Bizarre preaching
Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
in Hell
I'd like to consign the ramblings of, among others, a recent preacher at my local church who had clearly neglected to do a cursory google to check some basic facts, like the date of the start of the Reformation (600 years ago last year, repeated several times), the history of the Church of Scotland (apparently the Scottish reformation was contemporaneous with Luther, Presbyterianism requires a territorial parish system, and the Kirk has been Presbyterian since the reformation), and the what, why and when of the Counter-Reformation (apparently Henry VIII converted back to Rome due to the counter-reformation, which was led by Ignatius of Loyola).
Other gems included the parable of the sower indicating that only a quarter of churchgoers are saved.
Nice enough chap but clearly not a clue. I don't know whether to attribute it to age or to a lifetime of (valuable) ministry among those who are largely unlettered and unchurched where playing fast and loose with half-remembered facts won't be noticed.
Other gems included the parable of the sower indicating that only a quarter of churchgoers are saved.
Nice enough chap but clearly not a clue. I don't know whether to attribute it to age or to a lifetime of (valuable) ministry among those who are largely unlettered and unchurched where playing fast and loose with half-remembered facts won't be noticed.
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Is it possible that the guy was just bad at math, and was calculating the difference between 1517 and 2017 in his head, and accidentally adding an extra hundred? I've had a bit of trouble since the millenium changed with doing those kind of figures.
I think I would have assumed that the Scottish Reformation came after the bulk of Luther's activity, if for no other reason than it's unlikely that things would have gotten going up in Scotland the day after Luther nailed his Theses to the door(this was pre-TV and internet, after all).
Henry VIII's late-career Tiber-swim is a definite howler. What denomination was this preacher?
I'm trying to imagine what sort of agenda he would have been pushing with some of those facts. I could see, for example, a Catholic or maybe Anglo-Catholic cleric telling people that Henry went back to Catholicism during the Counter Reformation, ie. even Henry realized that Rome was where all good Christians should be.
Or, conversely I guess, another branch of protestanism hostile to Anglicianism, "See, they're really just a bunch of crypto-papists, even the founder went back to Babylon at the end".
Or was he just kind of randomly misremembering stuff, with no real pattern? I admit, I don't think I would have raised an eyebrow at the stuff about Ignatius leading the Counter-Reformation, since I've always been taken to understand he played a big role in it.
The preacher explained he would be taking a careful expository word-by-word approach.
"Tomorrow" was explained along the lines that today was yesterday's tomorrow, and yesterday today was tomorrow, and various other permutations. He then moved on to "I", which epitomised how selfish we all were. "Will" was all about how we selfishly wanted to do what we wanted instead of listening to God.
He lost me after that.
As for the agenda, just common-or-garden evangelical conversionism like we get from our friends at the faith mission. Possibly with a dash of good old fashioned west coast anti-Catholicism though that might just be my paranoia. It did seem like every move in a Protestant direction was led by God and every move in a Catholic direction was backsliding into the past. Same old evangelical insinuation that you're not properly Christian unless you have a defined "conversion" as an adult.
I've heard a sermon at a wedding, and it was in this millennium not the former one, where the preacher first asked, 'what did the groom bring to the marriage?'. His answer was, 'his strength and his ability to protect and provide'. Then he asked, 'and what did the bride bring?', answer. 'her beauty'.
Perhaps other shipmates might not see anything faulty about that.
You could see people eyeing the nearest exits.
I suspect he was just confusing Henry VIII with Charles II.
This was in a book of clerical jokes from the 1970s - a case of life imitates art???
The other thing that sticks in my mind about this sermon was nothing about the content except that the preacher constantly referred to the bride and groom as "X, Y, Y, X*" alternating with "Y,X, X,Y" which had the auditory effect of a pair of Maneki Neko waving cats.
From this I learned to address the bride and groom in wedding sermons by using "X, Y" once and then "Y, X" the next time, and so forth.
*Names removed for obvious reasons
Do you mean James II? Or did Charles convert as well?
In any case, I would find it rather odd for a Presbyterian minister in the UK to confuse Henry VIII with any other English king, even if it was just a case of knowing who you meant, but getting the name wrong, since Henry is one of those figures who's really in a class by himself. And I'm someone who basically knows about him mostly from stuff like Ladybird books and history cartoons.
So he was Church of Scotland. Is that Scottish Anglican, or Presbyterian, or something else? And at what kind of church was the man preaching?
Thx.
to attribute it to age
How old? We have a retired minister willing to step in at short notice, but his sermons are dreadful. Given his age (80 +) and the fact that he's usually doing someone a huge favour by being there at all we tend to smile and nod.
He's not factually incorrect, more out of touch. E.g. using examples such as the fear you feel when you are in your Anderson shelter and you know the last bomb fell close by.
If you ignore the dire sermons and look at the bigger picture of his lifetime of service, he's pretty impressive.
It's possible I suppose. Or was he getting muddled with Paul (2 Cor. 11:24)?
Perhaps a Roman Catholic preacher could argue that this indicated the pain inflicted on the body of Christ by the 39 Articles
Seems likely, based on the duckduckgo I just did.
We got told the other week that AD stands for 'After Death', so it might not be arithmetic but stupidity ...
Ripley Doctrine - take off and nuke from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Not everyone is focused on having everything pinned down, proven, and cited, nor checking everything online.
FWIW
I like people standing up front pontificating to know what they're talking about.
So he brought up a non-existent problem for something that is not recorded as happening. As all he needed to do was read the text carefully, he lost me from the opening sentences.
[ETA I only remember one lecturer like that, though.]
[that link might actually work now]
Normally, the sermon was about five minutes long; that's what everyone expected. This man preached for forty-five minutes, and no one could follow what he said. Afterwards we speculated that he had written a sermon every Sunday since he retired, and had given us one sentence from each. After everyone had stopped trying to understand, he jolted everyone awake by bellowing the word LOVE.
It was a memorable sermon.
What might have been interesting would have been speculation of whether Jesus ever preached a connected "sermon" on the mount at all, or whether it was simply a literary device used by the Evangelist to group together and frame some of Jesus' discourses.
*In fairness to this preacher, once he had feedback after the service he never made that mistake again.
Even in a biggish church, with enclosed walls, and a sounding board over a raised pulpit, a preacher, unamplified, has to effectively bellow slowly, syllable by syllable, as if addressing the simple-minded to be properly heard. It was no doubt, in its time, a fascinating spectacle, especially if the bellowing made sense and was of help. I used to go to the Hereford church where John Venn was known to have preached several times a Sunday to packed houses, who would queue round the streets to hear him.
But this was before youtube and TED talks, of course.
(from wiki, but I knew this because my brother has written a biography of Spurgeon.)
That doesn't mean he didn't get sizeable crowds. He undoubtedly did. Like Anselmina, I very much doubt they could all hear him.
As for Spurgeon at Crystal Palace, was that an open air sermon? Was there a venue that could hold / seat that many people there at that time?
Someone might also have made a simple megaphone with a cone of paper, corn shucks, etc.. I wonder if something like a ram's horn would work? Or something like the wooden Alp horns in Switzerland.
And then there's yodeling, and the huge noise produced by livestock-callers (e.g., humans calling out to hogs). I've only heard it on TV, usually in contests.
All sorts of low-techish (i.e., non-electrical) possibilities.