The value of speaking the truth

What is the usual experience on a given Sunday morning in a typical church in America? Sure, the worship styles will vary as will the size of the church and the age of the congregation, but for the most part a sermon will be central to what we call the worship service. Pulpits command the best seat in the house and for 45 minutes a monologue is delivered by a preacher who (hopefully) has faithfully studied the Word of God and is passionately delivering this truth to open ears.

But how much of what we hear on Sunday mornings do we actually remember. I have to confess that I am more prone to remember clever anecdotes and references to food than I am the points of truth that have been harvested from the Scripture. It does help if the points of the message form an acrostic for easy memorization or if they all start with the same letter, but my point is that much of what we hear, we don't remember. In fact, studies show that we remember only about 20% of what we hear and that immediately after hearing someone talk we only remember 50% of what they just said. That's very telling when 85% of what we know we have learned by listening. If we only remember 20% of what we hear on a typical Sunday morning does that mean the other 80% is wasted effort?

In the book Total Church the authors suggest that we take to heart what James 1:22 commands for us to do:

We must not only listen to the word--we must put it into practice. Churches are full of people who love listening to sermons. But sermons count for nothing in God's sight. We rate churches by whether they have good teaching or not. But James says great teaching counts for nothing. What counts is the practice of the word. What counts is teaching that leads to changed lives. We must never make good teaching an end in itself.

These are some pretty direct words but we must admit they are true. If all I ever get is a pat on the back and a "Good message this morning, pastor" after I preach, then have I really fulfilled the call of my ministry? What is the solution? Maybe instead of more monologues we can have more dialogue within the body of Christ. That's not to say that our Sunday morning services be round-table discussions, yet wouldn't there be benefit in small group opportunities to dig deeper into the text that has just been expounded by the pastor? Or to an even greater extent, what if believers would be more faithful to talk about their faith and the Bible and God and their salvation while they are at work or school or with their friends and neighbors?

The whole point of this post is that we must not simply rely upon a pastor or teacher to get God's Word out there. You may only remember 20% of what you hear on Sunday morning but that man or woman that you engage in a spiritual dialogue will grasp 100% of what you are trying to say.