How do we understand "preaching the word of God"?

A preacher posted the following on Facebook the other day:

While I am excited that our church is growing, I am heartbroken to hear what people are experiencing in other places. I had a lady tell me yesterday that she visited 4 churches before coming to our church and none of them where preaching the word of God. Please be kind with your comments, but is this what others are experiencing across the nation? When did the call to preach and teach begin to speak about everything but the word? Church this should sound an alarm in our hearts and we need to pray that God will bring our people back to his word.

Most of the responses were of the order of the following:

* (T)hat new word is often an old trick.

* Absolutely. Preach the word and don't sugar or water it down!!!! Keep preaching my brother in Christ.

* When was it this happened was your question. Judas started desiring the money, and the love of money is the root of all evil. Jesus is and was the Word. Either love all of Him, or the devil will come up with the silver for you to sell out Jesus.

* Everything that is not Christ is antichrist. Whatsoever is not of faith is of sin. Many like Jesus but few really love Him. Love your enemies. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. All of these and many many more are words Jesus taught. Today's lying messages are your best life now, and the carnal man loves that, but it is one of hundreds of doctrines of demons swallowed whole.

* Like chugging a camel, there is nothing there that survives Bible searching.

I think that you can see from these sample responses that there are people out there who have strong feelings about how the word of God is preached and what that means. I believe that everyone who responded is sincere. There are some subtle or emerging disagreements and contradictions expressed in the responses that I believe are healthy.

I wrote a lengthy response---more of a plea, actually---and it was quickly taken down.  I believe that my comments were taken down because I challenged the premise of the pastor's questions. I did not save my response, and I don't want to engage in polemics, but my points came down to the following:

* Let's tread gently here. It may be that some of us are hearing something that we're not prepared for now in a particular church, but we may need that message later in life. It may be that we're filtering what we're hearing only through our experiences and how we analyze those expriences rather than through what the Holy Spirit is calling us to and hoew the Holy Spirit wants us to analyze our conditions. It may be that we're either being mislead by the so-called "prosperity gospel" or that the relative privileges we enjoy here in the U.S. condition us and bend us more towards Ceasar than Christ and that we're confusing the two. It may be that we have a trauma- or abuse-driven mechanism in our heads that pushes us to binary views of the world and of how we encounter Scripture.

* The real issue here may also be our hard-heartedness. Preaching the word of God may take many forms, and not everyone will grasp or feel good about how that happens in environments that they're not comfortable with. For instance, I have attended a church where the majoirity of the congregation were houseless, on various medications, self-medicating, and struggling with surviving on the streets and the mental and emotional challenges that come with that. That is a very different exprience than where Christians are better off and more comfortable. The word of God is necessarily communicated and shared and experienced differently across places, times, and social groups.

* The church has experienced the word of God differently since our earliest days. It isn't news that some Christians object to how the word of God is preached and lived in other churches. If you find yourself in a church where you don't think the preaching and the living out is consistent with how you understand the word of God, take some gentle time to discern where it is that you may belong and search and pray to land in that place. But please be open to the possibility that you may want to return to the place that you're now uncomfortable in some day and that the Holy Spirit may work in that place and lead it and give that place grace and blessings that you are not receiving. 

* Matthew 10:14-15 does show that Jesus gave clear instructions to His disciples about how to respond to those who who reject the preaching of the word in the Spirit, but that was a commandment given to the disciples that came with other commandments regarding "the lost sheep of Israel," the radical message that "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," and curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and driving out demons without cost. We should set ourselves the tasks of healing the sick and raising the dead through social action, a necessary form of preaching the word of God. But so many Christians in the United States do something else. We judge ourselves and others when we're told not to judge. Please try to leave judging to God and be about the work of taking care of the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the naked, and the imprisoned. We are quite busy shaking the dust from our feet because of what we think happened at another church---and folks at that church are doing the same after encountering us. And, meanwhile, creation is suffering and crying out in agony.

* Who do I know who preaches the word of God? I know a fellow in Southern West Virginia who is not a preacher in a conventional sense but who is gentle and soulful and cautions folks not to judge, and you can feel the Spirit moving in him. His life is a good sermon. I know a preacher in Southeast Kentucky who is part of the Primitive Baptist Universalist community who preaches a Biblically-based universalism and Preterism that most Christians around there can't yet accept, but they can't explain why and he has gotten run off from some churches. You might come into my church on a Sunday and not hear what you think is the word of God being preached, but my pastor's sermons have moved the mountains of my conscience. There is often "something in the air" in my church that assures us and heals us. When our pastor absolves us of our sins as a pastor I can feel that healing taking place. These are among the continuing miracles to be found in the churtch to this day. Bishop William Barber II and Repairers of the Breach  preach the word of God and live the word of God. Why is their message sidelined or ignored by the church? You will need much more than proof texts to challenge these preachers if you don't believe that they're preaching the word of God.

* The idea that some pastors or churches are not preaching the word of God comes as part of a construct that seems to be saying that the word of God must come to us as harsh condemnation. From my universalist perspective, Scripture seems to say instead that the word of God is sweet ("sugarcoating"?) even when it calls us to repentence and correction. That construct also seems to be saying that it's a one-size-fits-all message, but God gave us diversity and gifts of the Spirit, and Scripture opens the door to many possibilities---and God is still speaking and creation still holds us despite our sins and errors. The preachers who I most often hear working within this conservative construct often pose as radicals. "I may get arrested or get in trouble for preaching this, but..." is often used. But, in fact, their message is not a dangerous one or out of step with the society we live in at all. The victimization being preached suits the Trump folks perfectly. It seems to me that "bring(ing) our people back to his word" (see above) at the present moment is very much about building new relationships with one another and doing this in ways that both weaken the conservative paradigm and builds God's kingdom from the kinds of people our Lord loved most deeply.  

* At this very moment the scandal that we are trapped in is not about a moderrn church not hearing the true word of God being preached, I think. It's about how deeply the legacies of relative privilege and power, racism, sexism, militarism, and trauma have conditioned us. It's about our excesses while the world is suffering, and it's about our lack of sobriety and healthy relationships. It's about the church being silent as Israel carries out genocidal policies and about how complicit we are in that. It's about living in a world that can still be saved if we make God real in our prayers and in our lives and in our daily work, and it's about how so many of us opt for forms of death (addiction, oppression, injustice, violence) when God offers life.