Category Archives: Sermons

Jesus

From time to time one of my dear fundy friends (yes, I do have a few!) informs me that I am much to negative on this site.

With that in mind, I’d like to share a sermon by one of my favorite fundamentalists on a topic that he loved very much.

[audio:http://www.darrelldow.com/blog/CrumptonJesus.mp3]

Illustrations: The Boiled Frog

boiling-frogs
“If you stick a frog in a boiling pan of water, he’ll try to jump out. But if you stick a frog in a pan of cold water and gradually heat it up, the frog will sit there until he boils to death.”

This charming bit of folks lore is used to show us that if we accept even a little wordiness into our lives that we’ll soon be boiled to death in a steaming pot of apathy. Whether or not that’s actually the case, there’s one small problem with the illustration…it’s completely bogus.

From Snopes.com

The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.

Preaching Contests

scorecardsEven though the school year is still early in the Fall semester, things are already heating up in the annual Ebenezer Baptist College  sermon contest with preacher boys looking forward to smiting their opponents on the church platform.

This year sees two formidable contenders emerging from the field of expository behemoths: Reginald “Reggie” McDonald, a pastoral ministries senior from Wichita, Kansas and Zedekiah Hosea Buckwalter, a missions major from Flint, Michigan. With such a strong matchup there’s likely to be more than a little blood, sweat, and tears shed on the oak wood of the  sacred desk.

“It’s all about crafting the perfect words,” said Buckwalter in a recent interview with Preacher Boy Monthly. “I’ve been working on my delivery ever since my freshman speech devotional and it’s almost perfect now.”

But Reggie disagrees about the method. “It’s not about delivery, it’s simply a matter of how much of the Holy Spirit you have,” argued McDonald. “Other than maybe the pastor himself, nobody on campus has as much of the Holy Spirit as I do. That’s just a fact.”

Neither contender would reveal the content of their sermon, although historically sermons on sin have always been favored in the contest. “A little lust goes a long way in a sermon,” explained a Bible faculty member who asked to stay anonymous, “Preaching on sin takes less preparation overall and as long as you stay on familiar topics like adultery, alcohol, and abortion, it’s easy to get the audience responding to you too. It also gives the preacher a chance to yell. Volume is always good for a few easy points.”

As always, scouts from major Baptist churches around the country have been  attending the semi-final “preach-offs” to recruit fresh talent. First round draft picks are often immediately placed as head pastor of a mid-sized congregation, while later picks are inevitably forced to start as volunteer assistant youth ministers and part-time Christian school gym teachers.

Thanks to Bill for this reminder of a piece that I wrote some time ago.

Assigning Reasons to Tragedy

disasterFundamentalists take great pleasure in divining the hidden reasons behind tragedies. Everything from car crashes to cancer are found to have hidden causes of great significance. And usually it means someone is being punished.

Perhaps the most famous examples come from the sermons preached in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina as preachers thundered their message that New Orleans suffered God’s wrath because of its great wickedness. AIDS is obviously God’s judgment on homosexuals and Vietnam was caused by American’s hesitation to intervene in the Holocaust. Whether every person ever killed by a hurricane, volcano, plague or pestilence was also equally wicked is unclear.

One has to wonder how many sermons were preached about the tornadoes in Murfreesboro, TN last week. Were the sins of Middle Tennessee Baptist Church responsible? Only fundamentalists know for sure — and they’re not saying.

Feeling Bad

frownFundamentalists take a fairly pessimistic view of most things including their own spiritual condition. They tend to look down on those Christians who go to church to sing upbeat music and generally be happy, preferring rather to spend their time in and equal mixture of guilt and grief. Repenting of something each time you go to church is seen as indispensable to the worship experience.

Fundy preachers would claim that other churches without “hard preaching” are just buildings full of people with itching ears who waste a lot of time hearing about how God loves them, when the truth is that He’s actually pretty unhappy with them most of the time. The concept that the itch that some people like to have scratched could just as easily be a craving for a dose of artificial guilt that builds until release during an invitation would be dismissed as just plain crazy talk.

For fundamentalists not only is the glass half empty but it’s also filthy and needs to get right with God.