How to Engage With a Sermon You Disagree With

Most people respond to a sermon they disagree with in one of two ways: they mentally check out for the duration, or they spend the rest of the service composing a rebuttal in their heads. Neither is particularly useful. The first wastes the encounter; the second tends to confirm whatever you already thought before you walked in.

There's a third approach that is harder and more interesting: take the disagreement seriously as a site of formation, rather than a problem to dismiss or defeat.

Diagnose the Disagreement First

Not all sermon disagreements are the same kind of thing, and the right response depends on what kind it is. It's worth spending a few minutes — ideally during the sermon itself — trying to identify which category your reaction falls into.

Theological disagreement

The preacher made a claim about God, Scripture, or doctrine that you believe is wrong — not just unfamiliar, but actually incorrect. This is the most serious category. It deserves the most rigorous response: write down the specific claim, find the passage it was based on, and sit with both the claim and the text before deciding you're right. Good disagreements improve both parties.

Cultural or stylistic discomfort

The preacher made a claim that felt politically coded, or used an illustration that grated on you, or applied the text in a direction that seemed to reflect their cultural assumptions rather than the text's actual demands. This category is worth distinguishing carefully from theological disagreement, because the discomfort is often more about aesthetic or tribal signals than about truth. The culturally uncomfortable sermon may be theologically sound.

Personal resistance

The sermon said something true that you don't want to hear. This is the category most likely to masquerade as the other two. A sermon on generosity that makes you defensive. A sermon on forgiveness that you immediately contextualize with reasons why it doesn't apply to your specific situation. A sermon on pride that you feel doesn't apply to you — which is itself a data point worth noticing.

The diagnostic question: if someone you deeply respected had said the same thing in the same way, would you have reacted the same way? If not, the disagreement may have more to do with the messenger than the message.

What to Do With Each Kind

With theological disagreement

Write down the specific claim and the passage. Go home and read the passage slowly. Find a commentator from within your tradition who addresses the same text. Ask: is the preacher's reading within the range of defensible interpretations, or is it genuinely outside the tradition? Many things that feel like theological errors are actually interpretive differences within a tradition that has always held those questions with some tension.

If after careful engagement you still think the preacher got it wrong, bring it to them. This is not a confrontation — it's the kind of theological conversation good pastors actively want. "I was wrestling with what you said on Sunday about X — can you help me understand how you got there?" is a generous question that honors the preacher's work while taking your own disagreement seriously.

With cultural discomfort

Ask whether the discomfort is pointing to something theologically important or something aesthetically personal. If the sermon's application depends on a cultural assumption you disagree with, it's worth examining whether that assumption is embedded in the text or in the preacher's reading of it. Sometimes it's the latter — and that's a real limitation worth naming. Sometimes the cultural framing is just packaging around a claim that stands without it.

With personal resistance

Sit with it rather than resolving it quickly. The impulse to immediately explain why a convicting sermon doesn't apply to your situation is worth examining rather than satisfying. Write down your resistance in specific terms. "The sermon said X and I felt Y because Z." The specificity often reveals whether you're encountering a genuine theological problem or a genuine personal one.

"The mark of a good sermon is not that you agree with everything. It is that you cannot forget it."

— Frederick Buechner, paraphrased

The Productive Use of Disagreement

Here is what most people miss: a sermon you disagree with often produces more theological engagement than one you agree with. Agreement can be passive — you nod, you receive, you move on. Disagreement forces you to identify exactly what you believe and why, to find the text that supports your position, to articulate an alternative reading. It is involuntary theological work.

The most formative sermons in many people's histories are the ones they pushed back against hardest — and then, over months or years, came to see differently. That process doesn't happen if you disengage at the first sign of friction. It happens if you write down the disagreement, sit with it honestly, and let it do its work.