I think it's very important that pastors realize that in their congregations,
there are going to be doctors, high school teachers, lawyers, business
professionals, who are highly educated and intelligent, and there needs to be
some sort of content given for these people as well as for the uneducated
that are in the congregation. I appreciate that the Sunday morning
sermon cannot be some sort of a lecture that is geared simply for intellectuals,
but there needs to be something there, I think, that will be helpful and of
interest to those who are deeper thinkers. And this isn't difficult to do;
so to give an illustration, if you're preaching through the Gospels and you're
dealing with a certain passage, what you can do before sharing the practical
lessons or spiritual insights that come out of that passage would be to share
something about the historical background of that passage. What evidence
do we have that the events or the people involved were historically real? Or other
kinds of local color that you can give. To give an illustration, our pastor was
preaching once on the story of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego and how they were
thrown into the fiery furnace. Well as part of the sermon, he put up a
PowerPoint slide of an ancient Mesopotamian smelting furnace and
explained how they would smelt bronze and iron by using these furnaces, and how
hot they got, and it just made the passage really come alive by seeing
something in the archaeology of what was being talked about in
that passage. On another occasion he was preaching on the disciples on the Sea of
Galilee, and he showed pictures of this Galilean fishing boat that has been
excavated from the mud of the Sea of Galilee when the waters dropped several
years ago, and they found this first century fishing boat that would have
been just like the one that the disciples and Jesus used. And again, this
makes it real; it makes it come alive. So there are ways in which you can add
color, historical detail, archaeological information, or even philosophical
questions to the morning sermon that will help to cultivate those in the
audience, in the congregation, who are more educated and have these questions.
In addition to that, I would really encourage every local church as part of
their adult Sunday school program to offer not simply simple Bible studies,
but for example survey courses on church history, on Christian doctrine, perhaps
even a course on Greek, elementary Greek to teach people at least how to use a
Greek concordance and dictionary and interlinear Greek New Testament.
I think there are all kinds of ways through the adult Sunday school program
that we can minister to the needs of people who have a more intellectual bent.