Walking away is an acceptable act of protest in a political setting or at a public lecture. Church is supposed to exist in a setting of relationship and community and so I keep having nagging thoughts that I should talk to someone.

Where churches have adopted a staff/congregation model (where the church staff operates in the capacity of a service provider, and the congregation is put in a role of attending and consuming services) it becomes easy to walk away from a church.

Do I have any real communion with these people? Do I have any real relationship with this pastor? I think shortcomings in these areas can possibly make bad preaching unresolvable and therefore intolerable.

Then there’s the basic problem that we’re all in the process of sanctification and we haven’t mastered the art of giving and receiving criticism in love yet.

Huh… maybe some bad preachers secretly don’t like preaching and yet, trapped by their job description, slog sacrificially forward in abject misery. I’ll have to ask pastors I meet whether they’ve ever hated preaching.

If I ever preach, I think I should probably steel myself to the inevitability that I will preach bad, bad sermons and receive deserved criticism (or worse, just watch people walk out). Knowing me, I will probably look at a congregation every Sunday and feel a little gnawing doubt, “Who’s missing because of my sermon last week?” Father, forgive me.

The problem is that it’s just so darn efficient to act like this. Of course, I’m tempted to say that if I worry about efficiency when thinking about friendship, I’m missing the point. Still, it’s not entirely clear cut, because when efficiency is completely disregarded, people get worn/burnt out.

I think it’s probably safe to say that I have friendships only in spite of Facebook and not because of it. It’s very handy at reminding me to contact other people (“Oh hey, Jack Daniels – I should touch base with him…”) but in every case in-person interaction is the meat and potatoes of the relationship.

I have a hard time with confrontation so I tend to use the “quietly-out-the-back-door” approach. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that that’s the polite Canadian way–hence the dropout rate for Canadian mainline churches.

How many people know their pastor well enough that there is a pre-existing foundation of love from which rebuke can be given and received in right spirit? In most cases, minus any real relationship, the only bucket in which to throw feedback is the Hard Words From A Stranger Bucket: not a helpful bucket! Rebuke really needs to happen where there is pre-existing accountability and some kind of follow-up afterwards. In the case of preaching, it’s probably best if an elder does it.

Breaking long stretches of silence to deliver one-off criticisms is the way the Internet converses… and it’s an ugly, ugly model for a community to adopt. It’s anti-community.

In a group of 150, is it better for all to barrage the one pastor – whom they don’t know so well – or to speak with an elder whom they know better?

I would only ever walk out on a sermon that I felt was actively detrimental to the Gospel. If I thought it a case of, “He really missed his calling because he can’t preach his way out of a paper bag” I would sit tight. But it’s a terrible thing to be sitting in the pew and thinking, “I’m glad my non-Christian friend didn’t come to church today”.

@Magpie – you’re right, but now that I have Mounce on a playlist, I can play him through and repeat after him, saying the same thing he does. I don’t know if the intonation is crucial, because in the book he basically says, “If you use the accents to mark syllable stress, it’s okay.”

Maybe if I was Welsh and had learned to lilt I would be willing to dedicate myself to the nuances of the circumflex, but things being as they are, I’m content to butcher it for the sake of the Gospel (reading it quickly, that is).