Pastors Who Don’t Teach Prophecy

Q

I have followed your website and ministry for nearly 8 years now and have been encouraged and blessed by your teaching. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on the resistance of many pastors toward teaching Bible prophecy. Specifically, your advice on how to approach speaking with those in Church authority about the importance of Bible prophecy teaching. How can we talk about this without offending or causing division?  Also, what are your thoughts on the importance of choosing a church that teaches Bible prophecy?

A

Organized religion is an Earth centered entity. Much of its success depends on keeping its members focused on the things of this world, like church growth, stewardship goals, or improvements to the church building.

For that reason many seminaries don’t spend much time teaching prophecy and some even discourage their students from teaching it after they graduate. I think their fear is that if they get people thinking too much about the next life, we’ll lose interest in this one.

In addition, it’s a controversial issue and can cause disharmony in the fellowship, something else to be avoided. The result is that many pastors feel ill equipped to teach prophecy and are too busy with their ongoing responsibilities to stop and learn.

Because of this I believe the likelihood of a lay person changing the focus of a pastor’s teaching is next to impossible.  I also believe his or her superiors would argue strongly against it. The far easier alternative would be to find a church that does teach prophecy  and start going there.

If someone is between churches looking, I would consider the teaching of a literal interpretation of prophecy to be one of the top requirements for a prospective church to meet.  After all we are living in the days of prophetic fulfillment.