30 Minutes With Haddon Robinson

Haddon Robinson

A Bridge Between Two Worlds

Editor’s Note: Haddon Robinson was named in a Baylor University survey as one of the 10 greatest preachers in America. A professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, MA, he has been teaching preaching at Gordon-Conwell’s Charlotte campus. We recently sat down with him to talk about what makes great preaching, the state of preaching in the evangelical church, and the state of the church itself.

Warren Smith: A couple of years ago you were named one of the dozen great preachers in America. I guess I’m wondering what makes a great preacher. What makes a great sermon? I know enough about you to know that you probably find it hard to talk about yourself, so what was it about the other preachers on the list that made them great?

Haddon Robinson: To be honest, the people on the list are for the most part, people who have published. Therefore, when 1500 were asked to name these people, they named them. But I don’t think they sat down and listened to us preach and said, "There’s a great preacher." I think they read what we wrote about preaching.

But what makes a great preacher? In the Baylor survey, the first qualification is that a great preacher is someone who communicates well, is able to connect. Is audience oriented. Another thing is that great preachers have strong ideas. They are known for having something important to say, and they say it well. They have good delivery. By that, they say what they have to say in a way that draws people in. Of course, I think a really good sermon draws its great ideas from scripture.

So, great ideas communicated in a relevant fashion in a way that gets the audience to listen and apply it to their lives. That’s what makes a great sermon.

WS: Given those standards, how would you characterize the state of preaching in the evangelical church today?

HR: On the whole, I would say that preaching is relatively weak. There are marvelous exceptions. But I don’t think people on the whole when they go to church are forced to think outside the categories they are forced to thinking in, that they are challenged.

Of course, sometimes that is the fault of the audience. If a preacher challenges the way people think or act, sometimes the audience won’t accept that. They become angry or upset. I think sometimes it comes because preachers often have to speak three times a week – Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and in the middle of the week. Nothing significant can come out of your mouth unless something significant is going on in your head. And if you have to preach not because you have something to say, but because you have to say something, then you fill the time. In that case, it is practically impossible for someone to have a thought that develops out of an understanding of scripture, and an understanding of how that biblical concept applies to people in the 21st century.

I think another reason preaching is weak is that pastors are expected to do everything. They are not only communicators, but they have to be chief executive officers of an organization. They have to be grief therapists. They’re expected to be counselors. People who are hurting come to them, and they have to be able to interact appropriately. They’re expected to be Christian educators, to provide an educational program that touches everyone from the womb to the tomb.

So if you look at all of this, even though the pastor may want to be a preacher, often the business of his life keeps that from happening.

WS: It sounds as though you’re making a case for increased specialization of function for the pastor – which some would argue necessarily implies a certain size or scale of the church. In other words, before you can have that kind of specialization of function, you must have three or four or five people on staff who handle these various functions. Besides, is it such a bad thing that a pastor is a grief counselor, or an educator, as well as a preacher. It seems to me that this kind of integration of skills and diversity of life experience in one person is not a bad thing.

HR: You’re right. It’s not a bad thing. It ends up, though, that the pastor suffers from vocational amnesia. He doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to do. And, of course, thinking is hard work. So it is easy to be tempted to do other things, rather than to study.

WS: What do you think about the pressure on preachers to be entertainers? That tends to discourage lay leadership in the church from rising to the occasion of being Christian educators or performing some of these other functions you have described.

HR: That’s a perceptive question. Because one solution is for lay people to do many of the very things that the pastor is now called upon to do. This requires a leader who is able to delegate, and people who are willing to be delegated to! That is why smaller churches do important work, and are often outstanding at developing disciples and leaders – because lay leaders step in and do important, even vital, work of the church. Sometimes the pastor’s role is to help lay people get into the role, provide initial support, and then withdraw.

WS: If I could push you a bit more on this point of pastors as info-tainers, there seems to be, in the evangelical work, a sense that success is equated with size. The preacher as entertainer and the worship service as entertainment seem to have taken precedence over expository preaching. Does that matter? What is the relationship between true worship, worship in "spirit and truth" and great expository preaching?

HR: I believe that any preacher that is not firmly based in the scripture is a waste of time and is in fact counter-productive because he will lead people away from God. I think the great problem that expository preaching has had in the past is that it has often not been shown to be relevant to people.

On the other hand, the topical preacher often starts with a topic that has pizzazz, goes to the biblical text merely for something to say that sounds biblical, but that’s not what directs the sermon.

Strong preaching comes when flint strikes steel. When the flint of a person’s question or problem strikes the steel of the Word of God. That’s when you get a spark. That spark can change life.

As for the idea of entertainment, that depends on what you mean by entertainment. Just as I can read a book and be gripped by it, I can hear a sermon based on scripture, done well, and it seems to me that draws people in. The word entertainment has a negative side, but an entertainment is also something that I want to hear. When that goes on, you’ve got great preaching.

WS: If, as you said, the general level of preaching in the evangelical church is fairly low, part of the responsibility for that has to rest, as you also said, on the evangelical community, which does not want to be challenged. On the other hand, don’t you also have to look to the seminaries? These preachers do not spring ex nihilo into the pulpit. They come from the seminaries, at least most of them do. What is Gordon-Conwell doing that is unique to prepare preachers?

HR: I think you’d have to say that the teaching of preaching in the theological seminaries has not been in high regard. Most schools will have two courses in preaching. Part of the other difficulty is that many people in seminary today have come to Christ in college. Many of them have not grown up in the church. As a result, when you are teaching them to preach, it’s like teaching them to swim when they’ve never been near water. You spend a lot of time saying "That’s water." And they diligently write that down.

Everyone in the group I’m teaching now here in Charlotte has been out in ministry for at least five years. They’ve got water up their nose. They know what the questions are. This is the most meaningful educational experience I have had in my 40 years of teaching.

It is tough to teach preaching to those who have never had to do it. The most you can do is to help them put a sermon together that is clear. But again and again, I will have students tell me that they read my book [on preaching] after they got out of seminary and had been in ministry a while, and they suddenly realized, "Aha, so that is what he meant."

So seminaries do share a bit of the blame, but there is a difficulty at teaching good preaching at the seminary level. Good preachers become good preachers outside of the seminary.

That is what is unique about this program. This is a two-week program, but there is a lot of reading they do prior to the course, and when they leave there are projects they have to do in their church. To get lay people involved in evaluating their sermons, and involved in the preparation of their sermons. To raise the questions that a layperson feels needs to be answered.

WS: So, implicit in what you are saying is that there is something fundamentally flawed about the way we’ve prepared people for ministry.

HR: Well, in days gone by, people would come up – be raised – in the church. So they had some awareness of what the church was, and some awareness of vital preaching. And another thing that would happen is that in years past you would graduate and go off to the First Episcobapterian Church and the people in the church knew how to do church so they would whip you into shape. They would teach you how to be a pastor by showing up, and requiring certain things of you. The elders and deacons would require certain things of you, and they were by and large the right things.

Today, because of the whole changing scene, people don’t know how to do church. They don’t know what a church should be about to touch people in the 21st century. Even though they may say that preaching doesn’t touch my life, they don’t have a ghost of an idea about what might be done differently. So you don’t get the post-graduate education in churches that you may have 40 years ago.

WS: Yet I heard as recently as yesterday that the majority of people who come to Christ come to Christ before the age of 12. And yet you are saying that many of your students in seminary are people who came to Christ in college. Help me reconcile these two data points.

HR: The mass of people who are Christians were brought up in a Christian home, and do have a childhood experience of faith, but if you ask even those children, you will discover that they had to go through an experience in which that faith had to be confirmed. Whether you are a Baptist, or a Presbyterian, or a Lutheran, or whatever. The faith of a five-year-old will not sustain that child as he approaches adulthood. The testimony is usually something like this: "I trusted Christ when I was six, but I drifted away, and when I got into my teens I went to youth camp and re-dedicated my life to Christ."

Well, it is in that area of re-dedication that I think sometimes they actually became a Christian. They were nurtured as a young child, but the meaningful decision to follow Christ came when they realized what this was all about. That is why I say that it is often in late high school or college where most people who are Christians as adults say that Christ got a hold on them.

WS: If what you say is true, and if it is also true that most people don’t know how to do church, and the environment in which they do start wrestling seriously with Christ is more likely to be youth camp than church, how do they learn the liturgy, the catechism – those things that some disparagingly call form and ritual, but in its way is didactic and does teach important doctrines of the faith. Or are these forms merely relics of the past?

HR: If a church does traditional things, they had better do them well. You can do contemporary worship much less well. Why? Because contemporary forms are already a part of what people are. But traditional forms are not, and the risk is seeming irrelevant. If you sing 300-year-old hymns, with words that are very different from the words you hear every day, there had better be excellence and beauty in those words. Contemporary forms do not carry that burden.

What those of us who are in leadership have to face is the fact that people coming to church today do not have even the most basic understanding of the facts of the Christian faith. I was flying on an airplane some time ago, and the fellow sitting next to me found out I taught at a seminary. That’s usually the kiss of death to a conversation, but this fellow wanted to know more. He asked me: "What’s Christmas?" I said, "It’s when we celebrate the birth of Jesus." He said: "What’s Easter?" I said, "That’s when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus." He said, "What do you mean by resurrection?" I said, "We believe that Jesus was murdered and put in the grave and three days later he came back from the dead."

He said, "Do Christians believe that?" I said, "All Christians should believe that." He said, "That’s interesting. I think I knew about Christmas, but I didn’t know about Easter."

Think about that. In our culture, you can learn the basics of Christmas. But where would you learn the basics of Easter from pop culture? There’s no Easter music on the radio. This fellow grew up in the United States. And we have more and more people like that with each passing year. If we expect them to learn liturgy before they can worship with us, they’re not going to make it. We’re not in a post-Christian world. We’re really in a pre-Christian world.

Think about that. When the apostles went out, they went into the synagogues. And in the synagogues, they could preach the Old Testament to people who believed the Old Testament, and out of that there would be those who would be converted. Then they hit the marketplace. Today, in many areas of the country, we don’t have those people who might be called synagogue people. We are going to a mission field, and if we don’t have a mission field mentality, we’re not going to reach them.

WS: I’m aware of Lesslie Newbiggin’s essay, "Foolishness to the Greeks," in which he described the remnants of western culture as the new mission field. But I also read that 40% of people say they did attend some worship service in the past week. Of course, there is also other data that says when you ask people this question, at least half of them will lie!

HR: Yes!

WS: And there is a Barna survey that says people who identify themselves as born-again don’t believe in the resurrection, or the virgin birth, or other key doctrines.

HR: Well, part of the issue is that when you and I use that term, "born again," we fill it with meaning. But lots of people use that word in ways that you and I don’t. It describes spiritism, or some experience that is semi-religious, perhaps, but has nothing to do with trusting Jesus Christ. Has nothing to do with John 3.

WS: I guess that’s my point. It seems that disciple making has to be more than self-referencing. It has to be based on sound teaching. Jesus said, "Go and make disciples." He said that to his disciples. What does that look like today?

HR: The Great Commission’s major verb is "go and make disciples." You do that by reaching them, baptizing them, and teaching them. I think our task is to take men and women who are not Christians and bring them into a relationship with Jesus Christ, and have them grow in that relationship until they develop maturity in their relationship with the Lord Jesus.

WS: It seems that people are being reached, but they’re not being taught.

HR: That’s the great danger. Many contemporary churches are doing a great job or reaching people, but they face frustration when it comes to making them fully committed followers of Jesus Christ. I admire these churches because they have been effective at reaching people who do not ordinarily come to church. We can learn a lot from them. But many of them are evaluating what they are doing, because they are realizing that what they have been doing is not enough. We have seen this evolution in the church -- from traditional to evangelistic to disciple-making – all of this has taken place in the past 30 years.

WS: Well, then let’s go back 30 or 50 years. Billy Graham was coming along with Youth for Christ. Campus Crusade just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The Navigators, InterVarsity. Right after World War II there was an explosion of these types of para-church organizations. The ground was fertile for these organizations. Perceptive people say they sprang up because of a failure of the church. My question is: shouldn’t there be some sense of urgency about recovering what was lost in the church, rather than turning the church into a para-church group.

HR: I think what happened 50 years ago was the great liberal-fundamentalist controversy. Liberals won. They won the denominations. What you had 50 years ago was a transformation of fundamentalism to evangelicalism, in the sense that they said, "We don’t have to retreat and nurse our wounds. We can move out." Many churches that have sprung up in the past 50 years are a reflection of these para-church ministries. They were effective in some ways, so the churches imitated them.

I believe that today, if you look at the churches that are growing, they’re evangelical. That’s true in Methodism, in Presbyterianism, among Baptists, even in the Episcopal church. However, there are people for whom liturgy, in the best sense, has a strong appeal. We have a culture that is much more visual. The liturgy is visual. We have a culture that needs to hear things again and again and again. Liturgy does that. The reciting of the Apostle’s Creed, and the rest.

WS: So what you are saying is that the rise of the video culture is also potentially providing fertile ground for a resurgence of liturgy.

HR: Sure. Banners in the church. Vestments. Colors to represent different seasons of the church calendar. A visual culture will respond to these things, if they are done well, and if scripture is behind them. Evangelical Anglican churches around the world are drawing huge numbers of people.

WS: If you could say one thing to a pastor in Charlotte about his leadership or his preaching, what would that be? What is the central message of Haddon Robinson’s life and ministry to the church?

HR: I believe that the most important single thing we can do is to take the scriptures, be faithful to what they are saying, and relate them to the complex problems of people in the 21st century. You cannot just focus on problems and needs of people without an honest exposition of scripture. On the other hand, you can’t stay in the 21st century BC. You’ve got to bring that truth to this culture.

The preacher stands as a bridge between two worlds. That takes thought and commitment. So preach the World of God. That must be the first and deepest commitment of a preacher. There is great power in the Word of God to change lives.

Editor’s Note: Haddon Robinson was named in a Baylor University survey as one of the 10 greatest preachers in America. A professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, MA, he has been teaching preaching at Gordon-Conwell’s Charlotte campus. We recently sat down with him to talk about what makes great preaching, the state of preaching in the evangelical church, and the state of the church itself.

Warren Smith: A couple of years ago you were named one of the dozen great preachers in America. I guess I’m wondering what makes a great preacher. What makes a great sermon? I know enough about you to know that you probably find it hard to talk about yourself, so what was it about the other preachers on the list that made them great?

Haddon Robinson: To be honest, the people on the list are for the most part, people who have published. Therefore, when 1500 were asked to name these people, they named them. But I don’t think they sat down and listened to us preach and said, "There’s a great preacher." I think they read what we wrote about preaching.

But what makes a great preacher? In the Baylor survey, the first qualification is that a great preacher is someone who communicates well, is able to connect. Is audience oriented. Another thing is that great preachers have strong ideas. They are known for having something important to say, and they say it well. They have good delivery. By that, they say what they have to say in a way that draws people in. Of course, I think a really good sermon draws its great ideas from scripture.

So, great ideas communicated in a relevant fashion in a way that gets the audience to listen and apply it to their lives. That’s what makes a great sermon.

WS: Given those standards, how would you characterize the state of preaching in the evangelical church today?

HR: On the whole, I would say that preaching is relatively weak. There are marvelous exceptions. But I don’t think people on the whole when they go to church are forced to think outside the categories they are forced to thinking in, that they are challenged.

Of course, sometimes that is the fault of the audience. If a preacher challenges the way people think or act, sometimes the audience won’t accept that. They become angry or upset. I think sometimes it comes because preachers often have to speak three times a week – Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and in the middle of the week. Nothing significant can come out of your mouth unless something significant is going on in your head. And if you have to preach not because you have something to say, but because you have to say something, then you fill the time. In that case, it is practically impossible for someone to have a thought that develops out of an understanding of scripture, and an understanding of how that biblical concept applies to people in the 21st century.

I think another reason preaching is weak is that pastors are expected to do everything. They are not only communicators, but they have to be chief executive officers of an organization. They have to be grief therapists. They’re expected to be counselors. People who are hurting come to them, and they have to be able to interact appropriately. They’re expected to be Christian educators, to provide an educational program that touches everyone from the womb to the tomb.

So if you look at all of this, even though the pastor may want to be a preacher, often the business of his life keeps that from happening.

WS: It sounds as though you’re making a case for increased specialization of function for the pastor – which some would argue necessarily implies a certain size or scale of the church. In other words, before you can have that kind of specialization of function, you must have three or four or five people on staff who handle these various functions. Besides, is it such a bad thing that a pastor is a grief counselor, or an educator, as well as a preacher. It seems to me that this kind of integration of skills and diversity of life experience in one person is not a bad thing.

HR: You’re right. It’s not a bad thing. It ends up, though, that the pastor suffers from vocational amnesia. He doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to do. And, of course, thinking is hard work. So it is easy to be tempted to do other things, rather than to study.

WS: What do you think about the pressure on preachers to be entertainers? That tends to discourage lay leadership in the church from rising to the occasion of being Christian educators or performing some of these other functions you have described.

HR: That’s a perceptive question. Because one solution is for lay people to do many of the very things that the pastor is now called upon to do. This requires a leader who is able to delegate, and people who are willing to be delegated to! That is why smaller churches do important work, and are often outstanding at developing disciples and leaders – because lay leaders step in and do important, even vital, work of the church. Sometimes the pastor’s role is to help lay people get into the role, provide initial support, and then withdraw.

WS: If I could push you a bit more on this point of pastors as info-tainers, there seems to be, in the evangelical work, a sense that success is equated with size. The preacher as entertainer and the worship service as entertainment seem to have taken precedence over expository preaching. Does that matter? What is the relationship between true worship, worship in "spirit and truth" and great expository preaching?

HR: I believe that any preacher that is not firmly based in the scripture is a waste of time and is in fact counter-productive because he will lead people away from God. I think the great problem that expository preaching has had in the past is that it has often not been shown to be relevant to people.

On the other hand, the topical preacher often starts with a topic that has pizzazz, goes to the biblical text merely for something to say that sounds biblical, but that’s not what directs the sermon.

Strong preaching comes when flint strikes steel. When the flint of a person’s question or problem strikes the steel of the Word of God. That’s when you get a spark. That spark can change life.

As for the idea of entertainment, that depends on what you mean by entertainment. Just as I can read a book and be gripped by it, I can hear a sermon based on scripture, done well, and it seems to me that draws people in. The word entertainment has a negative side, but an entertainment is also something that I want to hear. When that goes on, you’ve got great preaching.

WS: If, as you said, the general level of preaching in the evangelical church is fairly low, part of the responsibility for that has to rest, as you also said, on the evangelical community, which does not want to be challenged. On the other hand, don’t you also have to look to the seminaries? These preachers do not spring ex nihilo into the pulpit. They come from the seminaries, at least most of them do. What is Gordon-Conwell doing that is unique to prepare preachers?

HR: I think you’d have to say that the teaching of preaching in the theological seminaries has not been in high regard. Most schools will have two courses in preaching. Part of the other difficulty is that many people in seminary today have come to Christ in college. Many of them have not grown up in the church. As a result, when you are teaching them to preach, it’s like teaching them to swim when they’ve never been near water. You spend a lot of time saying "That’s water." And they diligently write that down.

Everyone in the group I’m teaching now here in Charlotte has been out in ministry for at least five years. They’ve got water up their nose. They know what the questions are. This is the most meaningful educational experience I have had in my 40 years of teaching.

It is tough to teach preaching to those who have never had to do it. The most you can do is to help them put a sermon together that is clear. But again and again, I will have students tell me that they read my book [on preaching] after they got out of seminary and had been in ministry a while, and they suddenly realized, "Aha, so that is what he meant."

So seminaries do share a bit of the blame, but there is a difficulty at teaching good preaching at the seminary level. Good preachers become good preachers outside of the seminary.

That is what is unique about this program. This is a two-week program, but there is a lot of reading they do prior to the course, and when they leave there are projects they have to do in their church. To get lay people involved in evaluating their sermons, and involved in the preparation of their sermons. To raise the questions that a layperson feels needs to be answered.

WS: So, implicit in what you are saying is that there is something fundamentally flawed about the way we’ve prepared people for ministry.

HR: Well, in days gone by, people would come up – be raised – in the church. So they had some awareness of what the church was, and some awareness of vital preaching. And another thing that would happen is that in years past you would graduate and go off to the First Episcobapterian Church and the people in the church knew how to do church so they would whip you into shape. They would teach you how to be a pastor by showing up, and requiring certain things of you. The elders and deacons would require certain things of you, and they were by and large the right things.

Today, because of the whole changing scene, people don’t know how to do church. They don’t know what a church should be about to touch people in the 21st century. Even though they may say that preaching doesn’t touch my life, they don’t have a ghost of an idea about what might be done differently. So you don’t get the post-graduate education in churches that you may have 40 years ago.

WS: Yet I heard as recently as yesterday that the majority of people who come to Christ come to Christ before the age of 12. And yet you are saying that many of your students in seminary are people who came to Christ in college. Help me reconcile these two data points.

HR: The mass of people who are Christians were brought up in a Christian home, and do have a childhood experience of faith, but if you ask even those children, you will discover that they had to go through an experience in which that faith had to be confirmed. Whether you are a Baptist, or a Presbyterian, or a Lutheran, or whatever. The faith of a five-year-old will not sustain that child as he approaches adulthood. The testimony is usually something like this: "I trusted Christ when I was six, but I drifted away, and when I got into my teens I went to youth camp and re-dedicated my life to Christ."

Well, it is in that area of re-dedication that I think sometimes they actually became a Christian. They were nurtured as a young child, but the meaningful decision to follow Christ came when they realized what this was all about. That is why I say that it is often in late high school or college where most people who are Christians as adults say that Christ got a hold on them.

WS: If what you say is true, and if it is also true that most people don’t know how to do church, and the environment in which they do start wrestling seriously with Christ is more likely to be youth camp than church, how do they learn the liturgy, the catechism – those things that some disparagingly call form and ritual, but in its way is didactic and does teach important doctrines of the faith. Or are these forms merely relics of the past?

HR: If a church does traditional things, they had better do them well. You can do contemporary worship much less well. Why? Because contemporary forms are already a part of what people are. But traditional forms are not, and the risk is seeming irrelevant. If you sing 300-year-old hymns, with words that are very different from the words you hear every day, there had better be excellence and beauty in those words. Contemporary forms do not carry that burden.

What those of us who are in leadership have to face is the fact that people coming to church today do not have even the most basic understanding of the facts of the Christian faith. I was flying on an airplane some time ago, and the fellow sitting next to me found out I taught at a seminary. That’s usually the kiss of death to a conversation, but this fellow wanted to know more. He asked me: "What’s Christmas?" I said, "It’s when we celebrate the birth of Jesus." He said: "What’s Easter?" I said, "That’s when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus." He said, "What do you mean by resurrection?" I said, "We believe that Jesus was murdered and put in the grave and three days later he came back from the dead."

He said, "Do Christians believe that?" I said, "All Christians should believe that." He said, "That’s interesting. I think I knew about Christmas, but I didn’t know about Easter."

Think about that. In our culture, you can learn the basics of Christmas. But where would you learn the basics of Easter from pop culture? There’s no Easter music on the radio. This fellow grew up in the United States. And we have more and more people like that with each passing year. If we expect them to learn liturgy before they can worship with us, they’re not going to make it. We’re not in a post-Christian world. We’re really in a pre-Christian world.

Think about that. When the apostles went out, they went into the synagogues. And in the synagogues, they could preach the Old Testament to people who believed the Old Testament, and out of that there would be those who would be converted. Then they hit the marketplace. Today, in many areas of the country, we don’t have those people who might be called synagogue people. We are going to a mission field, and if we don’t have a mission field mentality, we’re not going to reach them.

WS: I’m aware of Lesslie Newbiggin’s essay, "Foolishness to the Greeks," in which he described the remnants of western culture as the new mission field. But I also read that 40% of people say they did attend some worship service in the past week. Of course, there is also other data that says when you ask people this question, at least half of them will lie!

HR: Yes!

WS: And there is a Barna survey that says people who identify themselves as born-again don’t believe in the resurrection, or the virgin birth, or other key doctrines.

HR: Well, part of the issue is that when you and I use that term, "born again," we fill it with meaning. But lots of people use that word in ways that you and I don’t. It describes spiritism, or some experience that is semi-religious, perhaps, but has nothing to do with trusting Jesus Christ. Has nothing to do with John 3.

WS: I guess that’s my point. It seems that disciple making has to be more than self-referencing. It has to be based on sound teaching. Jesus said, "Go and make disciples." He said that to his disciples. What does that look like today?

HR: The Great Commission’s major verb is "go and make disciples." You do that by reaching them, baptizing them, and teaching them. I think our task is to take men and women who are not Christians and bring them into a relationship with Jesus Christ, and have them grow in that relationship until they develop maturity in their relationship with the Lord Jesus.

WS: It seems that people are being reached, but they’re not being taught.

HR: That’s the great danger. Many contemporary churches are doing a great job or reaching people, but they face frustration when it comes to making them fully committed followers of Jesus Christ. I admire these churches because they have been effective at reaching people who do not ordinarily come to church. We can learn a lot from them. But many of them are evaluating what they are doing, because they are realizing that what they have been doing is not enough. We have seen this evolution in the church -- from traditional to evangelistic to disciple-making – all of this has taken place in the past 30 years.

WS: Well, then let’s go back 30 or 50 years. Billy Graham was coming along with Youth for Christ. Campus Crusade just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The Navigators, InterVarsity. Right after World War II there was an explosion of these types of para-church organizations. The ground was fertile for these organizations. Perceptive people say they sprang up because of a failure of the church. My question is: shouldn’t there be some sense of urgency about recovering what was lost in the church, rather than turning the church into a para-church group.

HR: I think what happened 50 years ago was the great liberal-fundamentalist controversy. Liberals won. They won the denominations. What you had 50 years ago was a transformation of fundamentalism to evangelicalism, in the sense that they said, "We don’t have to retreat and nurse our wounds. We can move out." Many churches that have sprung up in the past 50 years are a reflection of these para-church ministries. They were effective in some ways, so the churches imitated them.

I believe that today, if you look at the churches that are growing, they’re evangelical. That’s true in Methodism, in Presbyterianism, among Baptists, even in the Episcopal church. However, there are people for whom liturgy, in the best sense, has a strong appeal. We have a culture that is much more visual. The liturgy is visual. We have a culture that needs to hear things again and again and again. Liturgy does that. The reciting of the Apostle’s Creed, and the rest.

WS: So what you are saying is that the rise of the video culture is also potentially providing fertile ground for a resurgence of liturgy.

HR: Sure. Banners in the church. Vestments. Colors to represent different seasons of the church calendar. A visual culture will respond to these things, if they are done well, and if scripture is behind them. Evangelical Anglican churches around the world are drawing huge numbers of people.

WS: If you could say one thing to a pastor in Charlotte about his leadership or his preaching, what would that be? What is the central message of Haddon Robinson’s life and ministry to the church?

HR: I believe that the most important single thing we can do is to take the scriptures, be faithful to what they are saying, and relate them to the complex problems of people in the 21st century. You cannot just focus on problems and needs of people without an honest exposition of scripture. On the other hand, you can’t stay in the 21st century BC. You’ve got to bring that truth to this culture.

The preacher stands as a bridge between two worlds. That takes thought and commitment. So preach the World of God. That must be the first and deepest commitment of a preacher. There is great power in the Word of God to change lives.