'Your Sermon Hurt My Feelings'

“Your sermon hurt my feelings.” This is not the way you’d prefer a meeting to start. The power of feelings is profound for many in the church. It drives decisions, shapes sermon series, and serves as a barometer for church health. The more positive the feelings in a church (or “good vibes” as some churches are starting to call it), the more positively the church attendee will assess the overall direction of that church. 

This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout history, communal living has always involved an emotional aspect. There have always been matters of perception and relational permeability. To be human is to be in a relationship, and a significant aspect of relationships is the way we impact others. Consider this recent work claiming that the pulpit has become a place of bullying and abuse. As is usual in our age, however, the presumption is that power in and of itself and exercising that power is somehow unholy and abusive.

Our cultural age is one of sentimentality. As Carl Trueman has described, we live in an age of expressive individualism where feelings are understood to determine reality. The material world is subjected to the immaterial insofar as the material does not seem to match the perceived immaterial realities we feel to be true. Herbert Schlossberg described this as not merely sentiment but ressentiment. “Ressentiment begins with perceived injury that may have a basis in fact, but more often is occasioned by envy for the possessions or the qualities possessed by another person” (Schlossberg, IfD, 51). In this way, sentiment takes on a Girardian flavor of desire and derision. We feel injured because we do not have everything we want, so we seek the active harm and disenfranchisement of others based on our sense that an injustice has been committed. (insert bible passage about what causes quarrels among you). This is the approach of Ibram X. Kendi and others like him when they promote discrimination to correct past injustices.

Today, pragmatism is married to sentimentality, which means that doctrine and mission are often interpreted by what sounds good and what works. The worst offense would be that you might offend someone by speaking the truth in love. Churches will downplay clear biblical teaching from Romans 1 by saying that God whispers about certain sins while loudly denouncing sins like racism and greed, which are received by the culture with praise. For a church to be governed by the principle of sentimentality is to have a church governed by envy and covetousness. How so? The aggrieved party, whose feelings have been hurt, is often inspired by popular literature to seek vengeance and rectify their feelings by labeling the pastor with the worst slander imaginable in our world—abusive.

What are we to do when this ressentiment meets the ecclesiastical context of a pastoral meeting? It is easy to dismiss the social justice warrior who falls outside our orbit, but it becomes impossible to avoid this matter when the people in our church have been discipled by the world. 

We must avoid capitulation. We cannot resort to the world’s tactics and take vengeance because we, as pastors, have been slandered. We must not return fire with fire. Instead, we must bring the word of God to bear on the particular conscience filled with envy. More often than not, this will likely lead to more hurt feelings. After all, the conscience of the sentimentalist has already been compromised. The word of God being applied to a compromised conscience will often inflame the matter because of guilt. But without wielding the word of God like a surgeon on this matter, we will fail to address the matter head-on; we will utilize the world’s standards on these matters, further sealing the troubled soul for hell. Better to turn them over to Satan so they may find repentance than to entertain sentimentality. 

We must reject this in our preaching. Sentimentality in our preaching can often play on people’s emotions. Rather than be condemned, this practice has become the normal modus operandi in many pulpits because if you can move people emotionally, people generally feel favorable towards the pastor. Pastors intuitively know they should apply the gospel to the heart and affections. However, seeking to appeal to people’s emotions without applying the gospel to their affections becomes a sinister form of people pleasing. Consider the fragile situation most pastors found themselves in in 2020. They wanted to meet the moment with biblical truth yet found themselves resorting to worldly slogans. Some even went so far as to launch grenades at other churches, their own included, by saying that the worldly disorder we were experiencing was because the church had not led the way. With tears in their eyes, many pastors brought in false teachings in order to appease the inflamed passions of the congregants for perceived injustices in the world. Sentimental preaching will produce feminized churches unable to muster the masculine courage to confront false ideologies, favoring highly emotional appeals for “empathy” and “listening.”

We must not throw the baby out with the bath water. Preaching should address the emotional world of the Christian. In fact, to be biblically preaching, one must deal with the heart. We must apply the law of God in such a way that people not only see their inability to fulfill it but experience the futility at an existential and affective level. Only then can the gospel be preached to the heart and mind so that the hearer feels and knows their need for the Savior. The good news of Jesus must be shown to be not only right but also beautiful and satisfying. No doubt, this manner of preaching will not be satisfying to a largely sentimental audience. But it does not matter because we do not aim to please men but to please God.