Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers

By: T. David Gordon

Let me say right out of the gate that I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It should be mandatory reading both for men training for the ministry and men already there. It is among the most important books of its kind to be written in our modern era.

I have read many books on preaching (e.g., Preaching and Preachers by Martyn Lloyd-Jones literally changed my life and ministry), but this one is unique. Though barely 100 pages, it directly confronts the lack of good preaching that characterizes the Church today and provides reasons why this has occurred. Gordon claims, in fact, that of all the sermons he’s heard in the last 25 years, only 15% had a discernible point and that of these less than 10% based their point on the text that was read. While some readers would immediately scream, “Oh, that’s just anecdotal evidence!” such evidence cannot be avoided (or ignored) here; trends must be observed and reported on, and that is what Gordon is doing. (A. W. Tozer, for instance, did the same thing in his day.) Besides, this would still be a sad condition if the first percentage where “only” 50 and the second was any number.

Gordon also reports something he has encountered about 100 times and which I too have heard uncounted times in my own almost 40 years of ministry, namely, church members who verify that their pastor doesn’t preach very well. When asked, “What do you think of your minister,” the reply is usually, “Well, he’s not a good preacher, but . . .” (22). The answer I have heard repeatedly is, “Well, he’s not a very good preacher, but he has a pastor’s heart,” which of course totally ignores the one specific requirement of a pastor as far as his job description is concerned: he must be a skilled teacher (1 Tim. 3:2; cf. Acts 20:27–31). This is non-negotiable.

The first fundamental reason for this breakdown in preaching, Gordon insists, is that men can’t read, that is, they can’t read texts (chapter 2). “There is a profound difference between reading information and reading texts,” he writes, “reading a text is a laboriously slow process” (42). Many ministers “read the Bible the same way they read everything else . . . for its most overt content . . . but they don’t raise question about how the passage is constructed” (46, emphasis Gordon’s). Why? Because our electronic media culture has trained them to do this. Gordon should know of what he speaks, since in addition to being currently professor of religion and Greek and Grove City College, he has also taught in the humanities and media culture.

The second reason, Gordon contends, is that neither can men write anymore (chapter 3). While we once had a culture that was demonstrably “articulate, thoughtful, and well-composed” in its writing (67), look at where we are today. (If I may interject, Facebook, Twitter, IMing, and texting are graphic examples; that is, of course, in my humble opinion—oh, I meant to type IMHO.)

I especially appreciated Gordon’s emphasis on the great 19^th-century theologian Robert L. Dabney and his classic book on homiletics, Sacred Rhetoric: or a Course of Lectures on Preaching (1870). In it Dabney delineates “The Seven Requisites of Preaching,” of which Gordon comments: “These seven requisites (not excellencies, but requisites) are seven minimal requirements that Dabney believed (and his reviewers agreed) were essential to every sermon. None of these categories is subjective; each is perfectly susceptible of objective evaluation.” Gordon then goes on to list and briefly summarize them: textual fidelity; unity; evangelical tone; instructiveness; movement; point; and order (23–28). As he also observes, and which is again demonstrably true, these are “manifestly absent” in most pulpits today.

A final problem in preaching today, Gordon submits in chapter 4, is that preaching is often not Christ-centered, having been replaced by four flawed alternatives: moralism, how-to, introspection, and social gospel/so-called culture war.  He also adds a brief note on “the contemporaneist/emergent alternative, which is to dispense with expository preaching altogether, since it is regarded by them as passé” (79[f11]). None of this truly feeds God’s people (74), which again is the pastor’s function.

I do have some criticisms of the book, and while they are minor I think they are worth noting. First, as a former professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary for 13 years, Gordon insists that the fault of all this does not lie at the doorstep of our seminaries (34–41). Granted, there are many good men in our seminaries, such as Gordon-Conwell’s own Haddon Robinson and others elsewhere. But I humbly submit that this is simply not true across the board. First, I have heard men fresh our of good seminaries who are not good preachers. Second, I have also many times over the years been able to know where a man went to school just by hearing him preach (and that often was not a good thing). I would also submit that even if a school teaches homiletics flawlessly, it still must assume part of the responsibility if it goes ahead and graduates a man who can’t preach. Second, I am also a bit troubled about Gordon’s suggestion that churches should perform an “annual review” of the pastor using “carefully designed survey questions” or even by phone calls (97–99). This simply is not biblical and is a non-issue if a man is truly anointed of God. Third, I just cringed when in reference to when writing “one begins a sentence, partway through realizes that it cannot be successfully completed, and therefore begins again” Gordon dubbed this with the “inelegant” term “sentence f---” (39). Sorry, but I think that comes from the very culture he criticizes. A wordsmith (which Gordon clearly is) can do better than that.

Minor criticisms aside, this is an extremely important and pertinent book for our day. I recommend it highly.

NOTE: My next post will review Gordon’s second book: Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal.