Pastor’s Blog

Someone recently brought to my attention a news article describing a pastor injured in an accident on a motorcycle. Now, people are injured in motorcycle accidents everyday. But not in church. Not in front of the congregation.

Jeff Harlow, pastor of Crossroads Community Church in Kokomo, Indiana, walked his motorcycle onto the front platform during a service to illustrate—of all things—the concept of unity. According to his wife, Becky,

He had this idea that he would bring this bike out on stage and show people how the rider would become one with the bike. He was going to just sit on it and drive it out. He was just walking the dirt bike out on stage and somehow it got away from him. It was not intended.

What was not intended was that the bike went off the edge of the 5-foot platform and into the front row of seats. (Thankfully, the seats were vacant. You always knew there was a good reason not to sit in the front row!) Pastor Harlow broke his wrist and had surgery on the the next day. “Jeff has already laughed a lot today, so he’s OK. I think his pride was bruised,” said his wife.

I’m glad he’s going to be OK. And I appreciate his desire to illustrate an important point in a memorable way. But was this spectacle really necessary?

Or to put it another way, does the proclamation of God’s Word (or Christian worship generally) need such theatrics to make it effective? Does not such a stunt distract from (or overpower) the point to be made?

This incident reminds me of comments made by John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. He was describing a pastor’s conference in which the speaker, talking about baby Christians, came out with a doll under one arm, a pacifier around his neck, and a baby bottle in his hand. MacArthur’s thoughts on such props:

In my judgment I would have to say that such a performance appears to be a crutch, and it seems that only a weak preacher would need such a crutch. You have to believe that the power of God’s Word will be more effective than any human drama or communication gimmick. Nothing is as dramatic as the explosion of truth on the mind of a believer through powerful preaching.

Setting aside questions of taste or appropriateness, and in complete ignorance of Pastor Harlow’s abilities as a preacher, I think he would do better simply to follow Paul’s advice to Timothy, “Preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2). As preachers, we know our weakness and rely, not on our own cleverness, but on the Holy Spirit to change people’s lives through “the foolishness of preaching” (1 Corinthians 1:21).

A simple gimmick-free exposition of the text, while not as immediately attention-grabbing, in the long run would prove more fruitful. And, at least in one way, less dangerous.

I recently completed Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and perhaps the leading proponent of atheism in the world today. I found his book difficult, but not for the reasons you might think. I will admit some trepidation as I began the book—would it undermine my faith in Christ and the existence of God? Would it raise objections and questions I couldn’t answer? But those kinds of challenges were not the source of my difficulty. (In the event, the answer to both questions was no.)

What made the book hard to read was that nearly every page was another opportunity for Dawkins to vent his spleen against religion in general and Christianity in particular. Each page brought another barrage of straw men raised and triumphantly knocked down, weak arguments, circular reasoning, and uses of the worst examples of behavior among Christians (or other religions) to represent the whole. Even many atheists were dismayed by the book’s poor quality and distance themselves from it.

Several authors have written in response to Dawkins, a couple of which I’ve read. Alister and Joanna McGrath have written The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. McGrath (Alister) is a colleague of Dawkins’ at Oxford, a professor of historical theology. Other qualifications he brings to the table in answering Dawkins include a doctorate in molecular biophyics and once being an atheist himself. His wife Joanna’s field of specialization is psychology, with training in theology as well.

Another response to Dawkins I read was David Robertson’s The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths. Robertson is pastor of St. Peter’s Free Church of Scotland in Dundee. His response is on a more pastoral level, though he also does a good job of exposing Dawkins’ fallacies and inconsistencies. The first of the letters was actually published on Dawkins’ own website. (Because of the furor it caused, the others were not.) The last letter is addressed to the reader (not Dawkins) and gives a wealth of resources for further reading.

A couple other books I’ve recently become aware of (but haven’t read) are Al Mohler’s Atheism Remix: a Christian Confronts the New Atheists and Ravi Zacharias’ The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists Again, I haven’t read these books, but being familiar with their authors, I am confident they would also be worth your time.

But is Dawkin’s book worth your time? I’ll let David Robertson answer that:

Obviously, The God Delusion is the book I am interacting with. If you already have the book then you will know what I am referring to. If you don’t, I cannot honestly recommend that you should get it. It really is as bad as I have tried to demonstrate and I would be reluctant to put any more money into it! If you are interested in science then Dawkins’ other books are much more palatable. (Letters, p. 111)

You can always do what I did—check it out from the public library.