Preachers need spiritual intelligence
MARTYN Lloyd-Jones, the British minister, asked: “What is the chief end of preaching?” His answer was: “It is to give men and women a sense of God and his presence.”
In my view, for some the purpose of preaching is an ostentatious exercise. During Mother’s Day I missed out on the opportunity to attend a Sunday church service because I had to attend a funeral service of my co-religionist. The deceased was a mother who had been outlived by her four sons. I had great expectations that the preacher would move from text to sermon with the view to dovetailing his message to Mother’s Day. To borrow language from David Livingstone, he swayed from “irrelevancy to irrelevancy”.
I stood open-mouthed when he went off that tangent by adopting a habitual Isaiahnic approach to his sermon: “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord” (Isaiah: 6). I was reminded of a woman whose husband died in a car accident on his way to work. After half an hour a pastor came to console her by reading from John 14:1: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me.” Silence would have been a better solution to the widow’s anguish than an irrelevant scripture. Job’s friends were not stupid when they kept quiet for seven days during his ordeal. They knew that silence spoke louder than words.
The four grieving sons who stood before their mother’s coffin on Mother’s Day had been told to see their loss as an opportunity to draw near to God. They were also told that God had engineered their mother’s demise in order for them to draw near to him. His manner of preaching reeked of affectation and the sermon never came out of the inward affection of his heart. His approach punctured the bereaved family’s confidence in the Creator.
Whilst I was mulling over my “spoiled” Mother’s Day I sought comfort in my television set. I watched the AmaBishop show on MojaLove which exposes religious charlatans with the view to encouraging people to exercise religious caution. A guest on the show suggested that the preachers of the gospel needed a new set competencies and that psychology should be a compulsory course in the theology curriculum. Competency includes knowledge, skill and attitude. I fully support the proposal. For example, had the preacher been equipped with intervention skills, he would have chosen a relevant text for the day. Intervention is the ability to objectively diagnose a situation and know what action is appropriate for a situation.
Society either moves or stagnate and in stagnation lies death and a mind unused atrophies. It is time we thought on new ways to console bereaved families. Dr John Demartini’s philosophy of “build and destroy” is worth employing – build new ideas and have the courage to destroy that which is no longer relevant. Preachers must be spiritually intelligent (SQ). By SQ I refer to the intelligence with which we address and solve problems of meaning and value. According to Zohar and Marshall, the following are indicators of a highly developed SQ: the capacity to be flexible, the tendency to see the connection between diverse things and being what psychologists call “field independent”, possessing a facility for working against convention.
John Gray says that men are from Mars and women are from Venus; a woman preacher would have been more sensitive to the plight of the bereaved and wounded sons.