All the way to 11 …

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“The numbers all go to 11. Look, right across the board, 11, 11, 11 and …” Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist for the fictional rock band Spinal Tap, is explaining to the reporter that unlike other rock bands who only have amps that go to 10, theirs go all the way to 11. When the reporter stops and asks, “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder?” there is a long pause followed by “These go to 11”.

If you’ve never seen the movie, you really haven’t missed much (with appropriate apologies to the devotees). But that quote has become for me, over time, a kind of metaphor for life. Quite apart from the fact that it describes what happens in the back seat of our car on any long family trip (I am sure that all children go to 11), it seems to capture my experience of everyday existence in 21st-century Australia.

When you’ve only got 10 seconds or half a paragraph to make your point, you’ve got to SHOUT. Everywhere I go, people seem to be shouting. They shout by being a bit more risqué than everyone else. They shout by making more outrageous claims than everyone else. They shout by dismissing out of hand the arguments of everyone else. In a world where publicity is everything, if you don’t shout louder, you don’t get heard.

It’s all caused me to stop and reflect on whether we do any Christian shouting. I think that it is a particular temptation for preachers. For those who have to get up week by week and say something that makes it through the sleep-deprived stupor that is Sunday morning, you have to shout to be heard. You have to be outrageous. You need to make stark claims. You need to present the black and white, while leaving people no room to move.

It has been exacerbated, I think, by the trend towards globalization. When I get up to preach, I am not the most interesting preacher they have heard this week. Many people sitting there listening have heard Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Don Carson, Phillip Jensen and Willie Taylor this week already. So the pressure is on. I need to be engaging. I need to be socially aware. I need to be hard-hitting. I need to grab people and shake people and make them listen (or is this temptation only mine?).

So how does the challenge to go all the way to 11 affect me? Well I see it in a number of ways. Firstly, it comes as the temptation to present every idea as the most important idea in the Bible. Whether I am preaching on the sweet, sweet love of God displayed in the death of his one and only Son on the cross, or whether I am discussing the merits of a premillennial versus amillennial view of Revelation 20, I want to present it as the most important thing in the world.

Secondly, I experience the desire to present every idea that I have as the right one, and others as wrong. I am not saying here that there is no right and wrong that must be clearly defended. There is right and wrong, and I give great thanks for men and women around the world who cling to and proclaim uncomfortable truth. However, I know that the principle of going all the way to 11 means that if I acknowledge that I am not completely certain, or that there are merits to someone else’s argument, then I have lost the day. And so I too readily dismiss other ideas.

Thirdly, and most insidiously I think, I end up wanting to do the work of the Holy Spirit. I want to take the principles and write the applications on the hearts of hearers. Instead of teaching the truth and trusting that God will challenge people in the details of their lives, I want to control how people respond. And so I make my applications the only applications. I want to tell people exactly what they must do with the truth. (Now, here, like almost everywhere else, there is the opposite problem of never acknowledging that the Scriptures have concrete things to say about the nitty-gritty of life, but I’ll leave that for another day.) I see this particularly as I present my programmes, my training courses, my goals as the biblically sanctioned appropriate life for all the believers hearing my preaching!

I am sure this isn’t just me. So I’d love to hear from you. Where are some other places that we experience the temptation to go all the way to 11?

9 thoughts on “All the way to 11 …”

  1. Hey Paul,

    Welcome to Matthias Media! Great to have you on the team.

    I don’t mind a bit of shouting, actually. Totally random, but for some reason I was reminded of this quote from one of my favourite secular books of all time, <i>How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling</i> by Frank Bettger:

    A dismal failure at selling life insurance, I finally concluded that <i>I was never cut out to be a salesman</i>, and began answering want ads for a job as a shipping clerk. I realised, however, that no matter what work I tried to do, I had to overcome a strange fear-complex that possessed me, so I joined one of Dale Carnegie’s courses in public speaking. One night, Mr. Carnegie stopped me in the middle of a talk.

    “Mr. Bettger,” he said. “Just a moment…just a moment. Are you interested in what you are saying?”

    “Yes…of course I am.” I replied.

    “Well then,” said Mr. Carnegie, “why don’t you talk with a little enthusiasm? How do you expect your audience to be interested if you don’t put some life and animation into what you say?”

    Dale Carnegie then gave our class a stirring talk on the power of enthusiasm. He got so excited during the talk, he threw a chair up against the wall and broke off one of its legs.

    Before I went to bed that night, I sat for an hour thinking. My thoughts went back to my baseball days at Johnston and New Haven. For the first time, I realised that the very fault which had threatened to wreck my career in baseball was now threatening to wreck my career as a salesman.

    It’s 90% hokum. My problem is I don’t really know which 90%. But that said, I figure that overenthusiasm in a preacher or public speaker is one of the more forgivable sins of our generation.

  2. It has been exacerbated, I think, by the trend towards globalisation.  When I get up to preach I am not the most interesting preacher they have heard this week. Many people sitting there and listening have heard Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Don Carson, Phillip Jensen and Willie Taylor already this week. So the pressure is on. I need to be engaging. I need to be socially aware. I need to be hard hitting. I need to grab people and shake people and make them listen (or maybe this temptation is only mine?).

    Great post.  Interesting questions raised.  I hope there is a robust discussion here. 

    In my experience, I find that those who listen to good pod-casting-sermons are invariably onside and are among the greatest assets at church.  They are also often the most personally encouraging of my preaching.  I know I am not brilliant.  They know it too. But as they hear God’s word preached well on-line, I think they are pointed to Christ, and so they love me and encourage me more than others do. 

    That being said, I was really struck yesterday (by Mark Driscoll and Kent Hughes) that I should probably not direct the bulk of my preaching to sermon connoisseurs!  I’m not after a score from them.

    Instead I should aim at those who want to be missionaries in our suburb (they may be the same people as mentioned above) and those who have come or are coming to Christ and who never hear online sermons (but in my opinion should).

  4. I agree that access to online sermons creates a pressure on preachers to perform. But I don’t agree that providing detailed application is doing the work of the Holy Spirit. I think this is actually the strength of being a local pastor/teacher rather than an itinerant or podcast preacher. My experience is that there is a world of difference preaching to a large audience compared with local small-scale preaching. In the smaller local context we know our congregation, we care about them personally and we are in a position to lovingly help them see how the word of God is relevant in our (the congregation’s) situation.

    Is our pressure to “shout” symptomatic of the fact that we measure the value of preaching by how interesting/funny/challenging/well communicated it is and fail to recognise the relational aspect? I think the best thing the average local preacher can do is to see his preaching as an integral part of his wider ministry of loving and pastoring his flock. This should help relieve the pressure to perform and keep the message rooted in the daily life of the congregation.

    Maybe slightly off topic – being in an isolated situation I find online preaching a great blessing. But I think a dependence upon it also carries some serious dangers – individualism (we hear God’s word alone not in fellowship with others); separation of hearing from doing since there is no accountability; pride, because of all the famous people I listen to; and the rise of a new class of Christian idols. Perhaps we need to start educating our people about the benefits and also the limitations of online sermons.

  5. Perhaps we need to start educating our people about the benefits and also the limitations of online sermons.

    See Nathan Walter’s helpful article in the July Briefing: “iPod, iSermon, iRighteous?”

    There’s also a helpful comment from Katie Fisher on the Interchange page for that issue (buried in there amongst all the free trade coffee comments, so scroll down the page).

  6. Thank you for your thoughts.

    It isn’t just you! I know this temptation well, though I have never been a preacher. I am a mother and I’m sure there are comparisons which can be drawn, especially in the sense that both mother and preacher love the people they are called to serve and desire nothing more than that their ‘children’ walk in the truth.  (1Jn1:4) All their lives (my husband and) I have taught our kids the word of God. Even now that they are all young adults the temptation to control, apply and tell seems stronger than ever.

    <i>It’s all caused me to stop and reflect on whether we do any Christian shouting.</i>

    I think it is deeply rooted somewhere in the depths of us all. Maybe it is exaggerated in this age of noise and made even worse by the fact that we have somehow forgotten how to listen.

    Of late, God has impressed on me the need to seek solitude. Most often to pray, but often to not. Just to be. And I’ve noticed as I read the lives of many of the great men of God through the ages, that they pursued regular disciplined time away to think and pray. And we could hardly do less than our Saviour. (Lk 4:42) Chapter 5 of the book, ‘The Great Omission’ by Dallas Willard is very helpful about that, especially for you pastor people.

  7. The influence of the (evangelical) internet preacher would be welcome in my congregation. Someone feeding on the word of God mid week, Lord, let it happen.  But perhaps the challenge it offers to our preaching should serve to remind us Baxter-like to be preaching in every part of the lives of our congregation.  Getting out to see them, confronting them in the nitty gritty of their lives.  That’s perhaps where we should take it all the way to 11.

  8. Hi All,

    Thanks so much for the thoughts and interaction. I think that it would probably be helpful to clarify a few things. Most importantly, I agree totally Philip that detailed application is not the same thing as doing the work of the Holy Spirit. I am all for detailed application and think that the Bible often gives detailed applications.

    The point that I was trying (and seem to have totally failed) to make was that I often preach my application as the only possible application. Or more significantly, I heap so many applications on people at volume 11 that there is no room to stop and respond. For example one week I call on people to be active in the process of Government and keep abreast of issues and right to their local member and the next week I tell them that they must all make Church their absolute priority and then the next week that they must all ask at least 3 non-Christian friends along to the evangelistic thing that Thursday that we haven’t properly prepared for and I am feeling guilty about etc. etc. Then after a couple of months people are up to their eye-balls in “all the way to 11” kind of applications with no real way of obeying all the things that I have placed on them.  (Does that make sense).

    I would also like to agree with the comment about how we measure the value of our preaching. I think that there is little doubt that we live in a performance based society.

    I think that what I really wanted to say was can be summarised like this. My daughter is preparing for her first grade piano exam and we have spent he last two weeks working on dynamics. One of the great things that makes music, music is the loud and the soft and the contrast. But if everything is said at volume 11, when you really need volume 11 you have no where to go. We need to actually work at preaching with the dynamics of scripture, if I can use that phrase. So that when we really need to go to 11 (like when we talk about the Lordship of Jesus) we haven’t been playing at 11 for the last year!  (Although, I hope that the Lordship of Jesus has come up slightly more often than that).

    Hope that brings some clarity about what I was trying to say. Thanks again for the discussion.

  9. Hi Paul,
    This comment thread appears closed, but anyway… I’d like to comment on this paragraph.
    “When I get up to preach, I am not the most interesting preacher they have heard this week. Many people sitting there listening have heard Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Don Carson, Phillip Jensen and Willie Taylor this week already. So the pressure is on. I need to be engaging. I need to be socially aware. I need to be hard-hitting. I need to grab people and shake people and make them listen (or is this temptation only mine?)

    Firstly, I want to encourage all of us that feel this temptation, that no-one, not Piper, Carson, Driscoll, Jensen or Taylor, knows our congregation they way we do.  Only you know their lives, their anxieties, their joys and their temptations.  Only you know how they need to be rebuked, encouraged and trained.  Only you can love them.  You are their shepherd (under-shepherd, if you like) and they are your sheep.  You know them by name and they know your voice.  Only you can really look after them.

    [a clarification; not you as in ‘you the only person in the world who could ever be the pastor of these people’ but ‘you whom God has made their pastor at this time’]

    And secondly, similar to some of Andrew Barry’s comments; rejoice that people are listening to sermons like these during the week.  Rejoice and don’t be jealous.  Rejoice and don’t be intimidated.

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