I saw a meme the other day:
Once upon a time, there was a chef named Burk. Burk absolutely refused to cook with anything less than the very finest ingredients. Thing is, Burk sucked at cooking. He would buy perfectly ripe, beautiful, crisp peas and boil them into tasteless grey mash. His chicken cutlets were raw on the inside, and his pies were burned black. Obviously, the feedback Burk got was less than stellar.
So Burk did the obvious thing: he took to the internet to complain. “Chefs who use the best ingredients will be rated poorly only by people who are seeking something besides the best ingredients,” his meme read. Lots of other chefs liked Burk’s meme, and Burk never got any better at cooking.
Is there a subset of the Christian public that the meme accurately describes? Sure, and it’s not a small group, either. But that “only” in the meme transforms what could have been a penetrating observation about the Christian public into a steaming pile of pastoral cope. They will only call you boring if they’re not interested in faithful preaching? Really? It’s just not possible that you’re, well, actually boring?
Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing you can buy at the farmer’s market is so good you can’t ruin it in the kitchen. In the same way, the Word is living and powerful and profitable, but YOU can still ruin it with bad presentation. You might get called boring because you’re hard to follow and never get to the point. You might get called boring because you make your point in the first five minutes, and then repeat that same five minutes relentlessly for an hour before mercifully closing in prayer. You might get called boring because your voice is a flat monotone and it puts people to sleep no matter how good your content is. Or for any one of a hundred other reasons. Preaching isn’t entertainment, but it is public speaking, and it’s a skill, and it’s entirely possible to be terrible at it. If you’re patting yourself on the back purely because people call you boring, you’re an idiot.
There’s a subset of conservative pastors who are absolutely terrible teachers, and genuinely proud of it. They preach long, impenetrable sermons, use Greek and Hebrew grammatical terms that are meaningless to the congregation they’re preaching to, adorn their preaching with unnecessary theological neologisms, wander off on rabbit trails that are at best diagonally related to the point they’re making. Their congregants tend to be proud of it too, to the point of dismissing other skilled teachers as “not serious enough” if they don’t also do these same things.
Among these folks, there’s a group that maintains, in all seriousness, that if you’re walking with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will teach you through your pastor’s sermons, no matter how bad they are. Therefore, they reason, if you didn’t get anything from your pastor’s sermon this week, it must be that you had some unconfessed sin gumming up your relationship with the Spirit, and were unable to grasp what the Spirit was teaching you. (I am not making this up — I’ve heard this taught from the pulpit, and I’ve heard it invoked self-condemningly from people who were struggling to understand a poorly constructed sermon.) That’s all rot. Pastors are not inerrant; sometimes we just preach a bad sermon.
Do not be like the hypocrites. There’s no excuse for sucking at your craft, and slagging the audience instead of finding ways to improve yourself is a really lame approach to ministry. Don’t do that.
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