I had heard a lot about Expression 58 from a close friend and finally decided to attend on November 20, 2016. People were really nice and friendly. The worship band was excellent. There were three singers, a man and two women, along with an electric guitarist, a bassist, a drummer and a keyboardist. The lead male singer also played an acoustic guitar. The tempo was putting me in a mood to seek God, and the singing lasted a long time--long enough to remain in the right place. Granted, there is a lot of crowd noise. The place filled up but not until about 40 minutes into the service. Meantime there was some background talking.
Then the sermon happened. This wasn't just disappointing; it really bothered me. Shaun Bolz was the speaker. He came on stage and announced he had a new book out. Said he would be signing and selling at the back of the church. Most people probably felt that it was a bit awkward. Anticipating their awkwardness, he defused it by making a joke that they are getting ready for the Christmas season with a bit of retail sales. He produced a lot of laughs, not a few of which were nervous.
But as he continued with the sermon I became more bothered by his incessant humblebragging. The theme was the 'Supernatural Life', a topic so big you can drive a semi-truck through it. There wasn't really a single passage of scripture he was preaching on. He referred to perhaps five passages during the sermon. The fact he needed to key through his ipad to find a few of them, asking the audience to wait on one occasion, reconfirmed what the sermon was mainly about. Shaun Bolz.
* Shaun had some learning difficulties as a youngster, that he didn't learn grammar that well, but that now...he's a very, very successful author.
* An international man of mystery, Shaun described being invited by a person who didn't speak his language to come to her house one night at 10pm in an unnamed Asian country. He was open to God's leading and, like an evangelical James Bond, was whisked away to a subterranean parking structure. Escorted upstairs, he was informed that he was in the presence of the family who had been the country's dictators for years. He might have been blindfolded but he didn't say. He prayed with them, they cried and they became Christians...because God loves you but he really, really loves working through Shaun.
* We learned about his service as an usher at a previous church, wherein one sunday a man was dancing a lot, which wasn't appropriate, but that Shaun asked the gentleman why he was dancing before he told the man to stop dancing...because Shaun is just a modest guy. (He was dancing because he was out of his wheelchair for the first time in 13 years.)
* Shaun brushed up on his multi-cultural, pro-racial street cred to the overwhelmingly white, upwardly mobile, post-Millennial audience by talking about how he was the only white guy on a stage with Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr.'s family...because he has friends in high places.
Shaun told many more stories and anecdotes about himself than about the Bible or Jesus or even other people. Like the most renowned prophets, he also seemed sufficiently self-deceived in the Lord that such a thought would never occur to him. As he says, it was God acting through him.
You don't need to take my word for any of this. Presumably the sermon will be up at http://expression58.org/sermons-archive/ where you can hear for yourself. Please for the love of God, think critically. read more