For ten long years, I was a pastor in a church. During that time, I preached more than 200 sermons.
And now, I disagree with many of them.
It’s funny how, at the time, I preached with such conviction. I was confident that I was right and that the message I had was God’s message. Walking away from the church gave me the space I needed to honestly examine my beliefs for the first time in my life. After all, it’s hard to embark on some kind of faith deconstruction journey when your employment requires you to be the most faith-filled person in the church.
Now, many years into my faith deconstruction journey, I still call myself a Christian. I still hold onto many of the core tenets of the faith. However, there is a whole lot more that I have discarded for one reason or another. And so, when I think about many of the sermons I preached, I cringe with mild to moderate embarrassment.
The thing is, I still have all those sermons on a hard drive because, well… they represent thousands of hours of thought, painstaking research, and hacking away at a keyboard in front of a computer screen. If for nothing else, I keep them as a monument to the person I once was.
They say confession is good for the soul. So, allow me to share with you some of my former pastoral regrets. Here are the seven sermons that I most regret preaching:
God’s Plan for Relationships
Back when I preached a sermon called “God’s Plan for Relationships,” my understanding of God’s plan for relationships consisted of everything I had been taught growing up in the evangelical church: God’s plan for relationships was life-long, monogamous, heterosexual marriage. All other relational expressions and sexual proclivities were downright sinful.
In one half-hour sermon, I managed to spiritually ostracize and alienate anyone and everyone in my congregation who happened to be single, divorced, or — God forbid — part of the LGBTQ+ community. I regret to say that I skillfully misused scripture to explain why same-sex relationships are an abomination to God. What is worse is that just below the surface, I probably didn’t really believe this, but I was toeing the company line. This is what my church believed, and this is what I was being paid to preach. The people who put their money in the offering plate don’t really want their boat rocked. They want to have what they already believe — their long-held biases — confirmed so they can go home and congratulate each other on having such a great handle on the ‘truth,’ over Sunday lunch.
I am so relieved that I was able to deconstruct the harmful beliefs that I was carrying about the LGBTQ+ community — the ones that I was indoctrinated with — out of existence from my life altogether. These days, I am completely affirming and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community, but the preacher’s guilt still remains. For what I said, I am profoundly sorry.
We Are All God’s Children
You might wonder how a sermon entitled “We Are All God’s Children” could possibly be offensive. After all, I believe now that we are all God’s children. But this sermon was actually about debunking that idea altogether. It was a ‘myth-busting’ sermon.
In fact, this was nothing more than a sermon about Christian exclusivism. I argued that not everyone is God’s child — only those who accept Jesus on our terms are adopted into the family of God. Everyone else is a child of Satan and is destined to join him.
Under this view, only a tiny percentage of the population will ever see Jesus face-to-face, which profoundly troubled me. If God really loves the people of the world, then why would he create a system where most of them perish in eternal fire? It didn’t make sense to me.
Common sense says that if I have a child, that child remains my child whether they realize or acknowledge that I am their father or not. I consider the story of the Prodigal Son — one of the greatest parables Jesus told — and I notice that this son who wished his own father dead and took off with the father’s fortune, did not, on that basis, cease to be his son. What is more, no matter what the wayward son did and his terrible motives for returning, he was always destined to be welcomed back into the father’s arms.
How We Help Each Other Grow
This sermon was written to address the question, “Do you have to go to church to be a Christian?” My answer, at the time, was obviously a resounding “Yes!”
I argued that without the church, you couldn’t really grow. You need the church to spur you on, to hold you accountable, to focus you on the word of God. This sermon was literally a pitch on why people should never abandon the pews for the dangers that lurk beyond the walls of the church — in a horrible place that Christians call (cue the spooky music) “The World!”
“Stay away from the world!” I would say, “It will corrupt you. It will lead you into all kinds of temptations. It will weaken your faith.”
Then I left the church, myself.
In so doing, I discovered that in some ways — many ways actually — the church prevents you from growing. I also learned that you can receive truth from anyone, regardless of their religion or lack thereof; that people outside the church are just as decent and kind as those within the walls — sometimes even more so; and that you can maintain a robust faith without outsourcing it to an institution.
Angels & Demons
I once had a go at preaching a sermon about angels and demons. I read over it now, and I think to myself, “You had no idea what you were talking about.” In this sermon, I basically prattled off every occasion in the Bible when angels and demons happen to show up. I then made a whole lot of broad, sweeping generalizations about how you could acquire a demon for yourself.
Play ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’
Read your horoscope.
Read Harry Potter.
And on and on I went with this kind of nonsense.
These days, I am careful to say that when it comes to that which we would consider paranormal, it’s all a mystery to me. I suppose if I have enough faith to believe in the existence of God, I guess I must equally entertain the possibility of the reality of spiritual forces of darkness, right?
Having said that, I have concluded that it is highly likely that in Jesus’ day, people with limited knowledge of science, psychology, and medicine may very well have attributed many naturally occurring afflictions with demonic activity. Add to that, they had a level of superstition that far exceeds that of modern people generally, and you could safely conclude that there would have certainly been an over-attribution to demons. In some Christian circles, overattributing things to demonic forces is still a common practice to this very day.
Come to Jesus
When I read back over the sermon I wrote entitled “Come to Jesus,” I absolutely cringe. This was my ultimate ‘altar call’ sermon, where I implored people to come down to the front of the church to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
Complete with all kinds of manipulative language and appeals to emotion, I promised the people that their lives would be much better with Jesus. I implored them to accept His free gift of salvation. Heck, I virtually begged people to come on down and receive Jesus.
But no one came down.
So, I made the worship band do another chorus of the closing song and assured those teetering on the edge of salvation that we would wait for them! It’s not too late! Today is the acceptable day of the Lord! Come to Jesus! I am ashamed of the manipulative language that I used.
What is more, I realize now that this was purely about my ego. It felt good to imagine that you were ‘saving people’s souls.’ “Man, look at me! God must be proud of me!” was how the inner dialogue would go when I got people saved. In fact, I used to keep a headcount. But it was equally humiliating when no one came to the front. I felt like I was a shit preacher (which was probably true, now that I think about it). I felt like a failure. I felt like God wasn’t using me. I felt like a disappointment to God.
Oh boy.
Everyone Lives Forever Somewhere
This was my very best (or should I call it my very worst?) sermon warning people about the dangers of Hell. In it, I communicated the mainstream Christian belief that all people are destined for Hell from birth unless they find salvation through Jesus.
When I grew up in the evangelical church, I was taught that Hell was basically a literal place beneath the earth, where those who didn’t believe in Jesus would be punished for eternity. For those who went there, it would be a place of both psychological torment — at the knowledge that they had lost the opportunity for salvation — and physical ones inflicted by Satan and his band of evil minions.
From his lofty throne, God will look down and laugh at the suffering of the damned, said the English puritan Richard Baxter. “Is it not a terrible thing,” he asked, “to a wretched soul, when it shall lie roaring perpetually … in the flames of Hell, and the God of mercy himself shall laugh at them?”
And after I had communicated all this fantastic ‘good news,’ I implored people to receive Jesus before it was too late. I even said, at one point, “If you walked out of here today and were hit by a bus and died, would you be 100% certain that you would be with Jesus? If not, you need to do business with him right now!”
I know this script all too well.
It’s nothing more than manipulation.
After I left the church, I began to find it increasingly difficult to square away the idea of a loving God with the doctrine of eternal torment in the fires of Hell.
I tried putting myself in God’s shoes. If I were God, I could imagine I might feel okay about sending a person to Hell if they had committed certain atrocities that you deem unforgivable — Hitler, for example. But, there is no way I would you send people to Hell if they simply didn’t believe in me.
Would you?
And isn’t god infinitely more gracious and loving than you or I?
How to be Wise With Your Wealth
I preached this sermon back in my late twenties: “How to be Wise With Your Wealth?” This was before I had a mortgage, an investment portfolio, or even two spare coins to rub together (because I was working for the church, and well… things were pretty tight!). I did have a boatload of debt, though.
Let me tell you something. If you ever go to church and a twenty-something-year-old gets up to preach to you about how to be smart with your money and tries to use the Bible to explain financial principles to you, do yourself a favor and walk out.
I would have walked out on me had I not been in the pulpit.
Of course, a fair chunk of this sermon was dedicated to the now-defunct Biblical principle of tithing and how people should give their ten percent (and then some) to the church. A good pastor never misses a chance to exhort his flock to greater generosity — towards the church, that is.
Now, I would most certainly advocate for generosity, and I even think that ten percent is a reasonable amount of your income to give away. But don’t give it to grand cathedrals and pastors’ wages. Give it to the poor, the needy, and the oppressed instead.
. . .
Standing on Soapboxes
There is a place in the middle of Sydney called ‘The Domain.’ In decades gone by, men would gather every Sunday afternoon in The Domain, stand on soapboxes, and shout their opinions and convictions to whoever would listen. Some who attended stood around mildly curious; some mocked, some just walked past. Undoubtedly, some concluded it was such a stupid waste of a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
But when I think about the soapbox preachers in The Domain, I realize I would do it too. In fact, so many of us still do it. We stand on our virtual soapboxes and share with whoever wants to listen to our firmly held beliefs.
The thing is, some time in the future, your deep personal convictions might one day appear ill-conceived, naive, ignorant, or just plain wrong to both yourself and others. For this reason, I have given up the game of preaching, and I advise you to do the same.
What do I know?
Enough to know that it is much more worthwhile to share the simple joys and sorrows of life with those close to us than to stand on a soapbox and shout at the things that might seem true to you today when tomorrow is another story.
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This post was previously published on Backyard Church.
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