David Mills is a lay Catholic and the editor of Touchstone Magazine. Leaving aside the substantial doctrinal differences between Reformed Evangelicals and Catholics, his philosophical treatise on ‘relevant preaching’ is insightful, which he begins thusly:

We have no reason to think that what feels relevant to the worldling is actually relevant to his life. We do have reason to believe that what he feels relevant will be that which diverts him from the painful contemplation of his own sins and helps him move along the trajectory he has plotted for himself—to improve, as he understands it, but not to change.

If the Christian revelation is both true and a truth to which fallen men are partly blinded, and a truth of great complexity and sophistication, a preacher may be most relevant when his language is least contemporary, and may be irrelevant to the point of fatuousness when it is most contemporary.

Read the entire essay: Preaching without Reaching: The Irrelevance of Relevant Preaching from the July/August 2007 issue of Touchstone Magazine.

HT: WorldMagBlog.com