Clowns Entertaining Goats
There is a line often laid at Charles Spurgeon’s feet—whether or not the words are precisely his, the warning rings true—that a day is coming when the pulpits will no longer hold shepherds feeding sheep, but clowns entertaining goats.
I have started looking hard at preacher culture in this country, and I am telling you with no joy: that day did not stay in the future.
Most of it has arrived.
I want to be careful here, because I am not a bitter man. I have the joy of the Lord and I am not interested in trading it for cynicism. But I look out across the landscape of American preaching and I am genuinely grieved, because I see men with real gifts—some of them with an anointing I can only marvel at—and they are using it to walk people pleasantly toward hell.
Here is how it happens.
A preacher decides that the worst thing he could ever do to a human being is make them uncomfortable.
So he hands out cotton candy.
Jesus loves you.
God has a wonderful plan for your life.
You are enough.
And he carefully, deliberately, never mentions sin, because that would hurt feelings. Hurting feelings has become the one unforgivable sin of our age.
We have reached the point where telling a person the truth is treated as a kind of violence. We even have names for it now. We call it a hate crime.
But listen to what that preacher is actually doing while he protects everyone’s comfort.
He is leading hundreds of people, smiling, to a destination he never warns them about.
And we have decided he is the loving one, while the man who names the danger is the cruel one.
We have it exactly backwards.
The man who will not speak of hell to people walking toward it does not love them.
He loves their approval.
There is a great difference, and one day it will be made very plain.
The thing the cotton-candy preacher is anesthetizing away is conviction.
And conviction is not the enemy.
Conviction is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is good.
When the Spirit comes, Jesus said, He convicts the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.
That is not a malfunction of the gospel.
It is the gospel doing precisely what it was sent to do.
No one has ever been saved without it.
Not one soul has come to Christ who was not first made to feel the weight of what was wrong.
I know this from the inside.
I was seven years old, sitting in the aftermath of a car accident that killed my cousin—my best friend—thrown from the seat right beside mine.
And for two weeks I could not shake a question:
What if it had been me?
That was not trauma alone.
That was a knock.
Sam.
Sam.
Do you not see?
You have sinned, Sam.
You have violated the character of God.
For two weeks the Spirit kept knocking, until my mother turned to me and asked what would have happened if I had been in that seat.
And I had to say the truth:
I would have died and gone to hell.
Then she asked if I wanted to know Jesus.
I did.
I was made deeply uncomfortable.
And it saved my life.
So when the culture tells me that conviction is harmful, that discomfort is harm, that a hurt feeling is a wound—I tell them the opposite, and I tell them gladly.
Spiritual birth is like every other birth.
There is pain in it.
There is a process you cannot skip.
And the modern impulse is to reach into the gospel and pull out all the pain, all the discomfort, all the sharp edges.
The result is not a gentler gospel.
The result is that people stop sharing the gospel at all, because what is left is too thin to bother passing on.
I am not arguing for cruelty.
By all means, become skilled.
Learn the Romans Road so you have a path to walk a person down.
Be gentle.
Be patient.
Be kind.
But understand going in that they may get upset with you, and that their getting upset is not proof you failed.
It may be proof the Spirit is at work.
Discomfort is not the same thing as harm.
As for me, I would rather preach the truth and clear a room than juggle and keep it full.
I can tell a joke.
I can hold a crowd if that is what I wanted.
But if I ever trade the word of God for the applause of goats, I pray God strikes me dead before I finish the sentence—and I do not say that flippantly.
If I am not preaching the word of God, there is no reason for me to be standing up there at all.
The clown will always draw a bigger crowd than the shepherd.
The shepherd talks about wolves.
The clown tells jokes.
The shepherd warns about judgment.
The clown reassures everyone that everything is fine.
The shepherd sometimes sends people home uncomfortable.
The clown sends everyone home smiling.
And in an age that worships comfort, the clown will often look more successful.
But success is not measured by how many people laugh at the performance.
It is measured by whether the sheep make it home alive.
The tragedy is not that goats enjoy the clown.
The tragedy is that sheep are starving while he performs.
May it be God’s word, or nothing.
