Do You Ever Get Bored In Church

[Sally by the seashore]

I used to be really bored in my parents church. Now I have a church home of my own and the pastor is awesome.  She is never boring and is always teaching straight from the Bible.

[bryan]

Preaching directly from the bible can be great if the pastor connects ideas you may not have noticed, adds cultural and custom info to clarify concepts, and shows how the scripture all can be tied together to provide a message.  Afterward, you should be able to verify the message yourself through scripture and possibly some outside research.  That seems to be done by a very small percent of pastors.  A good pastor is like a good teacher.  They connect ideas and verses to build a message you can understand and later verify yourself.  

Unfortunately, most sermons seem to be much like public school.   They assume you don't read scripture so they pick a small set of verses to read, skip the context and back story, and then tell you what the words in those verses say.   They then repeat what they say two or three times so a simple message takes ten or fifteen minutes.  Surround that thirty minutes of hymns, a five minute speech about tithes, and then closing prayer and that's it.   The end result is a 60 to 90 minute church service containing a three minute message.

How do you find good pastors like the ones described above?  I wish I knew.