Often times I hear American pastors in the pulpit demanding that congregants should follow their leaders. As if blindly. Obviously, they are not saying that this includes heretic leaders or blindly follow incompetent leaders. They are saying this under the umbrella of trusting and obeying Christ. However, the lack of expounding the other side of the truth is always lacking among these preachers. As if they inherited a sort of intellectual shallowness from the fundamentalists in the 20s, the Bible college camps.
The lack of "go out and experience more", consideration of various problems of diverse Christians, from these preachers are deafening. I imagine if I were to ask them: What about following leaders in those charismatic churches, liberal churches, etc. I can bet that their responses would be: Those are not churches because they aren't Bible believing churches.
On the contrary, I see Joel Osteen's church as a church, I see many problem churches as churches. If there's a church that's not a church, it would be that of the Mormon's, Jehovah Witnesses', etc. These strident fundamentalists just somehow lack something beyond their comfortable never growing American inheritance to perceive a bigger picture. I see a female pastor's church as a church while many of these fundamentalists would just say: everyone is disobeying God for calling this a church.
It's as if they are moving towards legalism: mandatory family Bible study, no work on Sundays, etc. They preach all these on the pulpit but when they are facing these issues from the congregants' mouth, they would treat it as if they never preached what they preached, as if there' some exceptional clause in their preaching against these things, like doctors have to work on Sundays since Jesus heals on Sabbath; but if there are exceptional clauses, why aren't they mentioned during the sermon? Either way, somehing is wrong.
This is of course, due to lack of evangelism, outdoor preaching. Something they have educated themselves against today.
A good preaching to me is always one:
After hearing, the congregants are moved to love, praise and study God even more.
Any other kinds of preaching, are in error with God. No matter how much they claim they are of God. I can write notes against it, during these sermons, thereby still satisfying it being beneficial to me through God's blessing, but I will not refrain myself from criticising.