Opening Closed Minds
When you address controversial issues today, you can irritate or influence, but not both.
By Adam Hamilton
April 1, 2004
Sometimes God calls us to preach to our people a timely and important word—a word that is challenging and perhaps difficult to receive. In seminary we called this "prophetic preaching." We looked to the Old Testament prophets as our example—courageous and willing to speak the hard words of criticism as they preached against the sins of injustice, unfaithfulness, and idolatry that had infiltrated God's people in their day. More recently I have watched pastors, who were quite proud of their "prophetic ministry," drive churches right into the ground. Or, if they did not drive the church into the ground, they succeeded in driving away everyone who disagreed with them, attracting only the like-minded to their church. What they did not manage to do, unfortunately, was to actually influence anyone to change. Having sought to deliver those kinds of messages with some regularity at Church of the Resurrection, I would like to offer some insights gained through both my successes and failures. Maybe these will help as you seek, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, not only to "comfort the afflicted" but to "afflict the comfortable." When preaching unpopular or controversial issues, we have to ask: Is our aim to proudly shout out our position, or is it to actually influence people to consider making this position their own? Obviously, by the way I've phrased the question, I believe that our aim is to influence others to change when their views are in conflict with what Scripture teaches. If we agree about this, then the next question is, "What is the most effective way to influence people to reconsider their own views and to adopt a more biblical view?" A popular prophet
On Christmas Eve of 1999 we announced to worshipers that beginning the ...
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