If you grew up in the Bible Belt or in the heavily churched Midwest, you know that a good sermon is supposed to contain (all together now) “three points and a poem.”
This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on a Washington Post sermon that ran with this headline: “A small-town Georgia preacher fills pews by leaving no one out.”
It’s possible that the author of this highly doctrinal news story understood the basics of Southern preaching. Hold that thought, because we will return to it. But first: The Big Idea of this sermon is stated in absolute terms — there is “good” religion and there is “bad” religion. Let they who have ears, let them hear (or whatever the new language is in this case).
I. It is always appropriate to open a sermon with a conversion story that illustrates the preacher’s Big Idea. This grab-a-tissue Washington Post feature could not be more explicit about that:
HARTWELL, Ga. — At night, the worn sign looks like a beacon in the darkness out front of the modest, red-brick Mt. Hebron Baptist Church.
The tired, it reads. The poor. And huddled masses. Welcome home.
In this small town in the rural northeast corner of Georgia, it’s the kind of message that assures Teri Massey she is loved for being who she is — a message 180 degrees from the one she heard in the Baptist church where she spent her teens into her 40s, where her grandfather, father and brother all held leadership positions.
When Massey came out in 2004, shortly after meeting the woman she later would marry, the congregation in that other small Georgia town responded by campaigning to send her to conversion therapy and holding prayer vigils outside her home.
She found Mt. Hebron a few years ago through a friend. Pastor Grant Myerholtz, whose usual preaching attire is T-shirt and jeans, met her and her wife at the door. They listened carefully as he stood in the pulpit and proclaimed: All are welcome.
“It was like this load was off of me,” Massey, 63, recalled last week.
There are good churches and there are bad churches. Got that.
II. This is an age in which churches need to change their doctrines if they want to, well, grow (or at the very least get good coverage from blue-zip-code elite newsrooms).
Thus, this Post story offers a very clear thesis statement as Point II.