What Women Wish Their Preacher Knew...Continued from page 3
Denise Geroge
Dillard compares today’s church to “children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares.... For the sleeping God may someday wake and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return..”7
Crash helmets? Life preservers? Flares? What would happen if Christians today did invoke the power of the Holy Spirit? How lightly we can take the worship of God even when Jesus took it so seriously! Women tell me that some churches today differ very little from the community’s country clubs.
Show Women How to Apply God’s Word to Their Lives
Women need for pastors to show them how to apply God’s Word to their everyday lives, especially those who face challenges and difficulties.
A woman from Mississippi writes: “I think it is important for pastors to help us apply the Bible more to our daily life, and show us how to claim the joy that Christ gives.”
Another responds: “I want the worship service to engage both my heart and my head so that I may love God with all my heart, strength, soul, and mind C during everyday life.”
A woman from Ohio says: “I want my pastor to know that I appreciate very much the teaching of God’s truths, and I’d like more practical applications given. He often tells me what I should do; now please tell me how to do it!”
In her book Preaching That Speaks to Women, Alice Mathews writes: “A fundamental aim of preaching is to empower listeners to incorporate what they have heard from Scripture into solutions to the challenges of everyday life.”8
I also discovered that many women want their pastor to enable them, through God’s Word, to reach out to other women around them. One Midwestern woman writes: “I would like to see pastors taking the lead in guiding the women of their congregations to not be satisfied with spiritual status quo, but to be keenly interested in how a relationship with Christ calls women to look beyond themselves into a world of need.”
Offer Compassion and Special Instruction to the Hurting Women
A Texas woman writes: “We all have emotional needs C our hearts are broken over something or someone. Please, Pastor, consider that in preparing your sermon. Be sure the Greek translation doesn’t upstage the broken hearts. Allow the Holy Spirit to confirm and bestow the compassion that’s needed.”
“Women on every pew in the church are hurting for one reason or another on any given Sunday,” writes another. “When preachers handle God’s Word effectively, the Holy Spirit will speak to each open heart with healing and conviction.”