I stumbled upon this interesting article last night.
In it, the author argues that our advances in the church (which are great in and of themselves) have weakened our preaching that is supposedly God-glorifying. Below is my summary of the first three (and in my opinion, most important) advances expressed in my own words:
1. The wide availability of the tools of exposition which preoccupy preachers to the extent that these tools stop becoming our tools and turning into our 'master', so much so that our sermons become dry, mechanistic, and formulaic.
2. The assumed task to make sermon simple and clear often ignores the rich insights in God's inspired words. Christians then have an eschewed understanding of even key concepts such as 'faith in Christ'. Einstein once challenged: How to make things simple, but not over-simplified.
3. The efforts to welcome and retain non-believers in the church services often compels us to dumb down in our preaching, making it as warm, hearer-friendly, non-offensive, non-apologetic, as non-patronizing as possible. No wonder the words hell, sin, repentance, the cross are often low in counts compared to words like forgiveness, happiness, self-confidence, self-esteem, and so on.
Read the entire text here:
http://www.theologian.org.uk/pastoralia/embersofpreaching.html
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