The Monologue-Centered Church
A Critique of Nine Marks and the Gospel™
Once upon a time, I thought there was a shortcut to finding a good church. If a church believed in predestination, preached expositionally, and exercised church discipline, then that was the church for me.
Mark Dever’s ministry Nine Marks had a map that purported to locate such churches. I remember referencing the map in my attempt, as a college freshman, to find a church that would satisfy my ideological predilections.
What may serve as a heuristic for a college freshman, however, cannot be the conclusion of mature Christian wisdom. Maturity recognizes that any set of boxes, however theologically-grounded, can be checked without exemplifying the corresponding virtues. What is more, any ideological simplification can be used as grounds to excuse a set of vices that are easily mistaken for the same virtues.
While I once thought that Dever’s Nine Marks paved the yellow-brick road to ecclesiological Oz, I now think that this teaching justifies and leads to a monologue-centered church and Christian life: Listening to the Gospel in sermon form is the primary task of Christian discipleship.
It also leads to “the one-man show,” authoritarianism, and antinomianism. In this vision of church life, one preaching pastor dominates people’s spiritual lives. The primary duty of the Christian life is to listen to his expository sermons every Sunday, as Dever puts it, his “monologues”. The rest of the Christian life is peripheral with respect to the gospel center, and discipleship is replaced by church discipline, through becoming a dues-paying member of the preacher’s church.
Mark Dever’s book expounds a sectarian Christian ideology. It narrows the scope of the Christian life to attendance at gospel monologues.
The Holy Monologue
by Joel Carini
We Protestants bristle at Catholic sacerdotalism: “Just get that mass inside of people.” The idea that the grace of Christ bypasses our understanding and can be ingested by a physical action offends the Protestant sensibility.
However, the weekly, expositional monologue - as articulated by Nine Marks - functions like a Protestant Eucharist. You know this because human communication is not the main goal. If it was, you would expect sermons to be very flexible to adjust their rhetoric to different audiences, to include stories, humor, and personability in order to connect with congregants, and to include personal judgment and wisdom rather than constraints of format. What is more, you would need to engage in discussion in order at least to confirm that people were grasping and assimilating the message, if not to have actual conversation and mutual encouragement.
Yet the ideology we find from Nine Marks is opposed to these elements. For instance, researcher George Barna writes that “sermons should be easier to understand, less abstract, more spontaneous, shorter, filled with more stories of the preacher’s personal experience, and they should even allow for the participation of the audience.” Mark Dever responds in the following way, “Permit me to suggest that the one-sidedness of preaching is not only excusable but is actually important. … In the event of preaching itself, the univocal character of God’s Word comes as a monologue to us, not hoping to elicit interest and participation but requiring us to respond.”
In other words, sermons should not be adjusted to communicate well to individuals, “eliciting interest” and featuring the mutuality of all human communication. Instead, the pastor puts on a performance intended to symbolize divine monergism, “the univocal character of God’s…monologue to us.”
What is striking is that when God actually preached - in the person of Christ - he rarely, if ever, provided long expositions or exegetical commentary. He spoke in brief parables; he told - what is the same thing - stories. He even used humor.
The New Testament urges the public reading of Scripture, and preaching and teaching. What it does not say is slavishly to reproduce the evangelical commentaries in a three-point sermon, whose three points are the main clauses of a biblical pericope as discovered by a Greek or Hebrew sentence-diagram.
Likewise, if God doesn’t even speak to us as if he were God in his sermons, why would pastors speak to us as if they were God? Why not speak to us like men? Even Paul did not claim this kind of authority, at least in certain cases: “I say this, not the Lord.”
Christian communication should be human communication, by mere humans, and adjusted to be heard and received and “to elicit interest” in the hearers.
God’s Modern Meat Puppet
by King Laugh
Expositional preaching attempts to remove from the comprehension, interpretation, and application of scripture the very humanity that God used to author, transmit, and translate it. In an attempt to “protect” the voice of God to His people, we silence His chosen mouthpieces as the Pharisees attempted to silence Jesus. God has been far more comfortable using human and imperfect messengers to convey sufficient and infallible messages than we have been obedient in avoiding transmogrifying them into idols and worshiping them as gods. It is blasphemous to venerate as God what isn’t God—angels who materialized theophanies, for example—and we are not guiltless of this heinous sin.
There are two ways to fail to properly understand and benefit from divinely inspired texts: one is to think that they are unreliable, untrue, evil, or stupid; the other is to think that they are God. Conservative Evangelicals typically fall somewhere between Marxists and Muslims on the spectrum of how founding documents of the faith are to be treated, but they act like the latter when it comes to “the original manuscripts”. God did not permit these to survive, and I think that we should take the hint! Likewise, there are two ways to fail to properly understand and engage with canonical authors: one is to think that they are misguided, deceitful, perverse, or ignorant men; the other is to think that they are God. We view the human authors as the biographical introductions that bedevil baking recipes.
God’s engagement with humanity—whether the guidance of the patriarchs, ancient Israel, and the early church, formation of the canon and early creeds, or modern interpretation of the texts in an ugly box in Akron, Ohio—is mediated through His image bearers and the ordinary gifts that He has given them as regents, a chosen nation, sons and daughters, or as members of the bride of Christ. The pastor is not magic any more than Paul, Moses, Noah, or Adam were, but neither is he an irrelevant meat puppet for God to possess. The process of comprehending, interpreting, and applying are as ordinary—and, indeed, extraordinary—as the process of authoring, transmitting, and translating were as well as the process by which the fruit of such labors is heard, processed, and headed—or challenged. God doesn’t need to bowl with bumpers because we have a felt need for epistemic certainty.
The activity of exposition is of no more use—and frequently less—than studying the scriptures ourselves or with others, and is not the best use of our time as the gathered body of Christ. We cannot confess our sins to one another, recite the creeds together, partake of the Lord’s supper, or sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs alone. We can read the Bible alone, read it together, and study it carefully under the guidance of a skilled teacher much better outside of the service and in better forms than a monologue—a lack of participation and contextualization make exposition a poor substitute for other delivery methods.
What keeps us from doing this is the conviction that the pastor is—without any promise from God or command to be this—God’s modern meat puppet for forty-five minutes. This fallacious way of approaching the teaching of the scriptures gags the man who spent tens of hours preparing to speak and infantilizes his listeners so as not to step on Jesus’ lines. This is like yoking the oxen, taking them to the field, and then hogtying their hooves and praying that God will plow the field, sow the seed, and reap the harvest, since He is the one who sends rain and sun, causes growth, and sustains creation. Why have oxen? Why, indeed, create a world of responsible moral agents? Why take a millennia to reveal what is now reduced to a bad, boring lecture once a week?
An unbiased observation of the texts of scripture bears out that God did not intend for His covenantal revelation to man to be Joseph Smith and the golden tablets, nor did he intend to dispense with the need for man to work to know, to do, and to be His image bearer and regent, His body and bride, and prepared to be His one flesh companion for eternity. In scripture, God reveals His covenant purpose for man. He does not tell us all we wish to know about angels, the universe, mathematics, political theory, or how to write high fantasy. That doesn’t mean that those things don’t exist or aren’t important, just that His purpose was discrete and His means and methods equally so. He gave man five senses, rationality, language, and an imagination, so we cannot blame Him if we fail to use these well to live the good life and accomplish our purposes and His.
My suggestion is that our teachers ought to be more like David, Daniel, Paul, and Peter than theologically-literate fraternity brothers approaching the scriptures like the supply demand curve or bitcoin. The people of God, as they always have, live in God’s world. A good teacher will look at all of it, including and particularly scripture, and point men and women to the truth, goodness, and beauty of God, His image bearers, and His world. Such a teacher will do this as any man does anything, God helping him, and be edifying, accountable, and authoritative to just that degree to which he has faithfully and skillfully done the work. The teacher cannot pin the blame on God or avoid the risk of the task by being “biblical”, nor can the congregants avoid their responsibility by finding a “theologically sound” pastor. Life cannot be put on autopilot nor the Christian life be made into a lecture series, not even a divinely inspired one.
Finally, and as a tangent, the conviction that the entire bible is an arcane book of Jewish and Christian “deep magic” is as silly as thinking that the fish lists in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, architectural descriptions of historical Paris in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or depictions of the whaling industry in Moby Dick are as essential to the works in question as their plots and character development. The Bible may be special, but that does not mean that we take as much of our finite lives studying the detailed account of how to ritually slaughter a goat as we do Jesus’ words in the gospels—assuming that we, of course, are not Levites tasked with ritually slaughtering goats. This, too, is a pernicious idiocy of expositional preaching: it cannot prioritize without admitting that man has some liberty and responsibility to determine what is meaningful and necessary for the body gathered at the feet of that particular preacher, in that place, and at that time to hear preached and what has largely ceased to be relevant to the Christian life or even just the people present in that situation.
Exposition Exposed
by Joel Carini
“So what is this all-important thing called expositional preaching?” - Mark Dever
The monologue form itself is inhuman. But the content of expositional preaching is also stripped of all human judgment.
As I’ve heard it many a time, the ideology of expository preaching is that, if you don’t have sermons the point of which is the point of a biblical pericope, then the pastor will just talk about whatever he as a human thinks prior to the text. To quote someone:
“When someone preaches in a way that is not expositional, the sermons tend to be only on the topics that interest the preacher. The result is that the preacher and the congregation only hear in Scripture what they already thought before they came to the text.”
Coming from churches that are not well-educated in theology, that are blown by the winds of popular Christian literature, it is understandable that the idea of slavishly preaching the biblical text would be a breath of fresh air. But at some point, we need to move beyond.
After all, Nine Marks also teaches that the content of every passage of Scripture is “The Gospel.” The result of this perspective is that all sermons should have the same concluding point: The milk of salvation.
I feel bad, but I’m sick of expositional preaching. I’d like to hear a preacher shoot from the hip and tell me what he thinks about a topic, a topic he thinks important for Christians to discuss.
Likewise, I wouldn’t mind hearing what a seasoned saint “already thought before they came to the text.” Is there no number of expository sermons sufficient to shape people’s interests and what they think before they come to the text the following week?
Also, I don’t think, without expository sermons, sermons would only tell us what we already think. In fact, I think the opposite is true: If you only preach in a gospel-centered, expositional way, Christians will only hear in sermons things they already learned in Sunday School.
There is a denial here of human judgment, growth in maturity, of the necessity of practical wisdom and empirical knowledge. That’s why King Laugh speaks with me about not only orthopraxy, but orthopathy. I want a mature Christian wise man to speak with me about what he is passionately interested in.
In fact, I’ve noticed pastors apologizing when they need to go off the expositional script in order to address some pressing or personal concern of the congregation. Or if they feel a topic needs to be addressed. Isn’t that the most pastoral (shepherd) thing they can do? To consider the actual realities and practicalities of their sheep? To address the people in the room?
Why would we hamstring wise Christians when they speak? Unless we are going to press people on the necessity of lay-people cultivating wisdom in other areas, while the Bible-expert stays in his lane. But I don’t believe that the Bible itself is this narrow, nor that it can be read and preached properly without wisdom and judgment. As King Laugh says, there is an attempt to hear to make preaching idiot-proof. Even an imbecile could slavishly regurgitate the commentaries. And AI could write these sermons. Is that really what we need as we go to battle daily with the world, the flesh, and the devil?
The Gospel™
by King Laugh
There is another side to the Nine Marks coin, and it is the cushion upon which the neutered preacher rests his wounded loins: The Gospel™. This isn’t your grandpappy’s gospel, either. It is the kind of slippery, lineless brand logo edition of the original that can adapt in size to fit any need. Want to appear simple, humble, and unpretentious? Bring it all back to the gospel™. Want to dog whistle about the gays? Make clear that their flags are a “gospel™ issue”. Want to have a Christian conference about lupus? How about “lupus and the gospel™”! The gospel™ is Obama’s “Change”, Nike’s “Just Do It”, and Charlie Sheen’s “Winning”.
If you can find a way to relate what you want to say to the gospel™, all bets are off in terms of expositional restraint. The gospel™ is Kierkegaard jumping the shark. If the expositional sermon is foot binding, the gospel™ is those gross toe shoes that make us contemplate feet in ways that only podiatrists should. In this way, a pastor preaching his way through Leviticus, Romans, or Wild at Heart can say anything that pops into his head or heart, sans any meaningful need to consider what he is saying carefully or to expect pushback from engaged congregants because, after all and at the end of the day, the thing that truly matters is the gospel™.
So long as the point of the message and its application remain either in the text or in the gospel™, little asides about sports team x, the pastor’s hot wife, immigrants, or the disease factory that is a toddler newly attending school can be mentioned. They may never be the message, nor may the book of nature or the lives of congregants and their needs therein. Any time somebody’s wife won’t lift a finger to make the house livable, someone’s husband won’t talk to the kids about much of anything, someone’s parents can’t respect boundaries, or somebody is an ungrateful churl to the woman who birthed them, the answer must ultimately be to sit by a campfire and contemplate the gospel™.
I’d like to suggest that such people need to be taught, trained, and counseled—and potentially disciplined—unto competence and character. They need to have an older couple explain order and organization in the home, the role of a father in living out and extolling the good God and His ways before the little citizens of his vineyard, that “no” isn’t hate, and that “no” isn’t always the right answer. They need, in other words, to see their ordinary sins by comparison to how a godly and wise brother or sister would handle such things, repent, be helped to bear fruit in keeping with that repentance, and to spread the seed of God’s kingdom in the lives of others.
The trouble is that we have been trained to associate “seed” with “gospel™” and to fold the entire Christian life into it. The gospel may be the necessary door through which a sinner walks, but it does not please Jesus to collapse His teachings into words that have marketing appeal, rather than semantic substance. “Go and make disciples” is the closest thing to a mantra for the Christian life, but it involves: 1. baptism; and 2. teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. While repentance is, as Luther says, the entire life of the believer, the image of Christ is our goal in that process, not the gospel that introduces sinners to the process.
This would be like calling anything to do with parenting “childbirth”. In some sense, every moment of our lives is new and we remain doe-eyed children until the day we die and every act of parenting brings children into the world in a way not dissimilar to the pangs of childbirth, but every mother knows the distinct pain of birthing children and would not use the same word for that and the struggle of standoffish teen years. It is perfectly acceptable to refer back to the time when, but it is a bizarre and perverse kind of nostalgia that latches onto a stage of life and treats the whole course as though it were one extended period of adolescence, for example. No, Paul talks incessantly about the gospel because he was an evangelist and missionary. It was his primary work, not the whole of his life. He lamented not being able to move beyond it as a foundation and castigated immature churches for continuing to need milk.
We don’t need slogans. We don’t need words around which to rally. Paul refers to his religion as Judaism according to “the way”, it is in Antioch that church-age believers were first called “Christians”, I am often called a “Baptist”, and I am occasionally called an “Evangelical”. Most of the time, the people using the words don’t know their historical context, their modern sociological meaning, or precisely what they mean or I am likely to understand by it when it tumbles out of their mouth. It matters not, because, for good or for ill, who we are and what we believe are not matters of speech or intellect, solely or primarily. They are, at best, shorthand expressions for what we love, do, and prioritize above all else.
I would like to suggest that, for Christians, this ought to be Jesus Christ. Sure, He preached the gospel and I believe it, but I think that it is not the same to tie everything back to the gospel™ as it is to tie everything back to Him. The dastardly thing about folding everything into the gospel™ is that the gospel™ is not the Second Person of the Trinity, did not make and sustain the world, did not live a perfect life, did not die for my sins, was not raised from the dead, will not come back in glory to judge the living and the dead, and is not going to give me a stone with a name on it only He and I know. Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, not the gospel™, even if the gospel is the precious, glorious, beautiful word that the Spirit uses to pierce my heart and transfuse my blood with His.
When we fold the culture war, the platitudinous end to a bad sermon, and a kitschy logo for the Evangelical Magisterium in with the person and work of Christ, we risk such essential tasks as taking up our cross daily, dying to self, mortifying sin, and filling up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ being supplanted by a sin-sorry-succor sucker sold by the bushel for a dollar a pop. We needed the gospel and must continue to preach it, but the mature Christian is not a spiritual infant that needs to constantly be reminded of how to enter the narrow gate. Let us move on to meat and save the milk for those who need it. If we remain in need of it, we should shudder with fear about the state of our immortal souls.
Gospel-Centered
by Joel Carini
The idea of being gospel-centered has taken control of a Christian subculture, conference circuit, and publishing industry. It has not been subjected to nearly enough critique.
To paraphrase King Laugh: “This gospel-centric black hole in which everything is nothing and nothing is everything.”
Effectively, gospel-centered means downplaying everything that comes before the gospel and everything that comes after. “Before the gospel” is the realm of preparation for the gospel, the Law of God in its first and second uses. “After the gospel” is the entire Christian life, and the third use of the law.
Christian maturity is not just returning to the gospel. We must proceed from milk to meat. The purpose of the Nine Marks pastor is to deliver top-quality whole milk. (Why not just give it to us raw? Train us all to be exegetes. It could be done, as King Laugh has pointed out.)
If the Gospel is the center, gospel-centered treats the Christian life as peripheral. This critique has come explicitly from the social justice Christian left and from the Kuyperian right, with regard to politics or social morality.
About spiritual growth, Dever writes: “A church that is clear on the gospel will help you grow as a Christian. … You cannot help but grow as you understand more and more of what God has done for you in Christ. Do you want to grow as a Christian? Meditate on Charles Wesley’s great hymn, ‘And Can It Be?’ Return to being amazed at the gospel.”
I mean, the caricature writes itself.
An Alternative
by King Laugh
There are too many books about how Jesus discipled the disciples—The Master Plan of Evangelism, for instance—for me to reinvent the wheel here. I will stick to broad strokes to evince a gestalt. Jesus took a willing but unprepared group of men and, by a combination of teaching, training, and counseling them during the course of a several year, live-with apprenticeship, he took them from merely—and often wrongly—knowing to teaching others and exercising authority over the church. They got a lot wrong on many occasions and even abandoned Him in His hour of suffering, so the key element of His work with them was His commitment to them and restoration of them after their failure. They often made the same mistakes as the crowds and we see Jesus patiently correct them in intimate, conversational settings after the fact—there are exceptions, but this is the general tenor.
The alternative to expositional preaching and a gospel™-centric mantra is this kind of discipleship. I am aware that the chapters in Nine Marks of a Healthy Church include one on “A Biblical Concern for Discipleship and Growth”, but the goal of Nine Marks and its means and methods differ substantially from what I think Jesus did with His disciples and what His apostles established in the life of the early church. Jesus’ mission was not to do church well or to cover the earth with sound churches. It wasn’t to have all the documents associated with incorporating and governing a church be on the website to peruse. It wasn’t to make everyone who called upon His name into little carbon copies of Peter, James, and John—Paul seems nothing like any of them and didn’t appear interested in fanboying.
As good as Capitol Hill Baptist Church is—I have wept while singing there because of how lustily and well those saints sing the praises of God—the thing that it fails to do is to permeate the lives of its members with what they need to live as Christians out there, in the City of Man, on an everyday basis. It is a glorious spectacle of what little demographic variety the professional class of D.C. has to offer worshipping God in earnest and with love for each other one cannot fail to feel. It is just that the few times a week they gather, in small and large groups, are about the only times I think are touched by its teaching, training, and counseling.
There are MANY churches who do church so poorly that doing it well is a breath of fresh air. It seems like stepping across the Jordan into Canaan! The trouble is that this touches, even for the most devoted lay person, less than five percent of their life. It is a great show the professional ministerial class puts on for the congregation, but it is still just that: a show. It has not become the City of God so much as a circus. Now, it is possible to be Cirque du Soleil, where each performer contributes of their gifts, but this circus is really the work of one man, who scales the show and builds new tents in other cities, never fundamentally changing it and so never fundamentally changing people.
Perhaps this can be attributed to a church in a city where almost no one is between the ages of thirty—where life, at least in modern America, has barely begun—and eighty—where it has all but ended—but the fifty years in between are full of the life God made for man to live to His glory. It is the honeymoon, the ultrasound, the first cries of life, the sleepless nights, the horseplay, board games, tough talks, hard lessons, graduations, weddings, funerals, weeping, laughing, grief, love, loss, grass, trees, lakes, twilight years, and so many other things that no scroll, pen, tongue, or memory could contain it all, much less the grace and mercy of the good God in the midst of it all! There is more to make me weep tears of both joy and sorrow in a Victor Hugo novel that in every sermon I have ever heard combined.
The trouble with much that is called “discipleship” is that it cannot fathom why Jesus would weep. It cannot imagine an explanation for Jesus granting Mary’s wish to see the poor peasants drunk as lords—they had drunk all the wine and He made “good” wine, so let’s settle down with all that teetotaler propaganda. It cannot give a reason for or an explanation of how to live ninety-five percent of the time, so I couldn’t give two figs how well it performs in the five. If we are to be made into Christ’s image, it must be the image of the Christ who ate and drank with prostitutes and tax collectors without becoming one or offending them unnecessarily, rather than the image of ones so insecure and judgmental that they cannot even mention gay people without mocking them, cannot admit Presbyterians to membership because of a disagreement about the timing of baptism, and cannot learn from older, wiser pastors because those pastors don’t have a ten page document they compel potential members to read.
Paul studied under Gamaliel, and what was involved was both far more robust than any training we undertake in the modern era and of tremendous use to Paul in his refutation of heretics, but Paul had to spend three years in remedial training after his Damascus road experience because he had spent his time with Gamaliel training to be something that was of limited—if real—use to him as an Apostle of Jesus Christ. My suggestion is that Nine Marks may make a church into a better church than the dreck that so often calls itself that, but it isn’t the City of God in the City of Man, and nothing short of that is the body and bride of Christ, against which the gates of hell will not prevail, and within which men and women are made into the image of Christ, shade by shade of glory.
For more on this topic, listen to our discussion with Dr. Joseph Minich about authoritarian ecclesiology:
This critique of Gospel™ reminds me of the contemporary critique of "Big Agriculture" or capitalism. Both the conservative and liberals are criticizing it. Say, the food pyramid came about to get more food to more people, so no one is starving anymore. But people are dying of a number of diseases linked to overconsumption of non-nutritious food. In a similar way, I think no one is starving for the very basics of the gospel. The Gospel trademark was a good way to multiply a lot of minimally nutritious teaching and make it profitable and stamped of approval, similar to something being USDA certified.
Also, we need a voiceover for this!! I need to hear King Laugh narrate.
I am so grateful for these essays. I couldn’t read them fast enough and intend to go back to them multiple times. Never has theology made me want to both laugh and cry so much!
After becoming a believer, I was a faithful churchgoer for about ten years. I was so excited to be part of the “body of Christ.” I slowly became aware of these exact patterns and suffered a lot of dysfunctional “leadership” as a result.
I reluctantly stopped attending a few years ago. Attending churches like this made me less loving, less powerful, more anxious and confused… I believe this kind of “discipleship” is not just disappointing or unfortunate but truly harmful. I’m still looking for a community that loves the way God loves.