This commitment to the centrality of preaching, particularly with regard to the church’s preservation and multiplication, continued throughout successive generations of faithful Christians like the English Reformers, Whitfield, Wesley and Edwards.
The biblical witness and the testimony of church history clearly point to the fact that preaching is the church’s survival strategy. By preaching the church expands and by preaching the church remains faithful in a hostile culture. In a secular age, we can no longer rely on the luxury of having other cultural voices do the work of instilling our people with a Christian worldview.
The plausibility structures of the culture now work at cross-currents to the message we preach on Sunday mornings. No longer does the culture indicate one “ought” to listen to preaching or one “ought” to give credence to the Christian moral tradition. Those days are behind us. Indeed, the plausibility structures of our culture have so radically changed that the cultural “oughts” are now opposed to Christianity—one ought not associate with those so far outside the cultural mainstream, one ought not define the human predicament in terms of sin, one ought not speak in a way that the Bible speaks or believe the things the Bible proclaims.
The church’s only recourse in a secular city is to continue to do what it has always done: preach the Word. We cannot hope that somehow we might stumble upon a third epistle to Timothy, which gives alternative ministry options to what Paul exhorts his protégé to do in Second Timothy. Our only hope is to continue to do what Jesus and the Apostles commissioned us to do. Whether we find ourselves in circumstances of cultural acceptance or cultural hostility, we must preach the Word.
We need to recognize that the age of cultural Christianity is disappearing right before us. The kind of preaching that made for “successful” churches is also disappearing because the people who came for that kind of preaching no longer feel bound to come. We must now recognize that preaching is not just an activity the church engages in on Sunday mornings. Preaching is not a trivial activity. Preaching is a matter of life and death—preaching in the secular city is a matter of survival.
Fundamentally, the survival of the church in the secular city comes down to a promise and a command given us in Scripture, an indicative and an imperative. First, we must remember that Jesus promised “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt 16:18) Next, we must remember that we have been commissioned to “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.” (2 Tim 4:2)
We need to remember both of these words from Scripture in order to serve faithfully in the secular city. Jesus has given His church a strategy for survival in the face of cultural hostility. That strategy, it turns out, is the apostolic call to preach.
R. Albert Mohler is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.