We need Berean pastors …

Imagine a student who attends a history class every week but never opens the textbook, choosing instead to rely entirely on whatever the teacher says during the lecture. If the teacher happens to pass along a wrong date or an inaccurate fact, the student will naturally accept it as absolute truth. This same scenario is playing out right now inside the American church, and it is a primary reason why biblical illiteracy is so widespread. The average person sitting in a church service today does not read or study the Bible for themselves during the week. Instead, most of what they know about God, doctrine, or the contents of scripture comes almost entirely from what their pastor tells them during a Sunday sermon.

This overt reliance on sermon content creates a vulnerability that few churchgoers ever stop to think about. We naturally assume that because a pastor stands on a stage or behind a pulpit, everything they say is the result of deep, personal study and research. But the reality is that pastors are a lot like the people they shepherd. Much of what a preacher knows about God and the contents of scripture is simply what they themselves were taught by a mentor, a denomination, or a professor. If their teachers passed down an error, the pastor will naturally pass that same error down to the congregation, continuing a cycle of hand-me-down information without anyone ever checking the source.

This widespread habit of accepting biblical teaching on blind trust directly contradicts a famous account recorded in the New Testament. During the early days of the church, the Apostle Paul traveled to a city called Berea to preach the gospel. Acts 17:10-12 gives us the story of how these people responded:

“That very night the believers sent Paul and Silas to Berea. When they arrived there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. As a result, many Jews believed, as did many of the prominent Greek women and men.”

The pressure of the pulpit
When pastors preach on this passage, they almost always use it to lecture the congregation. They tell church members that they need to be “good Bereans” by opening their Bibles and making sure they are not just taking a preacher’s word for face value. Yet, pastors rarely stop to realize that they need to be good Bereans also.

The everyday reality of pastoral ministry has become incredibly demanding. A modern preacher is rarely just a teacher; they are expected to act as a counselor, a financial manager, an administrator, and a CEO of a non-profit organization. When a leader is buried under the constant pressure of leading a church, the deep, quiet hours required to study the biblical text are usually the first thing to be reduced from their schedule.

To survive the relentless pressure of having to produce a brand-new, engaging sermon every week, many preachers turn to convenient shortcuts. They buy books written by high-profile celebrity pastors, download pre-packaged sermon series outlines from the internet, or watch videos and listen to podcasts of popular mega-church preachers to see how they handled a topic (not to mention in 2026 an increasing number of pastors are turning to AI to write their sermons for them). Then, they stand up on Sunday and regurgitate what those popular figures taught. The critical step of personal investigation is bypassed. The material is repeated to a local congregation without the pastor ever doing the hard work of making sure the content is actual biblical truth.

The anatomy of a hand-me-down definition
A perfect example of this systemic issue can be seen in how pastors commonly teach the concept of repentance. If you visit a dozen different churches, you will likely hear multiple pastors confidently explain that the word repent means “to turn around,” or “to make a u-turn” in your behavior.

While changing your behavior and leaving sin behind is a necessary result of a changed life, a u-turn is simply not what the word means.

When the authors of the New Testament wrote about repentance, they used the original Greek word metanoeo. To understand what this word actually means, you have to look at its two Greek components: meta, which means “change,” and noeo, which means “to think” (derived from the noun nous, meaning the mind). When you put these two pieces together, metanoeo literally means “to change your thinking” or “to change your mind.” It is not a description of a physical behavior, but a radical transformation of how a person thinks about sin, about self, and about God.

Why, then, is this false teaching about a behavioral “u-turn” perpetuated by so many leaders? It continues because many pastors were taught that exact definition when they were young or when they were in training, and they never once checked for themselves to see if the definition was true. It is not true. Because pastors skip the Berean process and rely on recycled information, a linguistic error is kept alive and passed down to millions of Christians who don’t know any better.

Reclaiming the study
For more than 300 years, a pastor’s office was not called an office at all; it was known as the “pastor’s study,” named precisely for the activity that was expected to consume a shepherd’s week. When modern church leaders lose that focus and rely overtly on the study habits of outside influencers or celebrity voices, the local church loses an anchor. A pastor’s primary calling is to be a diligent, careful handler of the text of scripture, not an echo chamber for popular ministry trends or a distributor of downloaded commentary. Confronting the vast biblical illiteracy in our churches requires shepherds who are willing to question their inherited assumptions, reject convenient shortcuts, and commit to the direct work of original discovery in the pages of the Bible.

The spiritual health of any congregation depends on leaders who value accurate truth over an easy preparation process. When a preacher steps onto a stage or behind a pulpit to address a congregation, the people should be hearing the direct overflow of a personal, verified encounter with scripture, rather than the repeated opinions of a popular Christian subculture.

Scotty