A youth pastor preached a peculiar sermon on the conception of Jesus to a group of students. His points followed these events of the Christmas story: 1) Joseph and Mary were engaged, 2) Oops! Mary got pregnant, 3) Joseph was afraid that this would harm his reputation, 4) he fearfully (and cowardly) broke off the engagement rather than experience humiliation in the eyes of the people who knew him, and 5) he reconsidered his decision and he married her. Joseph wasn’t the godly man that the Bible portrays him as being. He was just another young man dealing with the fear of his girlfriend’s crisis pregnancy. The youth pastor’s interpretation of the Biblical story made it sound like so many other stories of out-of-wedlock pregnancies. In fact, in the United States today, close to half of all births are to single women.

Amazingly, the pastor never mentioned that Joseph wasn’t the father. He omitted the key point of the story: the incarnation of Jesus—you know, the insignificant little doctrine that Jesus was formed by God, the Father, in Mary’s womb, and that Jesus was therefore God-in-the-flesh, or Emmanuel. The youth pastor never mentioned the Virgin Birth. What makes this even stranger is that it happened in a large evangelical church.

Dumbing Down the Doctrine

This situation illustrates a problem in conservative churches today. Rather than fleshing out the full Biblical story with the rich doctrine that it contains, many pastors assume that people aren’t smart enough to understand supposedly esoteric theological explanations. They assume that the Bible has to be “dumbed down” so that people will get at least some of it.

Several years ago, a college-educated church member pulled me aside to let me know that I was preaching over the heads of most of my listeners. “These are simple people,” she said, “they don’t have a college education.” She was right to the extent of my vocabulary. I immediately simplified my speech—without watering down the doctrine—and the positive response of the people was overwhelming.

The problem with “dumbing down” the doctrine is that it offers people an incomplete picture of Scripture from which they can independently develop false interpretations. Using the youth pastor’s message as an example, if Jesus were the product of a typical crisis pregnancy then Joseph, or someone else, could be the sperm donor—or so people might speculate. Maybe Mary wasn’t so pure. Maybe she was sleeping around. Maybe the conception of Jesus wasn’t so immaculate. So then, Jesus might have been fully human and not divine. Maybe he wasn’t really God’s Son. Maybe he was an ordinary guy who aspired to be God’s Son and who “had the amazing ability to pull it off” (I heard a liberal college professor say this to his class.)This subtle progression of reasoning undermines everything else in the New Testament and erodes the faith of a Christian.

Wouldn’t it be better to dig deeply into God’s Word during sermon preparation, to meditate on it with a heart of faith, to apply it to your life with an earnest pursuit of godliness, and then to develop an urgent sense of what God wants your people to hear? Wouldn’t it be better to preach biblical doctrine in a manner that challenges people to think and then watch them rise to new heights of discipleship? When you preach to the lowest common denominator you give people the impression that the Bible is a simplistic book that isn’t capable of addressing their deepest needs. Then, when their spiritual growth compels them to seek more doctrinal meat than you are giving them, they will either learn to be content with your nutritionally inadequate spiritual milk and remain immature, or they’ll go elsewhere in search of someone who can feed them deeper, more spiritually satisfying, biblical truth (1 Corinthians 3:2: Hebrews 5:12-13; 1 Peter 2:2). These hungry disciples will continue their healthy growth toward maturity in someone else’s church. Of course, there is another possibility. Some people may grow weary of your trite, simplistic, inadequate explanations of Truth and conclude that the Bible is irrelevant to address situations in real life. They might walk away from church, and God, altogether.

A disillusioned former church member wrote about his reasons for leaving the church of his youth many years earlier. He concluded by saying,

“Those of us who chose to walk away could also choose to walk back. What might prompt us to do that? Hard to say. The shortest answer is for churches to be places that clearly offer something powerful and positive not found elsewhere. That might give churches and strays a reason to bother with each other.” (Peter Greene)

So let’s take a moment to consider the part of the story that the students didn’t hear.

CONTINUED IN PART 2