Gone are the days when a barber or a butcher would discourse with you about the begetting of the Son while cutting your hair or cutting your pork loin chops. Believe it or not there was a time in the church's history that ordinary church folk discussed theological matters everyday. People were really engaged over the niceties of doctrine because they believed that truth mattered most. Today we are blessed with so many amenities in studying the Bible, yet we remain concordance cripples, dependent on our Study Bible notes, and generally unable to identify the barest of scripture passages in the event of a discussion about something other than the latest sports victory, what is on sale at the market, or what movie we saw last weekend.

Those days, when your average full-time working laymen knew the scriptures and could debate the theology he heard in the weekly sermon, need to be restored. How happy was I as our friends visited this evening and our guest could cite the passage and know the content of verses scattered in both testaments and relate them in theological discussions he had had earlier on this week. Oh, for fifty like him in our small church and things will change. Maybe we won't win all the masses to our great gospel, but they will certainly hear our presentation of it, and that is what we have been commanded to do.

Part of my aim as a minister, and as a continuing student of theology, is to educate our congregants so that they will engage their butchers and barbers with the deep doctrine of the Bible. It accomplishes nothing to parrot the 4 spiritual laws or to recite the Romans road if one cannot think through the theology of the gospel. Why did Jesus Die? For whom? What results in this death? If your responses are the typical generic and anemic answers that usually sound so pious but amount to nothing spiritually, like "Oh How He Loves you and Me!" What means this love if, it can guarantee nothing for the beloved? What means this love if, it is powerless to secure its blessings? You couldn't get away with that at the butchers market in the fourth century. But now we don't even discuss theology in our churches let alone anywhere else. Oh for a wide awakening. May the design of William Tyndale come to pass in our generation as it is so needful, that the ploughboy know more of the sacred scriptures than the priests and prelates. Then, maybe your pastor will learn something of value, something he can actually use in his sermons next time he gets a haircut.