The Case Against Gotcha Sermon Clips

Welcome to the Conversations in a Statement of Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. It's a cold day here in upstate New York, and someone just sent me an article from the Gospel Coalition. And I thought, let's go over this article.

The title looks interesting. I haven't read it yet, so we're going to discover it together. But I had a few thoughts I wanted to share with you about the Gospel Coalition before we get into it, because I was thinking about this.

My buddies, who are more meat and potatoes, get-er-done, mission-accomplished, working-class, they don't like the Gospel Coalition all that much. In fact, you could make a graph, and the more someone's like that, the masculine persona, the less they're going to like the Gospel Coalition.

And I started thinking, why? Why is that the case? And I have three reasons why. Number one, they push the political envelope left. Now, they could say, yeah, but progressives in mainline denominations and in the secular circles are more leftward than we are.

True.

But you shouldn't be trying to compare yourselves to people who think guys are girls and girls are guys, I would think. If you're using the standard of evangelicalism and where it was even five or ten or fifteen years ago, they're moving the envelope left.

They're pushing that needle. That's number one. Number two, the Gospel Coalition tends to connect, incorporate, show a relationship between social justice activism and the Gospel. And it happens all the time, and I think it goes, it passes under a lot of our, we kind of read an article and it just passes under our nose or over our head, whatever.

We don't notice it. But one of the things we've done on this podcast and in some of my books is I've pointed out where there's language to the effect of, hey, this social justice activism thing is part of the gospel, or you only have a half gospel if you're not engaging in this.

And it gets to the point where you read an article, let's say, just hypothetically, it could be about a lot of different topics. But let's say it's about the BLM stuff, and they might not ever come out and say, go march with BLM.

But by the time you're done, you're emotionally moved to the point that you think you should go march with BLM. So the solutions aren't spelled out, but it'll be a lot of emotional talk about what, how bad it is, how bad systemic racism is, and the solutions just kind of present themselves without them having to spell them out because they're identifying the problems the way secular leftists would identify the problems.

And it's usually like emotional hooks that they use to get you to do it, which brings me to my third point, and probably the most interesting one, because the other two you're probably familiar with. And that is that guys, I grew up with two brothers, you know, I was on a soccer team and a band and Boy Scouts and Bible studies with men and guys, they tend to be direct.

They tend to spell it out. They're willing to defend their position physically, if necessary, and then when you're done fighting, you go get a coffee together. Guys are meat and potatoes. And let's spell it out clearly direct compared to in general, and in general, females.

And I learned this more when I got married and I would spend time with my wife or her friends would come over or something. I realized something. Men are different than women.

Yeah, right. Eureka.

What, what a, what an amazing thought. Women tend to be less direct. They tend to be, and again, in general, not saying every woman on every topic, but in general, it's gonna be less direct, more emotional.

They have to kind of talk things out to figure out kind of what they're thinking. Generally, they approach it from a different angle. They start with the feelings generally to get to what's going on, whereas guys tend to start with what they think and then kind of get to, you know, it makes them feel a certain way.

And, and so, yeah, men and women are different. We praise God for that. Women, you know, everything's connected. Guys more compartmentalized. These are just general observations people have had over time.

And I would say in general, those things are true. Now, the thing about Gospel Coalition articles is they tend to be written, even if they're written by male authors, they tend to be written the way that my wife, my wife and her friends talk together.

Like I feel like I'm listening to a conversation sometimes between my wife and one of her friends. And again, that's not bad. My wife's conversations with her friends are great, I'm sure. Like they're, you know, edifying and like, you know, I'm not saying that's bad in and.

Of itself.

The other stuff I just mentioned is bad about Gospel Coalition. I'm not saying that particular thing is bad, but it's, it's the way it's being used though, I think is bad because it's an emotional kind of way of writing.

It's a word salad that's vague and it's very hard to nail it to a wall. And what it does is people who imbibe that a long, over a long period of time, they tend, it changed, it orients them, it reorients them in a different way.

They start considering different questions when they're approaching something. How is this going to make someone feel? I need to read charitably instead of I need to read accurately. Is this the truth?

Now both of those questions or those concerns aren't necessarily bad concerns, but one's the caboose and one's the engine, right? Truth is the primary thing.

What's the truth?

What we need to read accurately and then how is it going to make someone feel? How will it make me look and vision and optics and fashion? That stuff's secondary, okay? And the whole thing, the operation in my mind, like big picture of what the Gospel Coalition is trying to do is they are trying to manufacture an artificial synthetic Christian culture that's gospel centered, right?

Everything's oriented around the gospel and it's going to compete with secular culture in their minds, but just the organic natural culture that Gospel Coalition is embedded.

In.

They act like they're kind of like observing from this neutral standpoint of gospel centeredness, but actually no, they're embedded in a culture just like we all are. And so their goal, it seems like to me, is to attract people from the secular realm by saying, hey, look how better it is to be gospel centered and have a gospel centered culture,.

Right?

So I think there's so many problems with that, but the way that they're doing it a lot of the time is through these articles that just, they move you emotionally, but they're vague and they're designed to kind of influence you toward considering the way things feel and how things look and, right, more squishy, more or less definition, important to some degree, but not primary.

And you know, these are the things that like my wife and her friends would, they would talk about and guys just don't tend to do this as much. So that's why I think a lot of guys sense and they'll say, what they'll say is like the Gospel Coalition is effeminate.

I think that's what they're trying to, that's what they're noticing. So anyway, I wanted to say that just because I realized it, I noticed it. Let's talk about this article now and see if any of this comes out.

The Problem of Gotcha Sermon Clips

By Trevin Wax, gotcha sermon clips are bad for the church. Now notice already in the title, it's already coming out. So the question is like, okay, is there a phenomenon going on right now with gotcha sermon clips, people posting clips from pastors?

Yes, actually there is. Woke preacher clips, myself, I'm probably the first, one of the first ones in the social justice controversy to start making montages of what's happening at various seminaries.

That was me.

Yes.

A lot of those montages got into things like the Founders Documentary that those were, they found those from montages I made. Enemies within the church, I think use some of those. They were passed around a lot, but woke preacher clips has done far more than me at this point.

I mean, it's whoever's running that, that account is just doing a good job at exposing here's where leftists are and what they're saying. Things we normally wouldn't be listening to, but they're showing us, hey, wow, that's, that's a guy teaching at this seminary, you know, that kind of stuff.

Who else?

I don't know. Like some of these quote unquote discernment blogs maybe are putting stuff together. Like the recent one Reformation Charlotte did on Ed Litton and J .D. Greer, right? That's where this is going on.

People from the political left aren't putting together gotcha sermon clips, not widely at.

Least.

I'm sure they do it, but not widely. You could think of maybe, okay, like there was a clip, a gotcha sermon clip use of Paige Patterson there was against him, right? There's little, but it's, it's so minor compared to what those on the political right and theological right are doing to expose the left.

So that's the situation. We already know this. And so he's saying gotcha sermon clips are bad for the church. Now the question isn't, you know, really, are they true? Are they, it's just, it's bad, bad for what?

For the image. I'm sure that's what we're going to end up running into. It's an image thing, right? By Trevon White. And I don't know what this picture has to do with, you know, pastor, I guess, or something.

Maybe it's a bar. Who knows? Stand up comedy night in casual clothes, looking at a crowd. I have no clue why this was the stock footage used for this, but, but it's, you know, maybe that's, that's what the church should look like.

I have no clue.

All right.

All right.

15 years ago, he says an outlandish sermon clip made the rounds on YouTube. It was a shock jock, independent pastor ranting in front of a tiny congregation about modern Bible translations. It was comical, unnerving and cringe inducing, and I shared it on my blog.

Now by the way, I have to say this, I know kind of what he's talking about. There is, I think there's like one account on Twitter of like KJV only preacher clips, fundamentalist preacher clips, something like that.

So yeah, I mean, it's out there, but nothing compared to what's happening right now with the exposure of the left. So he's opening it up with possibly, okay, I'm saying possibly here, the kinds of people he's not talking about as much, you know, to, to, to try to take out perhaps I'm saying perhaps, I, you know, he hasn't, I haven't read this yet, but the political angle that there could be in this, because someone could say, oh, you're just trying to defend liberal preachers or something.

And he, so he's starting off with an example that's not that. I was new to blogging, he says, and around that time I asked an older, wiser pastor to speak into my writing. He asked a pointed question, who is edified by that sermon video?

And then he encouraged me to resist the urge to share something just because it was outrageous, entertaining, or a cautionary tale of how not to preach.

Okay.

So, you know, I don't know the specifics of this, I mean, it could be that that was good advice. I don't know. Maybe, you know, you're just sharing something because, I mean, but look, would it be wrong if he shared it just because, hey, this is, you know, interesting.

This is, there's people out here who believe this, you know, maybe, you know, be warned or, you know, there's a, I don't know, there's entertainment value in this to some extent with, you know, can you believe this happened in church?

That's amazing that that happened. It could be a time waster. And it's not like a bad question that's being asked there, but it's not a sin, right? It's not a sin to share a clip like that. It's not necessarily wrong, and it's not necessarily a bad question to ask.

So that was, that's his personal thing. That's his conviction. Good, you know, good for him. So then he says this, sermons and sermon clips. I thought about that conversation recently, okay, we know where this is going, as it predated Twitter and Instagram and the prevalence of sermon clips that now circulate far and wide.

In the past decade or so, more and more churches have begun posting video and audio of previous sermons. For the past 500 years, sermons were spread mainly in the form of pamphlets and books. Century ago, radio stations began broadcasting sermons.

For decades, prominent pastors had tape ministries. Okay, so there's availability. Talks about Martin Lloyd Jones, he didn't like that. Okay, today not only are sermon podcasts and videos made available online, but sermon clips circulate on various social media platforms.

Weaponize sermon clips, so here we go. But there is a flip side to sharing of gospel moments. Many sermon clips go viral because of how bad they are. We gawk at examples of sloppy or heretical preaching.

Now look, if you're exposing someone, that's not bad. That's actually, exposing the deeds of darkness could be something that's very good and you're supposed to be doing and is a helpful thing. He says social media accounts now feature the most outlandish moments from preachers or teachers who belong to another camp or tribe.

I mean, yeah, woke preacher clips. Some of these point the spotlight on crazy fundamentalists, while others root out the.

Most woke.

In either case, we're introduced to preachers who seem determined to live up to the worst characters. At times, we see clips from charismatic megachurch pastors delivering inspirational drivel rather than sound biblical preaching.

The intended reaction, it appears, is to shame, name and shame the bad preacher and to shake one's head in pity or disgust. No, it's not. I'm just going to say, write this like line in the sand here. No, it's not.

To smear all of that, to generalize all of that as it's just trying to shame a pastor. No, it's trying to warn people that this pastor is a wolf, doesn't even deserve the title pastor much of the time.

I'm thinking of like even like the Justin Peters clips and stuff that are put out there of here's all these prosperity wolves. No, it's not just he's a good preacher and we're making them look bad and that's the main concern.

No.

How about first, are they true? Did this pastor actually say it? I'll tell you what, I learned a lesson with this at Southeastern. I remember we put together, me and like a bunch of other people put together this whole like file on Southeastern teaching among some of the professors and how woke they had gotten.

And we put it out there and it got some people riled up, but like hardly made a dent. You know what made a bigger dent? When we put montages together. In fact, Southeastern went after me for copyright violation and stuff.

I mean, they were desperate to get rid of that. It really, and you can still see, I mean, this is now you can't contain it. It's everywhere. You go on Gab and on Rumble and on Facebook and places that don't even have the mechanism YouTube has to try to censor someone.

I mean, it's there. I think the last one from Southeastern was Scott Crawford put a whole thing together. I think they're, in his video, there's a whole like big montage, like 17 minutes long or something.

There's a, oh goodness, I'm trying to think of it. There's a YouTube account that's posting a lot of this stuff too. Some of the stuff that I've made ends up on it. I can't remember the name of it, but anyway, I mean, you just Google that stuff, search it and you'll find it.

So anyway, there's a purpose behind that. It's to prove to people, this is what's going on. This is what you're funding. This is bad preaching. Don't listen to this person. Be warned sheep. That's the primary purpose.

Even worse in many cases, sermon excerpts become ammunition for ongoing battles. Why is that worse? Why is that bad? Why is that bad to have ammunition? If Jesus, is Jesus quoting what the Pharisees teach?

Like, oh man, look how bad he's making them look. Oh goodness.

How bad is that?

The academic discipline itself would fail. It would stop. It would grind to a halt if you were not allowed to actually quote people. The question is not, can you quote people? The question is, are you quoting them fairly?

And Treven Wax, I'm going to just, he's vaguely doing this, but we kind of know who he's talking about. He's doing the same thing, kind of. If you think about it, he's imposing motives onto the people that make these montages or these sermon clips.

And he is snapshotting them and saying like, this is why they're doing it. And then just condemning it. What he's not doing is he's not bothering to try to figure out like why they're actually doing it.

I've given tons of commentary on this.

Why?

In fact, in my videos, even on Southeastern, I'm like saying, I love the school. I don't want it to go this direction. I want it to come back from the brink. This is exposure. People don't know this is what's going on.

Here it is. So it's for accountability. Anyway, each clip becomes another piece of evidence that the evangelical church is quickly becoming woke or that evangelicals are becoming white nationalists. I don't, I mean, what, okay, what's he talking about there?

Maybe who's that? Maybe that pastor down in Texas. Even well-known and respected pastors with many years of ministry experience, men like John MacArthur and David Platt are subject to the forces of this online dissemination.

MacArthur becomes an example of being anti-religious liberty and David Platt, an example of wokeism. Well, the thing with MacArthur was they literally, it was an edited clip. Like literally they left out context that would have completely changed what MacArthur was trying to say.

If you're not doing that, if there is no context you're leaving out that overturns the meaning and you're rightly representing what someone says, like David Platt, I mean, those two situations are not analogous.

Then there's nothing wrong with it. Question is, is it true? Is it true? Not, is it used for a political battle? How it's used apparently is more important than, is it true? Who it benefits is more important than, is it true?

How it makes someone look is more important than, is it true? MacArthur becomes an example of being, okay, we already read that. All because what they've said, perhaps sloppily, have been weaponized against them to cast doubt on the rest of their Bible teaching.

The Truth, Context, and the Weaker Pulpit

Weaker pulpit, I don't believe the widespread sharing of bad moments in preaching will make the pulpit stronger. The weaponization of preaching clips as ammunition in intramural warfare isn't a healthy and life-giving development.

Anyone who seeks to rightly handle the word knows the feeling, feeling the inadequacy in preaching. I look back to sermons of mine from just a few years ago and find points I would make differently, analogies I would cut, and things about the Trinity that, while not heretical, are sloppier than they should have been.

The more I've grown in my skills as a preacher and thinker and theologian and sharper I hope my messages have become. Now let me say this about this, because there's a remedy that he's not talking about here.

Yes, we develop over time. I mean this, a hundred years ago, it would have been, hey, I don't agree with what I wrote. I mean, Augustine had all kinds of things he, at the end of his life, I don't agree with this, that, and the other thing.

That's just, I think Spurgeon had the same thing. I mean, this is normal. You learn, you grow. You make retractions. That's what you do. If there's something so blatant that you, and it's affected a lot of people, you make a retraction.

Hopefully people have the grace, so if someone is misrepresenting someone, they made a retraction or they don't believe that anymore and they don't mention that, they just show you them at their worst from a time when they did believe something in error, then shame on them.

Shame on them. The goal and the motive should be the truth. If the goal is the truth, then you don't have this problem. But that's, Trevon Wax isn't bringing in the truth. He's bringing in, it's all optic style fashion.

I shudder for the 20-something, okay, anyway, let's, how paralyzing for the young preacher with a lifetime of learning ahead. Yeah, it could be. You know, the pulpit's very important. You really want to make sure what you're saying when you're preaching is accurate.

The church has endured bad and sloppy preaching through the centuries. You don't have to look hard to find moments from Augustine, Chrysostom, Luther, okay. Let's skip here. How does this build the church when we do this?

Does it edify? I can hear the words, howls of protest from some of my pastor friends who share bad or bizarre clips. We're protecting the pulpit. We're instructing our people so they don't fall for this kind of bad preaching.

We care about doctrine when we see this preaching and it's good to point out. And he says, I get that. And I want to believe the best about people who share and comment on outlandish sermon.

Clips.

This is so gospel coalition, right? So it's blasting and reducing everything to this motive to shame. And then I want to believe the best about people, right? I want to believe like, okay, all right, you really are not convincing us too much there.

I do care about doctrine. I care about avoiding analogies that confuse more than clarify. I'm not opposed to using social media to talk about good versus bad. Yes, we can and sometimes should have some substantive disagreements with sermons.

We shouldn't cover up Luther's anti-Semitic writings, but recoil in horror at those sentiments and how they were used sometimes verbatim by Hitler hundreds of years later. By the way, I did a whole, my research paper, you can actually look on YouTube.

I did a presentation on it, but my research paper from my Holocaust class was on Martin.

Luther.

And I'm trying to think, I don't know if Hitler actually ever quoted Luther. I think he referred to Luther as kind of a German bulk hero. I mean, that was unavoidable. It's like, you're living in the United States talking about Abraham Lincoln or something.

But yeah, I mean, there were German bulk movements that were totally anti-Semitic and use Luther sermon clip or writings and stuff.

That's totally true.

But I point out that they actually were, they were making a number of erroneous assumptions in using them. Luther didn't mean the same thing. His anti, really more of an anti-Judaism, anti the Jewish religion was not the same as anti-Semitism.

And so there's a lot of conflation that goes on anyway. It's good to engage with preachers and sermons, illuminating where they've gone wrong in the past and where people may be off base in the present.

But surely there's a difference between careful, instructive engagement and a social media driven gotcha clip that stirs the mob mentality. Does the sharing, wait, what? There's a difference between careful, instructive engagement.

Again, what's the difference? This is the kind of response you get. I've gotten it. Where you point something out. This is a problem. You go through the right channels and then, you know, they're not listening.

You got pointed out. We need to be aware of this. And then the response you get is, well, it's not what you said.

It's the way you said it. That's so pervasive today.

It characterized, characterizes the evangelical elite guild.

It's the way you said it.

You damage the relationships and the connections and the, you know, hierarchy that exists here. That's artificial outside the church. You damaged it. You know, did you think about, you know, your careless words and it's, you never talk about whether it's true or not.

Russell Fuller went in, you know, hit this brick wall when he came out. He had documented evidence and I remember, I remember very well conservatives during that time. And man, I, it's still, it's just, it, it's still, um, it's just a shame in my mind.

People on the other side of the critical race theory debate, you know, lined up, ready to share Russell Fuller's videos, ready to support Russell Fuller. And as it got going one by one, Hey John, I'm not going to be sharing that actually.

Hey John, actually, you know, could you, could you make sure that I'm not included in these.

Videos?

Could you, and what did it come down to ultimately? Um, yeah, I don't know. I doubt what he said now or, uh, you know, I I'm getting all these phone calls from people and a lot of it had to do with optics, the way it would look, the fashion of it.

Um, it, you know, Fuller had document, it was documented. I watched that thing like a hawk, everything everyone was saying about that. We talked about it at the time and it was air tight, the case he made.

And then you see the way it was treated and you know, that's the world we live in. It's not a world that's concerned with truth, objective truth, as much it is as the world is concerned with relationships and how it could affect them.

And that's a big problem. So I'm not that relationships aren't important. I'm just saying caboose, right? Truth engine. So this is the same kind of distinction Trevon wax is making. Does that sharing a bad sermon clips really help our people in the way we think it does?

Yes, it does.

Yes.

Mostly it does. Are there people that get upset. Maybe too much about it?

Yeah.

But that's a different issue. It's not the clip that's causing that. That's something inside them. Is it possible that this phenomenon trains people to be ever on the lookout for sloppy moments in preaching, to be good critics, more than good listeners, to approach the pulpit with an eye of a cynic rather than the mind of a Berean.

That all has to do with motivation. If you just have an ax to grind, um, then yeah, I don't think the clips are the problem.

Though.

That would be, that's more, um, that's a human heart issue. Uh, it's, it's how you're approaching the clips. Do gotcha sermon clips build up the church and honor the gravity of what happens in the moment of preaching or do they risk reducing a pastor to a bad moment, reinforcing a stereotype that may be false when considered in isolation to the rest of his ministry.

I just don't see how the ministry of the church is strengthened by showcasing bad examples of preaching on social media. For that reason, I don't want to be part of it. Whenever these clips come across my feed, I'm committed, committing instead to pray that God will give me grace and discernment to pastors as they seek to divide.

Right? So you're gonna put your head in the sand. Uh, so what if, what if it's a in print, you know, here's a transcript, you know, is that acceptable then? I mean, how can you ever critique anyone? How can you ever have exercise discernment?

How can you point out error? How can, he's not making the necessary qualifications. Really what should be happening here is if the concern is people are going to get angry and they're going to unfairly treat others as you focus on that heart issue, the way that someone could be approaching these clips, not the clips themselves as if they're the problem.

Uh, you know, evil comes from inside that that's where it comes from. It's the heart of man. So again, a swing and a miss from the gospel coalition and from Treven Wax. And I, for one, I'm grateful that guys like woke preacher clips are out there exposing this stuff because not everyone's listening.

We're working. We don't have time. And to know that, wait, the seminary that I'm funding, that I'm sending my kids to, the denomination I'm part of, that's where you supporting it, you know, supporting this.

Too.

I need to make a phone call. I need to write a letter. I need to tell my pastor. I need to make sure I find a different school for my kid. These are all the very helpful things. And if they're done out of love for the people that, um, you know, are benefiting from this in some way, then praise God.

You know, again, this is like blaming some, something external for someone's bad motives. So, uh, that's, that's the article. That's my critique of it. Uh, you, you wouldn't ever be able to critique anything if this were the case.

Um, you, you couldn't ever quote anyone. You can never generalize anyone. You could, you couldn't just, uh, you couldn't summarize what someone means, which is, I mean, Treven Wax does this in this article.

He's summarizing the motives of people, right? Uh, you know, how do you know that they're like that all the time? You're judging just based on them posting this one sermon clip, you know, how their motive and who they are and reducing them down to, I mean, I could like get all high and mighty and use the same language he uses about himself.

So it kind of undercuts itself, but, uh, that, that's, that's what we got for today. And, um, and so I don't know, I don't know where to go from here. That's the end.

That's it.

No more. A few announcements at the end here. Uh, just want to mention, I haven't said it a lot, uh, because I forget, but discerningchristians .com. Don't forget about that website, check it out, become a member, put down, you know, in, uh, sign up, add an organization, add a church, uh, that's solid, that's preaching the gospel that conforms to the statement of faith.

That's on the website where we are building a network and it is really helping some people.

There.

Um, also just want to mention that, uh, if you have read Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, please, uh, leave a rating on Amazon, leave a rating on Goodreads. It does help. And, uh, and, and of course you can get those at worldviewconversation .com or amazon .com or with Social Justice Goes to Church.

I think you can get that book wherever books are sold just about.

So God bless.

Hope this was helpful for you in some way and more coming by now.