You are listening to David Platt Messages, a weekly podcast with sermons and messages from

pastor, author, and teacher David Platt.

God, make us a church that takes you at your word.

There's a pretty common trend today in churches, and especially some of the larger churches in our country

to minimize the Word of God and to minimize the preaching of the Word of God. And you can catch a lot

of sermons with a lot of crowds being drawn on TV that have nothing to do with the word and churches

that are not putting the word at the center of all that they do. I was in a session, a presentation

down in New Orleans when I was working on the Ph.D. down there, and it was a church growth

specialist that was giving his speech that particular day.

And he was talking about how to grow the church in the 21st century and the church for

upcoming generations.

And what he did was he went on to talk about one of his main theses was that the role of

preaching, the word, is diminishing in the church today, that it's not as

necessary, in fact, that it's being replaced by music. And he went on to talk about how, if we

want to reach people in our culture, we need to put music at the central place instead of preaching

the word, put music there because people respond better to music,

and that's the more effective way to communicate in our day and age.

Well, I was a lowly PhD student sitting in the back, and I didn't want to be bold or arrogant

and ask him the question that was coming to my mind.

Part of me wishes now looking back that I would have, but sitting there listening to this

guy talk about how the

most effective way today to communicate his music, and so that's going to replace preaching

...