"Stupid Evangelical tricks"

Internet Monk lists five "stupid Evangelical tricks." In his complete comments he qualifies and expands on the excerpts below:

... [L]et’s check in with what the iMonk feels are some of the most egregious and foolish of current evangelical blunders. ....

1. Eliminating All Hymns: .... I’m not trying to say a church needs to pursue a music program that ignores missional realities in pursuit of a mission to promote classical music. What I am saying is that the heritage ... has sustained, discipled and given words to evangelicals in ways you can’t discount. Throwing this away is ridiculous.

There’s another good point about preserving the heritage of hymnody: it’s already been sorted out by history. Go pick up a hymnal from 150 years ago, and you will find as many bad songs as you’re hearing on K-Love today, but a modern hymnal (Trinity, Celebration, Baptist) has sorted through those hymns to the best of the best. In other words, we know how God has used “Man of Sorrows” and “Immortal, Invisible.”

Evangelicals should find a way to keep the heritage of great hymns alive. Dumping them entirely for secular and CCM music is a dumb move and evidence that too many churches are leaving important decisions to the wrong people.

2. Goofy Youth Minister Style Preaching: .... Preaching has some basics. When Mark Driscoll suggests that Chris Rock is the preaching teacher you need, I am wincing. The preaching teacher you need is someone like Lloyd-Jones, D.A. Carson, John Piper, Sinclair Ferguson or Al Martin. Chris Rock - or Mark Driscoll - is the influence you need to add to basic preaching essentials in order to speak in some settings.

Basics? Yeah…Expository. In the text. Organized. Balanced. Applicatory. Good questions. Illustrations that serve, not drive. Christ-centered. Original. Gospel-fueled. Open Bible. Earnest. Evangelistic. ....

3. No Church Membership: Oh brother. The church is not an audience. It’s not a crowd that watches a show. It’s not a fan club. It’s a community. It has boundaries. Leadership doesn’t function in the church like a guy opening a store and filling it with customers. You are in it or you are out of it. Baptism is a door into a local church as well as the universal church. The Biblical passages on church shepherding/discipline are about real churches with real leaders and real boundaries. Creed, Confession, Covenant, Constitution (and bylaws.) Your church needs all four. ....

4. The MegaChurch Agenda vs The Healthy Church Agenda: .... The finest teacher of pastoral theology and preaching I’ve ever heard is Al Martin. You’ll never hear him unless you go looking. You can learn every thought Rick Warren’s ever had by just going to the book section at Wal-Mart.

I’m not saying megachurches aren’t healthy. I’m not trying to get rid of them. We need big churches in every city and in every region for lots of good reasons. But the megachurch agenda is different. We don’t need every church to make every decision on how to get more and more people in the building. We don’t need to have leaders who won’t go to a hospital or do a funeral because it doesn’t contribute to growth. We don’t need worship being judged by the applause meter. ....

Get in your Bible and find what the church is all about. Quit trying to be the latest thing. ....[T]he people in front of you - who may never be the congregation you have in your head - matter to God and need to matter to you.

5. Too Much Music: .... What’s going on right now seems to be this: The average church needs a band, a lead singer, a praise team, and 40 minutes of worship for “worship,” i.e. music. We’re going to stand the entire time. We’re going to sing what the musicians and worship leaders feel is “worshipful.” We’re going to do a lot of new songs, and we’re going to sing a lot of lyrics over again. Lights, sound and video projection are now essentials.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this picture, but there are a lot of actual and potential problems here. ....

(Someone will want to know about bad theology. That’s another five, or ten, or fifteen……I’ll get to that later.)

Source: internetmonk.com: Stupid Evangelical Tricks