We released the “Evangelical Manifesto” yesterday at the National Press Club—see http://www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com/. I joined with the other drafters in expressing worries about the way in which the “evangelical” label has gotten too closely associated in recent years with a political activism. I do feel strongly about that, and I am an enthusiastic supporter of the “Manifesto” cause. At the same time, I am conscious of some irony in the fact that I am now speaking out in favor of holding back a bit from identifying the evangelical cause with political programs.

In the early 1970s I was present for the drafting of the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns. My first book was Political Evangelism, in which I argued for an integration of evangelism and political action. I spent a good part of my early career on the circuit, calling for a more active social witness on the part of evangelical Christians.

I don’t disown that history. But I do see the need these days to supplement those calls to activism with two other important expressions of concern. The one is the need to engage in our public activism with the right sort of theological and spiritual sensitivities.
Jerry Falwell once observed that there was a time in his ministry when he criticized Martin Luther King for speaking out on social issues, on the grounds that preachers had no business getting mixed up in politics. But Falwell had come to the point, he confessed, where he had now acknowledged that he was misguided in that criticism.

Here is what puzzles me about Falwell’s change of heart. What was the theological basis for his shift? Had he come to espouse a different view of the church? Had he changed his theology of Christ and culture? Had he come upon new insights regarding Bible prophecy? How could someone who had once preached a separatistic Gospel, with its conception of the true church as a cognitive minority in the larger culture, suddenly decide to form a movement called “the Moral Majority”? The shortcomings of the Religious Right have been due in large part, to my way of thinking, to a lack of careful theological reflection.

And then there are the spiritual failures. Yesterday at our press conference I noted that a favorite verse for evangelicals is I Peter 3:15: we must always be ready to give a reason for the hope that lies within us. But, I also observed, we have typically not gone on to quote the rest of the apostolic mandate: that we are always to do so with “gentleness and reverence.” We evangelicals have often approached our political involvements with a crusading spirit that falls far short of the “gentleness and reverence” requirement. We have failed to nurture a spirituality for public discipleship.

The other big area of concern for me is the way in which evangelism—calling individuals to accept Jesus as Savior—so easily takes a back seat to everything else. Bill Hybels made this point a few years ago by way of a confession of failure in Willow Creek’s ministries. They had set goals for their congregation in which evangelism was twenty-five percent of what they intended to do for the year. At the end of the year they saw that evangelism had been largely crowded out by the other goals. The lesson, Hybels said, is that we need to be very intentional about evangelism. If we try to keep it as merely one thing alongside of many others it will lose even that place that we have assigned to it. If we don’t over-emphasize evangelism it will end up being under-emphasized.

I have not stopped being a social activist. Working for justice, peace and righteousness is an important demand of discipleship. But we must be diligent about pursuing those matters with the larger picture in mind.

The April 21, 2008 issue of Newsweek has an interesting cover story on divorce. The theme is the radical shift in attitudes toward divorce in a matter of only a few decades. I resonate with that. Having seen it up close now so many times, I have gotten used to divorce as a fact of contemporary life. But I have not changed my theology of divorce. I still see it as a terrible thing. Unavoidable in many situations—but still terrible.

These days when someone comes to talk to me about the personal pain of divorce, one that has happened or one that will soon happen, I typically tell them about the experience of a friend who went through two divorces. The first one happened when he was a member of a very conservative church. When his wife told him she was leaving him, he went to his pastor, who responded harshly by telling him that he wanted my friend—a lay leader in the congregation—either to resign his membership voluntarily or to face formal excommunication proceedings. My friend resigned and moved on to a congregation that belonged to a more mainstream denomination. Soon he remarried, but a few years later his second wife also filed for divorce. Again he informed his pastor, but this time the pastor seemed surprised that he would even bother to make an issue of it. Basically my friend was told, “No big deal.”

Soon after, he came to me to talk about his experiences. “You know what I want?” he asked, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I want to hear two things from the church. One is that divorce is a horrible thing, that it is one of the biggest failures a human being can experience. The other is that this is not the end of my life—that God may still have good things in store for me.”

I looked him straight in the eye and repeated both of those things back to him, and through his sobs he thanked me. I continue to be grateful to him. He brought together for me in a wise combination exactly what we need to be saying about divorce. Given the realities of our culture, to say either one without the other strikes me as a serious failing, both theologically and pastorally.

I have been invited by The New York Times to write for their blog about the Pope’s visit to the United States. You can check these postings out at: http://thepope.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/on-faith-and-human-rights/

Last Wednesday evening (April 9), some 150 people gathered in Fuller Seminary’s Travis Auditorium to sing old-time hymns. Young and old alike showed much enthusiasm in singing “Rescue the Perishing,” “Just As I Am,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” and other hymns that have shaped both the worshiping life and the personal piety of many generations of Christians.

On that same night, a hymn of praise rang out in a very different venue and before a very different crowd. The American Idol producers broadcast an “Idol Gives Back” TV special on Fox, and the “top 8” performers ended the show with a rousing rendition of Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord.” That night, the group substituted “My Shepherd” for “My Jesus” in the opening line, but when they performed it again the next night on another American Idol show, they went back to “My Jesus.” Both performances were witnessed not only by large studio and television audiences, but also by millions of others via You Tube and podcast. I suspect that many joined together with this group as they sang the words that are familiar to many present-day Christians. And the studio audience itself responded with applause, whistles and shouts, and even a shower of confetti, for the singing of a hymn of praise to the God of the Scriptures.

I regularly hear folks complaining that “the great Christian hymns” are from a bygone era, and are only available in worn songbooks, unopened hymnals, and outdated albums. Yet, thanks to last week’s American Idol, we are reminded that today’s Christian music also has an extraordinary ability to inspire us and bring us together as a worshiping community.

We focused this past week at Fuller on the influences of Christian music, with the help of keynote speaker Mark Noll, a gifted scholar, author, and history professor at the University of Notre Dame. With his theme “Then Sings My Soul: The Significance of Hymns for Evangelicals,” Noll reviewed the influences of Christian music in the past three centuries. In his lectures, Noll described Christian hymnody’s transformations, beginning with the early singing of psalms to Isaac Watts’ publication of “Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1707,” which “gave bold voice to new expressions” in Christian belief. Another transformation, after the Civil War, resulted in “movements of spiritual renewal and piety in the midst of the challenges” of that era. This was reflected in a hymnody that included, for example, “the metaphor of nautical rescue.” Noll went on to describe the transformation that began after World War II and continues to the present, when evangelicalism’s music reflects, and is even driven by, the powerful influences of television, youth culture, and popular entertainment, as well as by the innovations generated by the Vietnam era, Jesus movement, the growth of Pentecostalism and the emergence of charismatic renewal.

I was reminded this past week of my deep personal gratitude for the work and faithful commitments of songwriters of past generations: Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Fanny Crosby, and many others. Those writers and composers made marvelous contributions to the faith. Yet, I was also reminded this week of my deep gratitude for Darlene Zschech, author of “Shout to the Lord,” along with other current songwriters whose songs capture our hearts and point us toward a faithful Savior.

The Christian story continues to be sung!

The Missouri Synod Lutherans are arguing with each other about “traditional” versus “seeker-sensitive” styles of being church. And the debate has spilled over into the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In its March 28 issue, the WSJ published an op-ed piece by Mollie Zeigler Hemingway, a former member of the denomination’s Board for Communication Services, criticizing the church leadership for canceling a respected radio program that discussed current issues from a Lutheran perspective. Since then some letters have appeared, debating the pros and cons of the claims she made about the significance of the cancellation.

Here is her basic thesis:
“The program was in all likelihood a pawn in a larger battle for the soul of the Missouri Synod. The church is divided between, on the one hand, traditional Lutherans known for their emphasis on sacraments, liturgical worship and the church’s historic confessions and, on the other, those who have embraced pop-culture Christianity and a market-driven approach to church growth. The divide is well known to all confessional Christian denominations struggling to retain their traditional identity.”

I have no views about the cancellation of the program, which I have never listened to. Nor do I know how to assess the claims and counter-claims about the actual motives at work in this particular case. But the larger scenario presented by Ms. Hemingway points, as she makes clear, to some important issues for all of us who care about traditional confessional identities. Indeed the Lutheran version of the issues is laid out in much helpful detail in Stephen Ellingson’s 2007 book, Megachurch and the Mainline: Remaking Religious Tradition in the Twenty-first Century. Ellingson, a sociologist, provides in-depth accounts of the ways in which nine Lutheran congregations in the San Francisco area are responding to new challenges for the church’s life and mission. While each of the congregations has its own unique character, Ellingson sees two very different patterns being explored. Borrowing terminology from the sociologist Robert Bellah and his Habits of the Heart colleagues, he sees some congregations attempting to be “communities of memory,” while others are promoting a model associated with “communities of interest” that draw on “seeker sensitive” themes.

It is unfortunate that the debate is often posed in terms of those who care about traditional theology and those who have sold their souls to “marketing” techniques. (I can’t resist the temptation to observe that there is some irony in Ms. Hemingway’s choosing the Wall Street Journal as the venue for making her case against the influence of “market-driven” strategies on church life.) I won’t develop my own argument in detail here, but I am convinced that in my own Reformed tradition there are important theological resources for taking “seeker” sensitivities very seriously in reflecting on the life and mission of the church. In fact, I look directly to John Calvin himself for positive encouragement on this subject. In the Institutes Calvin introduces two themes for understanding what he sees as the indelibly spiritual character of human existence, even in its fallen condition: the sense of divinity (sensus divinitatis) and the seed of religion (semen religionis). All human beings, Calvin says, have a sense of the divine, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not. This is due to the fact that God has planted the seed of religion in every human heart. Human beings, even sinful human beings, yearn for God. As St. Augustine put it in the form of a prayer at the beginning of his Confessions: “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”

To be sure, the yearnings of the sinful human heart are fundamentally misdirected. As Calvin also put it: “The human heart is a factory of idols…Everyone of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.” When, because of our sinful rebellion, we cut ourselves off from a vital relationship with our Creator, we seek to satisfy our hopes and calm our fears by putting our ultimate trust in something creaturely, in something that is less than the true God. But it is precisely because we are created for fellowship with the Living God that our idols never really satisfy our deepest yearnings. Our hearts are restless until they rest in the Living God.

So we have the present-day question that is being debated by the Missourians and others: should we attempt to be communities of interest or communities of memory? The Reformed answer, it seems to me, is that we must focus on both. The experienced “needs” of the unbelievers whom we want to reach with the gospel are themselves expressions of deep, although certainly misdirected, yearnings that are planted by God in their hearts. Those needs, those quests and longings, are not wrong in themselves. Rather, they are misdirected. People who are trapped in sinful lives are looking in the wrong places to find ultimate meaning and true satisfaction.

I have put the case here in Reformed terms, but I am quite sure Martin Luther would agree with the basic point. As Thomas Aquinas. And the Wesleys. And maybe even Menno Simons.

When the new-style congregations emphasize the importance of welcoming “seekers,” then, they are pointing all of us to something important. We need to see our congregations as places of safety, as spaces into which we can invite wandering sinners to come home to the Living God. And those of us who care deeply about confessional identities need to be willing to learn important lessons from those newer congregations about how best to welcome this new generation of seekers. We do need to think new thoughts, in the new cultural situations in which we find ourselves, about the tone and atmosphere of our worshiping life–and about the kind of language that best communicates the truths of God’s Word to people who desperately need to hear the Good News of a Savior who was sent to minister to “the hopes and fears of all the years.”

We are getting ready to leave for Korea and Japan tomorrow. My main assignment on this trip is to deliver the first Underwood Lectures. This lectureship has been established by the oldest Protestant congregration in Korea, the Saemoonan Presbyterian Church, in cooperation with New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Horace Underwood, a graduate of New Brunswick, arrived in Korea in 1885, as the first official Protestant missionary sent to that country. In 1886 he established an orphanage school, which eventually became Yonsei University, a major institution of higher education in Korea. In 1887 he established a small congregation of 14 believers, which continues today as the Saemoonan Church, now a very large church.

One thing I did in preparation for these lectures was to read Lillias Underwood’s biography of Horace, her husband. I was especially intrigued by this vignette. Sometime during the late 1880s the Underwoods met a woman from a rural village who came to them because she was interested in learning more about Christianity. In writing about this encounter, Lillias Underwood reports that the woman did not have access to any biblical writings, or any other Christian literature, But what she had heard about the Gospel was, as Mrs. Underwood puts it, “a tiny morsel of truth” that had begun to take “deeper and deeper root in the good ground of her heart.” As a result she told the Underwoods that she had come to hold to these three beliefs. The first was that “There is only one God and we must worship no other.” The second was that “We must put away our sins, be good and pure and true.” And the third: “We must keep one day in seven holy and sing the words, Yesu We Pee Patkui Umnay” (Nothing But the Blood of Jesus).” Encouraged by the Underwoods to continue in her newfound faith, she went back to her village and told others about Jesus. Several came to faith in Christ–including a man who had been known as a very wicked person. After a while the little group was able to obtain Bibles, catechisms and hymnbooks. Eventually a church was built and after several years hundreds were attending worship services there.

That’s a nice little story about church growth. And it begins with a woman who had somehow picked up some good theology to start with. Indeed, that’s a pretty good place to start from in our own efforts at evangelism and church planting today!

I have been preparing a lecture on “seeker sensitive” preaching, and I decided to try to match wits a bit with Karl Barth. I remember reading Barth on the subject of preaching, where he insisted that sermons should not have either introductions or conclusions. I decided to re-read Barth on the subject, to refresh my own memory (http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/barth/prayerpreaching/prayerpreaching.06.htm)

And indeed Barth pulled no punches on the subject. Framing a sermon with an introduction and a conclusion is motivated, he argued, by a desire to establish a “point of contact,” a “common ground,” with those to whom the sermon is addressed. And this motive is theologically misguided. We must simply proclaim the text. The Word of God will make its own connection to the hearts of the hearers. The Holy Spirit does not need our help in making the message of God’s Word “relevant” to the innermost regions of the human spirit. Barth goes so far as to label as “heresy” any effort on the part of a preacher to provide introductions and conclusions to the proclamation of the text.

But I was glad to see that there was more. In preparing our sermons, Barth says, we do need to consider “the situation in which the congregation is placed.” We must preach to them “in a way that they will understand.” The preacher “must know them as individuals; he must be acquainted with the conditions which shape their lives, with their capacities, and their potentialities for good and evil. Only so will he find the means to touch their hearts so that the Word may have significance for them.” A preacher must be careful not to deliver a sermon that is “simply a monologue, magnificent perhaps, but not necessarily helpful to the congregation.” In preparing the sermon, “those to whom he is going to speak must constantly be present in the mind of the preacher.” Thinking about the actual life situation of the hearers “will suggest unexpected ideas and associations which will be with [the preacher] in the study of the text.” This means, Barth says, that the preacher’s preparation will “provide the element of actuality, the application of [the chosen] text to the contemporary situation.” Whatever Barth meant by not looking for a “point of contact,” he was not suggesting that we should ignore the life-situations of those to whom we preach.

My own theology is very much of the “point of contact” variety. I like John Calvin’s insistence that every human being has a “sense of the divine” (sensus divinitatis), that a “seed of religion” (semen religionis) is planted in every human heart. Even our radical sinfulness cannot eradicate this spiritual restlessness. It seems to me that if we take those themes seriously we are not misguided in trying to use both introductions and conclusions in our preaching to make connections with what Barth himself calls us to focus on in those who hear sermons: “the conditions which shape their lives, with their capacities, and their potentialities for good and evil.”

I am pretty sure I can make a good case for “seeker sensitive” preaching by appealing to the authority of John Calvin. And I might even be able to make good use, at least selectively, of Karl Barth!

In their Reveal report, the folks at Willow Creek have taken a critical look at their own effectiveness in ministry. It is a fine example of public self-critique. A key finding is that a significant portion of their membership complains that their spiritual growth has been “stalled” in the Willow Creek context. This has led the leadership to conclude that their church members should not expect all of their spiritual needs to be met within the life of the church. Those who are looking for greater spiritual maturity need to realize that “much of the responsibility for their spiritual growth belongs to them” as individuals. The church has limits to what it “can and should deliver,” the report says. People who come to Willow Creek need to be told “early on in their journey that they need to look beyond the church to grow.”

In a recent editorial, the editors of Christianity Today rightly commended the Willow Creek leadership for their willingness to take an honest look at what they are or are not accomplishing in their ministry. But the editors also criticize the Willow Creek study on several key points. They note that the report describes the church “as if it were merely a distribution point for spiritual goods and services.” This, they say, “suggests a disturbingly low view of the church.” Quoting Ephesians 4, the editors observe that the Apostle Paul insists that the important spiritual growth that leads to maturity in Christ must take place within the life of the church. This does not mean, the editorial says, that it is bad for people to need to engage on their own in the personal spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible study, and the like. But the Willow Creek report fails to acknowledge “that these spiritual disciplines are intrinsically grounded in the ongoing life of the church.”

My basic sympathies are with the folks at Christianity Today on this. I say this as someone who has learned much from the folks at Willow Creek. Their ministry has been a marvelous force for renewal in the contemporary church. But I do not think we can concede as much as they now seem willing to concede regarding the limited role of the local church in nurturing spiritual growth.

I have struggled much with this topic in recent years, because of my own Kuyperian allegiances. I celebrate the ways in which Abraham Kuyper encouraged the flourishing of a variety of Christian organizations beyond the boundaries of the institutional church: the Christian school, the Christian political party, the Christian farming organization, the Christian art guild, and so on. There is certainly a way of seeing all of this as diminishing the role of the local church. And this downplaying of the importance of the institutional church has often loomed large among many of Kuyper’s followers. But I believe that is a mistaken interpretation. In his day Kuyper could take the strength of the local church for granted. People were thoroughly immersed in the worshiping and teaching ministries of the local church. When they went off from the church to their involvement in Christian political witness, Christian farming discussions, and the like, they took with them that very robust Calvinist vision that had nurtured and formed their faith in the life of the local congregation.

In Kuyper’s day, he knew that the larger culture was strongly influenced by Christian teaching. Reformed people spent much time in church, and they took the teachings of the church with them into other areas of their lives. This is no longer the case in the Netherlands, or in the United States. A primary need for the Christian community today, then, is the nurturing of a Christian identity. In our postmodern pluralistic cultures there are many other forces at work that attempt to shape our identities. We need to work very hard at forming Christian identity, and that hard work must take place within the life of the church. It is in the church where the Word is preached, the sacraments are offered, and where we are pointed to the way of discipleship. Whatever our church members may experience in other contexts, such as retreat centers, prayer breakfasts, small group study groups, and organizations that promote discipleship in various occupational settings, these experiences, as important as they may be, must be fed—and even on occasion corrected–by the sense of our identity in Christ that is nurtured in the life of the local congregation.

During this past October, 138 Muslim leaders released a letter that they had sent to Pope Benedict, calling for cooperation between Christians and Muslims in working to lessen tensions between the two religious communities. Of special interest was their clear critique of those who resort to violence in pursuing their religious aims: “To those who nevertheless relish conflict and destruction for their own sake, or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and to come together in harmony.”

This important declaration was welcomed by the Catholic hierarchy, and rightly so. Since 9/11 we have heard many complaints in the Christian world about what has been seen as a deliberate silence on the part of most moderate Muslim leaders on the issues of extremism. These leaders have now taken a clear and bold stand, and they deserve our support.

On November 18, 300 Christian leaders, mostly Protestant, published a full-page ad in the New York Times expressing appreciation and support for the Muslim initiative. The signers included many evangelicals, including several of us from Fuller Seminary. Now things have begun to heat up for the evangelical signers. Recently a few of those who signed the ad, because of vocal criticisms from their supporters, have asked that their names be removed from the list of signers .I stand by my own support for that declaration, and I want to explain why.

Fuller is deeply engaged in the evangelical study of Islam. We make no apology for the fact that we are motivated by a deep desire to tell Muslims about the saving power of Jesus Christ. But we also want to do everything possible to work at mutual understanding and to find ways to cooperate with Muslims of good will to work for the common good by combating extremism and promoting peace.

The element of the New York Times ad that has stirred up the most criticism is our acknowledgement as Christians that we have sinned against Muslims, both in the Crusades and in more recent times.This apology was prefaced by the observation that our Lord requires that we remove what is in our own eyes before critiquing our neighbors for what they have in their eyes.

The critics obviously think it is unseemly to apologize for the Crusades or any actions that have figured into our conflicts with Muslim communities. What about that? Were the Crusades a bad thing? No, of course not. They were motivated by a desire to make it possible for Christians to continue to visit the Holy Land, which had been conquered by Muslim Arabs. That was a good motive and rationale. Nonetheless, there was some looting and even rape conducted by Christian warriors. And Middle Eastern culture, with its emphasis on “honor,” makes much more than we do of the need to keep remembering past offenses: Jews must remember the Holocaust, Armenian Christians the Turkish massacres, Muslims the Crusades.

The continuing issue here was illustrated at a recent Muslim-Christian consultation in Turkey. I have been told that there was much tension in the room, until a Christian speaker began his remarks by apologizing for the destruction and looting that the Crusades had caused there. The Muslim participants interrupted him with applause, and the mood quickly changed. The Muslims became much more receptive to the explanation that was given of the basic claims of the Christian Gospel.

I can’t speak for all who signed the New York Times ad, but my own motivation was two-fold. One was to keep the lines of communication open to Muslim leaders who are willing to take their own risks by publicly distancing themselves from their own extremists. The other, much more basic, was to remove those barriers that make it impossible for them to hear what we have to say about the power of the Gospel. I can’t think of a better way to witness to that power than by exhibiting the vulnerability that comes from publicly admitting our own sins and thereby perhaps gaining the right to speak about a forgiveness that can come only by God’s sovereign grace that has reached out to us at Calvary.

I am sorry that some of my evangelical friends have found it necessary to distance themselves from the ad. The Muslim leaders who spoke out against the extremists in their own part of the world took a big risk in taking that stand. We know for a fact that our willingness to admit past misdeeds makes it easier for them to ward off criticism from their compatriots who may feel that they should not have reached out in our direction. We have extended the hand of friendship and support to them. To pull back that hand now would be yet another thing for which we may someday have to apologize.

We’ve been having conversations recently with laypeople—folks who support theological education—about how Fuller Seminary can respond effectively to the needs of local congregations. One topic that gets raised constantly is preaching. One woman put it bluntly: “Give us better preachers!”

I actually like the preaching I hear on a regular basis in our home congregation. And when I visit other churches I really can’t complain about the sermons delivered in those services–since, typically, I am there as the guest preacher. But Phyllis and I do occasionally attend services as visitors where we hear some pretty bad preaching. On one such occasion, there was a sign in the vestibule of the sanctuary announcing the cancellation of an adult class; the message accurately captured what we experienced in the worship service that morning: “No Kerygma Today.”

In the newspaper the other day there was a feature about the increasingly sophisticated tastes in chocolate. The commentator observed that reviews of various kinds of chocolate are now resembling the evaluations offered by wine-tasters. A few days later, when we shopped at Trader Joe’s, I decided to see if the chocolate shelves had the kinds of one-liners that are posted in the wine section. Sure enough, there were handwritten signs about different kinds of chocolate that did indeed read like the wine descriptions. But since sermons were on my mind, it also occurred to me that those brief chocolate tasting evaluations might apply to sermons as well. “Long-lasting finish.” “Powerful lingering intensity.” “Pleasant aftertaste.”

I don’t think a preacher-rating system, like the ones students set up to evaluate college courses, is a very good idea. I don’t like to see particular preachers being humiliated publicly. But it might be productive for seminaries to ask the hearers of sermons to give confidential feedback to the preaching faculty about the kinds of sermons that are being preached in their congregations. I take seriously the pleas that I have been hearing lately. We need better sermons, and I am convinced that it should be a high priority for theological schools to work at improving the quality of preaching in present-day churches.

Not that the situation is simply dismal. I regularly hear glowing comments about the preaching skills and sermon content of Fuller alums. And I know of graduates of other seminaries who are marvelous proclaimers of the Word. Furthermore, there are innovations in place to work for improvements—one excellent case in point is Lloyd Ogilvie’s “Preaching with Passion” conferences that we sponsor on our Pasadena campus. And again, the preaching at our own local congregation, if I were to give it a sermon-taster’s review, deserves this Trader Joe line about a particular variety of chocolate: “Rich and satisfying.”

I’m glad I seldom hear the kind of preaching that deserves this other one-liner that I saw in the chocolate section: “Slightly nutty”!