STUPID PASTOR TRICKS | Camping With Jesus

Seeker-Driven Church Stagecraft and the Cost of “Relevance”

Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith here on YouTube. We're going to file this under the category of Stupid Pastor Tricks. If you've ever attended one of those seeker-driven big-box churches and wondered, how are they affording all of these props and expensive set dressings and engaging in all of this stuff?

Because, I mean, you just start putting cash values on the things that they put on their stage, and you wonder, how are they affording this? By the way, the seeker-driven movement, most expensive way to do church ever.

But if you've ever wondered that, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Be sure to ring the bell. And today we're going to be heading over to the Crossing Church, where Eric Dykstra is the chief vision casting leader.

And we're going to be listening to a portion of his message titled, Camping with Jesus. Something I can honestly say I've never done yet. Me and Jesus, we're not camping buddies, so it's just kind of weird.

But let's see if we can make heads or tails of this sermon, and see what you think. Here we go. It's hot in there, man.

Oh my gosh, they talked me into getting in that tent right before service. I'm like, why'd they talk me into that? It's pretty awesome in there, though. I got a pillow in there, laid back, enjoyed the worship.

It was great. Actually, Kelly and I haven't been paying our.

Mortgage, so I needed someplace to crash. All of this, by the way, that you're looking at, I mean, the super expensive wall of high-def televisions, the tent, and all the props, the stage setup, all of that is designed to make it so that church is relevant.

Yeah. You see, the Bible's not enough anymore, apparently. And so it's all about showing the non-believer, the person who has not crossed the line of faith yet, as they say in the secret-driven parlance, to show them that they care about them.

So all of this is showing how loving Christians can be by including all of the pop culture trappings that you could possibly imagine. And of course, every time I look at stage setups like this, I keep thinking, how much money is being wasted on this?

I'm pretty sure their stage budget for six months is more than the annual budget, by far, for the church that I serve. But I digress. Let's continue. We're going to go camping with Jesus. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Messing with you, but you know what I have? I have camped in some pretty crappy places. In fact, some of you have camped with me before, but if you've camped with me, you know that I am an expert at camping in the worst possible places.

I deserve a Boy Scout badge for worst camper ever, in terms of places to camp. Just to give you a couple examples.

Sermon Illustrations Without a Biblical Text

Isn't the job of a pastor to preach Christ? Why am I learning all about your camping expertise? I mean, a little bit of a note here. Sermon illustrations, and you can invoke things in your own life if it'll help, but sermon illustrations are supposed to help you understand a biblical text.

So you're working through a passage of the Bible as a pastor, and you get to one of those thorny sections that's a little tough to understand, at least on the surface. And so you can say, this is a lot like the time I did this in my life, and this happened, and that's how we're to understand this passage.

It works kind of in that way. You can bring personal anecdotal stories to bear as a sermon illustration if it'll help you explain the proper meaning of a text. Notice, we ain't in a biblical text here.

We're just camping with Jesus and learning a lot about Eric Dykstra, and the sermon illustrations are San's Bible. So they can't really be things to help us understand a biblical text now, can they?

Uh, back when I was in college, like freshman year of college, me and my buddy Alan went camping. We were like, oh, it's gonna be awesome. We went to the beach in Savannah, Georgia. So we were like camping on the beach in Savannah, and it was gonna be so awesome.

I'm camping right on the beach. You hear the surf. It's gonna be so cool. Except Alan had really smelly feet, and it was a tent about this size. I'm not kidding you. So there's two college guys in a tent about this size, and I was like, dude, man, your feet stink.

And so he like, he shoved at the bottom of the tent,.

And he broke. Literally couldn't smell worse than the sermon does. The zipper. He broke the zipper.

Out, and I'm like, sweet, put your feet out. So he put his feet out of the tent. His feet are like hanging out there. I'm like, oh, I can breathe, man. This is awesome, and this was great until about 3 a .m., because I realized I had set up the tent on a fire ant hill.

I'm not even kidding you. About 3 in the morning, all of a sudden, I'm like. Yeah,.

That's a great story. Yeah, the story of camping on the fire ant hill with stinky feet. How does this help me understand the Bible better? I'm not seeing the connection yet.

I wake up. I'm like, I'm on fire. Why am I on fire? And there's fire ants in my hair. They're in the sleeping bag. They're all over in our clothes. I mean, we're. I mean, you could.

Have used that as an illustration of maybe like the torture that people go through in hell, you know, and things like, you know, it's just okay. Freaking out. We're running out of the.

Tent. We're like, we ran into the surf. We're like washing ourselves off, and then we had to sleep in a minivan with the window shut so the mosquitoes wouldn't get us with his stupid, smelly feet. I am a lousy camper, man.

Like, I have camped all my life, and I'm terrible at picking locations. When Kelly and I first got married, she'd never gone camping. You know,.

Lousy camper. It's, you know, so should we compare his ability to preach a biblical sermon to his camping skills? Both of them seem to be lacking here. My whole life, and she'd never.

Gone camping. It's like she grew up in a family of girls, so she never really did that, and I was like, she's like a Hilton girl, so that's her version of camping. So, I was like, come on, we're gonna go camping.

She's like, okay, and like she's, we're newly married, so she's still like wanting to trust me. So, we borrowed a guy's tent and camped on the Georgia hillside, and it was awesome, except the tent leaked.

I'm talking like torrential rain, and the tent like leaked, and it.

Was cold out. You know, I have some great like camping stories, and the outcomes are awful. I mean, and that's what makes the story so great, but I don't share them from the pulpit. No, I mean, you want to hear these, come to my house on a Sunday afternoon, you know, hang out with my family after church, and you know, while we're kicking up our feet, enjoying a meal together, maybe a little barbecued steak or something, you know, or barbecued hamburgers, and some good old sweet corn, you know, and I'll regale you with some of our camping stories.

They're epic, you know, but what is the point here? What is the purpose of this portion of the sermon? The job of a pastor, by the way, is to, get this, preach the word. Yeah, you know, I didn't make that up, by the way.

That's not me just being ornery. If we open up our Bible and maybe go to 2 Timothy chapter 4, and you know, the Apostle Paul writing to young pastor Timothy, you know, says this, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who's to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, watch this, preach the word.

Yes, that's the job of a pastor. Reprove, rebuke, be ready in season, out of season, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves, teachers to suit their own passions, turn away from listening to truth, and wander off into myths.

So apparently now we're wandering off into not just merely myths, but we're wandering off into personal camping stories that are not helping us understand a biblical text, because Eric Dykstra is not actually doing his job.

Given to him by God, not me, is, you know, preach the.

Word. And the sleeping bags got all wet, and then like you got, you know how you get chilled when you get cold, and like in the middle of that, we had one little candle, so we lit the candle, we were trying to like keep ourselves warm with the, I mean it was bad, and then, and then in the morning, this isn't even the worst part, then the morning I get out, and I'm an Iowa boy, so I don't know much about Georgia clay, but Georgia clay is great as long as it's not rained on.

It's nice and solid, rock solid, but when it gets rained on, it turns to tar. I walked out, I looked at our truck, and all four wheels are, are three quarters buried, and it's like sitting on the, sitting on basically the whole frame, it's like sitting on the ground, and we couldn't get the thing out, like it was like, we had to get a bunch of people, and like we're pushing and shoving on it, because I'm such a great camper, man, I pick, I pick great spots.

Then my kids get like, my kids kind of come along, I'm like, all right kids, we're going camping, and so we went to this, this campground in Iowa, in northeast Iowa, there's an awesome campground called Strawberry.

Camping Stories Are Not a Sermon

Why should we care about this?

I mean, his camping stories are, clearly he had like one good one, and now we're like scraping the bottom of the barrel here. What purpose does this serve again in preaching the word?

And there's like 500 foot bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, and I mean it's, it's a great area, I mean it's beautiful, we took the kids spelunking in a cave, and we're all, it's so cool, except where I put the tent up, there was a bunch of dead trees, and things live in dead trees, and I didn't think about that, when I put the tent up, and in the middle of the night, I'm not kidding you, it was like Night of the Living Dead with raccoons, and there was like, raccoons like everywhere, like we had one of those like screen porch things to like keep all, they were underneath the screen porch, they were in all the foods, they ripped the cooler open, they were in stuff, and then like, because we kept trying to get the raccoons out, well the guy who's camping next to us had a jeep with a soft top on it, and they actually managed to get inside the soft top, and about three in the morning, they were standing on the steering wheel on the horn, and then they would, then they would like, we'd chase them out, and like they would move off onto the dash, because it freaked them out too, and then a few minutes later, they stand back on the horn again, and they would, I mean he was scared the snot out of us, all because I'm like, how many of you agree I deserve a badge?

I deserve a badge! I am a terrible chooser of, you pick a bad spot for camping, and it can really mess you up, and there's a spiritual principle.

Here, and this is, so notice something here, we're not getting our theology from the Bible, no, no, no, no, no, he's learned via his bad camp site picking abilities that there is a spiritual principle here.

Yeah, let me, let me take a look at a different portion of Scripture, and actually, same book, yeah, here it is, 2nd Timothy chapter 3, we'll just back up a little bit, again, Paul writing to young Pastor Timothy, pastor of a congregation in Ephesus, here's what he says to him, starting at verse 14, but as for you, young Pastor Timothy, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, here the Greek word is grammata, writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

Now watch this, all Scripture, and here the Greek word is graphe, again writing, all Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Yeah, I, you know, I hate to break it to Eric, but Christianity has literally thrived for 2 ,000 years without anybody being able to have the need for him to exegete the spiritual principles out of his camping experiences.

Yeah, it's true. Yep, that's right. In fact, Christianity will survive long, long into the future if Christ doesn't return, and nobody will actually rely on, moving forward, the spiritual principles drawn from Eric Dijkstra's camping experiences.

Yeah, so isn't that weird? I mean, he's literally trying to draw a spiritual principle from his inability to pick a good camping site. Let me back this up just a smidge, and let's listen to the spiritual principle that he thinks we need to be hearing, learning as Christians.

You know, this is going to help us with our discipleship. How many of you agree I deserve a badge?

I deserve a badge. I am a terrible chooser of location. You pick a bad spot for camping, and it can really mess you up, and there's a spiritual principle here, and this is kind of the conversation I want to have today.

Because I've been gone for two weeks, I've been really processing what do I want to say when I get back, and this message is more of just a.

A Father’s Day Message About Life’s Journey

Father's Day message and more of... Yeah, I mean, as a pastor, usually I'm like, all right, what's the assigned text for Sunday, and how do I properly convey what this thing means? You know, yeah, that's why I follow a lectionary as a pastor, so that my people are not tormented by my whims.

You know, I'm given a body of biblical text to work through every week, and that's what I focus on, you know, doing here. But what can Eric Dijkstra possibly think he needs to tell everybody? I need to tell him a spiritual principle.

No idea what that is. That spiritual principle I learned while camping.

My heart for you, my heart for the church, my heart for, honestly, what I believe we're called to be and to go towards. And so the concept I want to talk about really is about camping. In fact, why don't you write this down for me?

All of us are on a journey with God,.

And where we camp can hurt us or help us. Wow, that's all you got. Wow. Okay, so pretty much, there's no way to save this sermon. It's destined for the rubbish heat of history. Okay, so all of us are on a journey with God, and where we camp can either hurt us or help us.

Write that down, folks, maybe at the back of your Bible. Yeah, it's a spiritual principle he learned through his failures at being able to pick good camping sites. So yeah, there. Yeah, my Christianity will never be the same.

In fact, I can feel myself just getting closer to Jesus and my holiness. I'm almost up there with Mother Teresa now, after learning this spiritual principle from Eric Dijkstra's life. And there's the problem.

Job of a pastor is to preach the word. No doctrines or teachings outside of the Bible are needed. In fact, if you're believing a doctrine or teaching that isn't found in the Bible, yeah, it's not Christian.

It's not biblical. And so, yeah, including the important principle of being on a journey and where you camp can either help you or hurt you. If you found this helpful, please be sure to share it with other people.

You can share our videos. If you haven't already subscribed, subscribe. Ring the bell. And of course, if you'd like to support us financially, all the information on how to do that is in the description of this video.

So until next time, may God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and His vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins. Amen.