Episode 112: On Planning & Preaching for Non-Christians
How should you plan for and preach to unbelievers in your Sunday morning sermons? On this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman discuss to what extent you should consider unbelievers when preparing for your sermon and the importance of ensuring that God is the primary audience of your Sunday morning worship service. They flesh out proper ways to address non-believers in your sermon and warn against improper ways.
- Should You Consider Non-Christians When Planning Sunday Morning?
- How to Ensure God is the Primary Audience of Your Sermon
- Addressing Non-Christians in Your Sermon
- Poor Ways to Address Unbelievers in Your Sermon
Show Notes
You’re So Depraved, You Probably Think This Church Is About You: How Total Depravity Upends Attractionalism, by Alex Duke
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, I am Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
You really, really are,
Jonathan Leeman:
My good friend Mark Dever is with me. Welcome to this episode of Nine Marks Pastors Talk. Nine marks exist to equip church leaders with a biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches.
Mark Dever:
Learn more at 9marks.org. I’m always impressed. By the way, you don’t read any of that. I’ve been doing the benediction from the end of Second Corinthians for 25 years now.
Jonathan Leeman:
Me the grace of the Lord Jesus Love,
Mark Dever:
Love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Be with us all.
Jonathan Leeman:
You always feel nervous though.
Mark Dever:
I do. And I always open my Bible and read it because I am terrible at rote memory anyway, so I’m always impressed at the way you open this thing.
Who is the Sunday Gathering for?
Jonathan Leeman:
Well on that one. You don’t expect the love of God. You expect the love of Christ. I don’t know. That’s where I, this last Sunday did the same thing. I had to look it up first. Well, speaking of those Sunday gatherings, Mark, where you’re given the benediction and others, who are those for? Who’s the Sunday gathering for?
Mark Dever:
God? He is our main audience.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. Good answer On Earth. Who’s it for?
Mark Dever:
The Saints. Edify one another. Encourage one another. Hebrews 10, 24, 25.
Jonathan Leeman:
But we know non-Christians are there.
Mark Dever:
It seems from First Corinthians that the assumption was that outsiders were sometimes or always in the meeting.
Jonathan Leeman:
First Corinthians, what are you thinking of?
Mark Dever:
I’m thinking when they’re talking about tongues in chapters 12 and 14. 14, yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Where it says prophecies are assigned to believers tongues are assigned for unbelievers. You’re quickly flipping to the page.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, no, it is. This whole section, the way he’s writing in 12 and 14,
Jonathan Leeman:
He’s assuming unbelievers are there.
Mark Dever:
It seems so.
Should You Consider Non-Christians When Planning Sunday Morning?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. And I think we should as well. And so that’s what I want to think about with you, Mark. Should we consider non-Christians when planning Sunday gatherings? And I want to think about that first.
Broadly the whole service. And then second, I want to think about that specifically as you prepare your sermons and what goes in theirs. So some churches want to say that they designed the whole thing for the non-Christian.
Mark Dever:
That’s what it is to be missional,
Jonathan Leeman:
Right? Is that a new thing?
Mark Dever:
I think so. I can’t think of examples like that from the 19th century or earlier, but maybe they exist,
Jonathan Leeman:
But it started showing up in churches in the West. With what secret sensitivity?
Mark Dever:
Well, I think more revival. I think to me, I associate it with churches in the 1950s, maybe from the example of the Billy Sunday Gypsy Smith, Billy Graham crusades. Taking on the idea that the Sunday morning service is sort of like an evangelistic crusade
Jonathan Leeman:
And that kind of went through 1950s alter calls and sixties and then that shows up in the seventies and eighties as secret sensitivity basically. And are there modern versions of that that may be? You said missional, the missional mind.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. The way I think so many preachers have it drilled into their own minds is that they don’t want to use any language that’s theological. They don’t want to use any language that requires a kind of pre-commitment to the Christian faith. They want to speak in a very plain fashion.
While that’s somewhat laudable, I think on the whole that’s degrading to the church, and that’s unhelpful. So I definitely want to make sure that I share the gospel when I preach. I want to raise questions for non-Christians when I preach.
I want to have in mind the non-Christians who are present even in leading the service, but they’re not the first audience in my mind. The first audience is God, and the second audience of the brothers and sisters. So I want to say what’s true in honoring the Lord. I want to say what’s edifying to the brothers and sisters.
You could go to several different places here in 14 for students. 14, 14, 26. What then brothers, when you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up that all things be done in the assembly for building up.
The Church is to Edify One Another
Mark Dever:
That’s our goal. So we come together to edify each other and to see each other edified in the Lord. And that’s going to mean that we need to use Christian shorthand in order for time so we don’t have to explain every noun with a definition. Every time we use the noun though
Jonathan Leeman:
You do Ebenezer, you do some things. Sure.
Mark Dever:
Oh yeah. If there are things that I think are unusually obscure or very evident to users of a different language, Hebrew or Greek, then yes, sometimes it’s helpful to make,
Jonathan Leeman:
There are good things about an attractional or secret-sensitive mindset.
Mark Dever:
It is
Jonathan Leeman:
True or false?
Mark Dever:
False. I think
Jonathan Leeman:
There’s nothing redeeming there.
Mark Dever:
Well, I think what I’m tripping over is your word mindset. So if you’re going to run everything through this editor, then it’s bad If you’re going to say, is it good for us to have in mind unbelievers are present? Definitely. Yeah.
But do I want to run everything I say, every hymn I sing, every bit of scripture we read in practical Psalms through the idea of how a non-Christian unconstructed and unbelieving and sympathetic to God might hear and or approve? Then I say, then you’re ruining the Christian service.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is it fair to say, okay, we got to keep the primary, primary, secondary, secondary, and attractional seeker-sensitive mindset in a sense, risks switching those with all kinds of effects?
Mark Dever:
It turns life, everything into, I would even say a certain kind of evangelistic meeting and I think we’ve got more to do. We don’t always have to be in first grade, but first grade has wonderful truths.
Jonathan Leeman:
Alex Duke wrote an article for the Nine Marks website at one point might be the best-titled article we have. You’re so vain, you probably think this church is about you. He uses it to talk about attractional and he talks about how to attract seeks to curry favor among outsiders by highlighting how similar we are to the world. When in scripture, very often the emphasis falls on the distinctiveness of the church and the holiness of the church and how we love one another as being salt and light, not just how the same we are.
Mark Dever:
Well, if you just think of the marks of a church preaching well that’s giving attention to a book that the non-believer doesn’t even believe in and it’s giving sustained attention even more. The ordinances, of baptism are specifically to mark off the baptized from the non-baptized. We’ve crossed the Rubicon in our rebellion against Satan’s rebellion or the Lord’s supper.
It’s the family meal. It’s very important that you realize you’re not part of it if you’re not part of it. So the very signs that Jesus left us a baptism of the Lord’s supper are not passive. Watch the river flow, watch the wheat grow.
They’re active, subjective, get in the river, eat the bread. And the people who don’t get in the river and don’t eat the bread are meant to understand that they’re not getting in the river and they’re not eating the bread. And we should call them to the salvation that those signs represent. That is to have faith in Christ.
Jonathan Leeman:
Before I said we wanted to make it secondary, not primary. Really, I should have said based on what you said, tertiary. Tertiary. Yeah. Okay. What are
Mark Dever:
Things? I thought about that but I thought I knew what he meant.
Jonathan Leeman:
Thank you. Look at how gracious you are.
Mark Dever:
I didn’t want to point it out, but thanks.
How to Ensure God is the Primary Audience of Your Sermon
Jonathan Leeman:
What do you do in your service to make sure the primary is primary, that God is the primary audience? What are you doing? Honestly, that thought had not obviously you’re right. I get it. I agree with it, but I didn’t sit down at this table thinking God is a primary audience, therefore this what is therefore this.
Mark Dever:
I’m not sure. I’m not sure I have a quick and good answer to that. I think the structure of our service is deliberate. The fact that our service formally begins with words from scripture, a s scriptural call to worship, not even the citation, we call it the book of Psalms. We call it the hundred and third Psalm.
We call it verse four. But literally just the words of scripture, the word of God is how it begins. That itself is a sign of the God-centeredness, the God-foundedness of this time together. His is the call that goes out. We are the people who hear and come toward that listening to that like the sunflowers to the sun.
And then normally in our services, deliberately, not always, but normally in our services, we will begin with some kind of affirmation of faith. Whether it’s a biblical one like the 10 Commandments, a sub-apostolic one like the Apostle’s creed, or a modern one like our church statement of faith where we will affirm together truths from God or about God.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’d like to say that’s one particular way, one particular form you can do the where two or three are gathered in my name, here we are in the name of Christ affirming these things. That is to say, we hear represent him.
Who is the Worship Team Performing for?
What you hear from us, you hear from him. I think another way, Mark, God is a primary audience, is just congregational singing, right? Yeah. The congregation is the main performer, not the people on the stage. Who are they performing for?
Mark Dever:
That’s right. And then the fact that we spend a good bit of time in prayer where we are most fundamentally addressing God.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, so you, let’s go to the tertiary, the third audience of non-Christians. Are there things you deliberately do in your service for their sake?
Mark Dever:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
And we’ll get to preaching in a minute before that.
Mark Dever:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
What
Mark Dever:
Before the service formally begins, we have announcements what they’d call in Scotland intimations. And we will very often say something like, if you’re visiting with us today, we’re glad you’re here. If you want to know more about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, we’ll say some more things there.
Point them to stuff they can take with them afterward. Talk to one of the pastors at the doors on the way out afterward, the friend they’ve come with. So things like that. And then I think in the quick explanations that we often give of a scripture reading or a hymn, there will be an awareness of how it might sound.
Particularly if there are any unusually sharp objects cognitively coming up in the scripture reading or the hymn. We’ll probably try to someplace it so that the offense at least is well placed and not misunderstood.
Jonathan Leeman:
You do that in your service planning time.
Mark Dever:
That’s more done on behalf of the service leader. So Caleb Morell is sitting here. Caleb’s going to be leading the service this coming Sunday morning at CH HBC. Caleb will undoubtedly read through all the scripture readings and the hymns beforehand and he will feel if there are kind of awkward elbows for the unbeliever. And if so, it will probably cause a sentence or two of introduction.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mark. You typically sit around the table with half your staff, all your staff in planning services and thinking through the music.
Mark Dever:
The pastoral staff.
Jonathan Leeman:
Pastoral staff.
Mark Dever:
So I would’ve planned it. It’s already there, but then we’ll change things.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right. Does it ever come up in that conversation?
Mark Dever:
Not usually, no. That would be more just the service leader.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. Anything else that I missed in terms of the pres sermon Sunday schools or your Wednesday night Bible studies? You’re very not conscious of non-Christians. That’s a different kind of thing though.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s a large inductive Bible study with a hundred people there.
Jonathan Leeman:
Lots of visitors typically come.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, it is interesting. One of our strangest, probably the people who are from outside of here, intakes for a certain set of non-Christians will be coming on Wednesday night because it’s brief.
It’s an hour long and it’s conversational so it can be engaging even if they don’t themselves have faith. Yeah, we saw, I can think of a sister, I think when she began coming a couple of years ago was Hindu and now she’s a believer and a member of our church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Speaking of your Sunday night service, what strikes me about it as being attractional is that it’s so devoted to the life of the church through the sharing of prayer requests.
Mark Dever:
It’s very horizontal,
Church Community is Compelling to the Outsider
Jonathan Leeman:
But it’s also very John 1334 and 35, they will know you’re my disciples by your love for one another. So that’s the kind of attraction I think you get to highlight on a Sunday.
Mark Dever:
It’s compelling community kind of stuff.
Jonathan Leeman:
Exactly. And it is compelling to the outsider.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. To some people, they see a community of love and concern that is often sadly not replicated in a fallen world outside of families or sometimes even inside of families.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. Let’s talk about the sermon. You said a moment ago you explicitly addressed non-Christians in the sermon. How do you do it? What words do you use? What do you say?
Mark Dever:
A few different ways. I’ll try to make sure I let every person there know how they can be forgiven for their sins because of what God has done in Christ and who he is and explain that. I think I’m pretty formulaic in how I do that though I try not to be.
I want to cover God and man Christ’s response, but throughout the sermon, I will one, two, or three times probably in a sermon, give little gifts to unbelievers who are present. And I’ll say something like, if you’re here today and you’re not regularly at church or you’re here today and you’re not a Christian or you’re not a believer, I use different words for it.
I bet this, I wonder if this sounds to you like we’re saying dah, dah, dah. Did you ever think what if it’s really this and then I won’t answer it, or I might leave the question like, now see, I can understand how God would do this because I trust him because of what I think he’s done in the incarnation in becoming a man himself in Christ? You see the same horrible reality that I see, but I wonder how you can sleep at night and then just leave it, let it hang for a minute, and then keep going
Jonathan Leeman:
Throughout the sermon, you’re dropping little things like that.
Mark Dever:
Not a lot of them, but three or four. Sometimes one or two, some of it’s three or four.
Jonathan Leeman:
You don’t even need to resolve all of them.
Mark Dever:
No, certainly not.
Jonathan Leeman:
It just provokes the question.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. Because Christianity is true and thoughtfulness is on our side. So if we can get somebody to begin to ask questions about what they understand about the truth that they’re coming over to the ground that we want them to be on.
I also try to do this though, I think with sometimes strikingly little success with my introductions. So my introductions are rarely meant for Christians. My introductions are almost always meant for Bob who’s just turned up, who lives in the neighborhood, and his nephew wanted to come and he came with him.
And so Bob’s sitting there rarely at church, and he’s listening to this man begin to speak and he has the sinking feeling this could go on for 30 minutes or longer. And of course, he’s right in that. And so what I want to do in my first two or three minutes is connect with Bob in a way that he could think like, oh, this is as engaging as TV. Okay, I could listen to this guy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Oh, come on. This is you being seeker-sensitive.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s right. Theologically, I wouldn’t call him a seeker.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right.
Mark Dever:
Okay. This is you being God’s seeker. But yeah,
Jonathan Leeman:
This is you at that moment prioritizing the non-Christian.
Mark Dever:
Very much so, because I’m trying to convince them to listen to what I’m about to say. Although that message will be basically to Christians from the word, the expo of scripture,
Jonathan Leeman:
Setting up the text.
Mark Dever:
Now, what I’m also doing, even though I’m doing it in a fashion by speaking to non-Christians, is I’m very simply helping the Christian learn how to file this knowledge. I’m doing a little pre-application, so if I raise the question of envy and we’ve considered and wrestled with it through an illustration in the introduction, in the human experience of envy, I’m doing something that then is identifying an itch that is not just non-Christians but Christians in their feel, and they now have been informed that this passage of scripture we’re looking at Matthew’s gospel will be addressing envy. So I’ve given them a heads up on where this knowledge they’re going to get can be filed in their life.
Jonathan Leeman:
This might not work, but to put you on the spot for a moment, suppose,
Mark Dever:
But this whole thing is not that, oh, there’s a change in strategy after 20 years. Finally, we figure out, let’s put ’em on the spot.
Addressing Non-Christians in Your Sermon
Jonathan Leeman:
This might be a little harder though. Maybe not. You’re preaching, let’s just pick a common text, David and Goliath. What’s your sermon intro going to be in a way that speaks to the non-Christian? What could you do with that text?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I’ll probably find something about the expectations people have and how some things are just obviously the case and we all know they’re the case, but then find a way to tell the story or give the example in which at the very end there’s a flip and there’s a surprise
Jonathan Leeman:
Because David and Goliath is an expectations-defying story.
Mark Dever:
Exactly.
Jonathan Leeman:
You’re going to identify with the non-Christian right there.
Mark Dever:
We identify with the Christians and non-Christians, but both that we experience life, we expect the sun to come up in the morning, and the sun to go down in the evening. We have all these expectations and one of the things, and I think the more you understand the David and Goliath story, the more surprising it is, the more shocking.
It’s our problem as churchgoers is our familiarity with it. That of course is not ultimately a problem, but I mean in the sense of trying to provoke the emotion or the reaction I’m trying to provoke, that’s what I have to figure out. Even when non-Christians know David and Goliath, they know that’s the image of a small guy, the little guy against the big guy, and the little guy wins like the expression underdog.
Then I want to, as a preacher, figure out if I can a way to recapture what I think would’ve been the initial shock surprise. That’s right. Even shock that the Israelites themselves faithless as they are would find in David’s victory.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, I think I remember thinking about this when I heard you, maybe I heard you preaching Daniel on lines in or something, I don’t know, but I remember realizing that you do a great job. No, it was Job.
You’re preaching through the first couple of chapters of Job, and I noticed how you allowed the drama of the story to place your sermon inside of the drama of the story so that we all felt it, because when you’re sitting down, you’re reading a story to a little kid, you still kind of want to feel the drama of the three little pigs or whatever, and you do a good job in preaching narrative that way so that the drama, the growing conflict, the climax and so forth, you feel that. So does speaking to non-Christians change from genre to genre? Is it harder, or easier with some genres than others?
Mark Dever:
That’s an interesting question, Jonathan. Yeah. I think it probably depends more on what the topic is than the genre, but I think the prophetic books, actually, there’s a lot in common you can draw on in the believer’s sense of justice, and I think narrative, just the power of a story, the wisdom literature, no, there’s a lot there you can draw on. Maybe the epistles are the hardest genre.
Jonathan Leeman:
These are so clear to churches.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, they’re written to Christians just simply and directly and plainly, and some of the concerns they have are just not concerns a non-Christian would have.
How Much Time in Your Sermon Should You Speak to Non-Christians?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. I realize this is imprecise and subjective, but how much time in your sermon do you actually spend talking to non-Christians?
Mark Dever:
If I preach for 60 minutes, probably five.
Jonathan Leeman:
Can a person do it too much?
Mark Dever:
Oh, sure, of course.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah.
Mark Dever:
But I mean, there might be a sermon in which you’re preaching me 30 of your 60 minutes to the non-Christian. It might be entirely appropriate, just depends on what we’re doing.
Jonathan Leeman:
But you’re saying if that’s the overall weight of your weekly sermon, that’s probably too much
Mark Dever:
Because you’re there to feed the sheep. Right. But just to be clear, when I or any preacher in our pulpit, speak well to the non-Christian, that is instructive for the Christians present.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark Dever:
They hear the tone and the way at which you address maybe the pushiness, the provocative, and yet the respect and the affection and the real esteem you may have for non-Christians, and they can learn to capture maybe some of the timber of that in their conversations with non-Christian family and friends.
Jonathan Leeman:
You’re given a workshop in that regard.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
There are different kinds of non-Christians and different kinds of rebellions. They don’t all rebel the same. Do you think through different categories, you’re in Washington, DC the types of things people struggle with here versus the types of things they struggle with elsewhere? How do you think through,
Mark Dever:
I mean, I do have my application grid, and I do have Perkins and other Puritans in my mind about Richard Baxter, and different categories of hearers. I do look through the membership directory and think about different individuals. Those are Christians, members of our church, so I don’t have a self-conscious pattern that I use to think about the different kinds of non-Christians, but they’re there in my mind
Jonathan Leeman:
When I think about Christians. I think about the distinction between the more hardhearted and then the more easily guilt-prone individual. I’ve heard you say though, that you really speak to the atheist and the agnostic coming from your background,
Mark Dever:
But that’s a different kind of challenge than others,
Mark Dever:
And I think if you leave me to naturally go where this stone’s going to roll, that’s the little depression that I’ll roll into the little gutter, the little space it’s going to be to the agnostic because that’s where naturally I am or was intellectual. So it seems a very reasonable position to me when I don’t think about it too much, and that’s just the one that to me seems the most formidable opponent of Christian faith, and therefore the one I’m most anxious to mentally decapitate.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, something I remember from your sermons in the nineties, maybe early two thousand and maybe less so today, is Mark Dever as Duke University Secular Religion Department, liberal Christian arguments seemed to kind of heavily weigh into, and I still hear that some response to the liberal Christian, maybe less so these days probably, which is not as prominent on as your mind as it was say, coming out of Duke.
Mark Dever:
Well, and I also probably assume that if it’s 1997, we are in an old building on Capitol Hill and the car age is old, and the people I get in are probably going to be old, and they have a United Methodist or PCSA or Episcopalian background or Liberal Baptists, and I don’t assume that at all Today we have a different kind of unbeliever probably by social attribute sitting there these days. So that old mainline Protestantism, that was my dialogue partner, probably more in the nineties. I just don’t assume ever hears or listens to me or anybody like me.
Jonathan Leeman:
Something I’ve always appreciated about you brother, is that you are doing, and I think I’ve said this probably in other conversations, in other contexts, I think you are doing instinctively that kind of contextualizing work, even though you’re not using the language of contextualization, you’re doing it instinctively. You are responding to the people in front of you and saying, okay, this is the certain social movements are going on around these people, and they’re kind of affected by these things, and you’re speaking to them there, even if you’re not articulating in your mind what all of the attributes of that are fair to say.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I think anybody who’s a speaker that people like to hear must be to some extent figuring out illustrations that speak to them or ways you put things in language that they are affected by.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, so this week you told me you and your senior staff read from, what was it,
Mark Dever:
Christian Smith soul searching,
Jonathan Leeman:
And you did that because
Mark Dever:
I wanted us to understand is the generation that we are speaking to, is who we have sitting in our pews. They were teenagers 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Well, now they’re in their twenties and thirties and they are most of the members of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you’re educating your staff to think about who they’re speaking to, and even non-Christians.
Mark Dever:
Right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Other things you’ve read with your staff like that to help ’em think in those ways.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, probably about once a year, I’ll grab a book like that. I can’t remember the titles right now, but I can kind of see them.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, I remember when you did that series on, that was in Deepak’s Chopra. All your intros came from,
Mark Dever:
Well, I did the book of James, I think it was, and I interacted with the Dalai Lama.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s it. Dalai Lama.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, because some book had just come out.
Jonathan Leeman:
People are like, what? But you had a method to your madness.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I just thought Dalai Lama is getting a lot of positive press, and James has always presented as this ultimately nontheological proverbial book of ethics, so you would think this would be very at home with something like Happy Dalai Lama, and so I just wanted to bring out sort of Dalai LA from what I understand, and the book of James, and show exactly how theological it was and how it was actually giving a kind of superior ethical treatment of humanity than what were actually afforded from the writings of the Dalai Lama.
This one book that he just came out with that I had read, and so I interacted in each sermon as I’m recalling, I interacted with a chapter of that book, and I tried to forward in the intro, his thesis in the chapter, and then I would use the chapter of James I was dealing with to begin raising questions about that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now, Mr. McKinley, Mike McKinley, pastor of Sterling Park Baptist Church says he doesn’t like to say if you’re here as a non-Christian for two reasons. Number one, people identify themselves as nonsomething, and number two, they don’t really know what a Christian is, and so he says things like, if you’re here this morning, you’ve not repented of your sins the way we’ve been talking about. If you’re not a follower of Jesus, like Paul is talking about, do you say non-Christian?
Poor Ways to Address Unbelievers in Your Sermon
Mark Dever:
I do. I don’t only, but I do. Yeah. I find a lot of, not every week, but certainly every month, I’ll have somebody at the door speak to me and tell me they’re an atheist or a Muslim or Jewish, or this is their first time in a Christian Church, and thank me for, remember them Speaking them on Christians, and it made them feel like it was a public signal.
It was okay that they were here at this meeting. What are some ways to poorly speak to unsaved people in the room to the unbelievers? Well, I think if you speak with a kind of personal-sounding dismissiveness or harshness or
Jonathan Leeman:
Contempt
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I think it would be the same way that you would think it’d be poor to speak to anyone. I don’t know that I have, you don’t want to set up straw men for an argument that a non-Christian has. You’d like to treat it with respect and understand it as clearly as you can.
Jonathan Leeman:
In general, you’re trying to show them respect.
Mark Dever:
You want to provoke their minds to think, but you are, they’re made in the image of God. Even in their rebellion, they’re made in God’s own image.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’ve heard you say that you should assume your audience is both extremely intelligent and extremely uneducated. Explain,
Mark Dever:
Yeah. It has no pop in the way you just said it, so I say it the opposite way because I’m from a rural area in a state that people think of as a poor educational background, and neither
Jonathan Leeman:
So. How do you say it?
Mark Dever:
Neither of my parents went to college. I just say I long ago learned that people can be very uneducated and very intelligent
Jonathan Leeman:
That has more pop.
Mark Dever:
Yeah
Jonathan Leeman:
I’ll give it to the very uneducated, just start with that, and people who have a lot of education will often assume the uneducated or unintelligent. I have never been tempted to do that because having come from that area, I’ve met a lot of very sharp people who had very little formal education, and on the other hand, having been at some good schools, I know a lot of very intelligent people who are fools, very educated people rather, who are not very intelligent. Any last comments on this?
Mark Dever:
It’s a good conversation. I pray that the Lord will help the pastors who are listening to lead their congregation to be joyful in their concentration on God when they’re together and just feast on the freedom of knowing his word and talking about his word with each other in a way that encourages and builds up, and also talking to non-Christians, but realizing that you should not feel trapped and limited blindered by thinking everything you say needs to be understandable to any non-Christian. You can imagine that’s just not true, not helpful,
Jonathan Leeman:
Primary, secondary, tertiary.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Very clearly.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, to speak to Christians, and edify each other. Thanks for your time. Thank you, brother.
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A weekly conversation between Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever about practical aspects of the Christian life and pastoral ministry.
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