Star Trek is a blueprint for all great sermons.

Is Star Trek still cool? Was it ever or am I just remembering things from my youth with rose tinted glasses? Either way, Star Trek gives us a wonderful blueprint for all sermons, and if you have ever heard a good sermon you might be able to associate with what I am going to say. Also, if you're ever at church bored on a Sunday morning (like that would ever happen), it is a good indicator that your preacher doesn't understand Star Trek.

While it is mainly remembered today for its hammy acting and stories of a philandering captain, boldly going into relations with various green skinned hot aliens, Star Trek does have a wonderful formula played out between its three main protagonists. And when I was once asked to explain what is a sermon, as opposed to a study or a seminar, Star Trek provides the perfect answer.

A sermon is the interplay between Pathos, Logos, and Ethos. Those are cool Greek words which you can now use to impress your friends the next time you're watching Star Trek like all the cool kids do, or just drop them into conversation to sound smart. They are easy to understand too.

Pathos is passion, it's pain and grief, it's that moving speech the coach gives in the underdog movie when the team needs to win this final game so Little Timmy can have his operation. And Pathos is Captain Kirk. He inspires his crew to take on the odds and achieve more than they ever thought possible. Pathos is when your blood runs hot and your heart rules your head. There's a reason hot alien chicks fancy the pants off him

Sermons handle Pathos in a number of ways. One is to ignore it entirely and you end up with someone droning on for twenty minutes, and no matter how good the subject is you aren't really listening because it's all so dry and boring.

The other side of Pathos is the rampant hysteria that is whipped up at conventions, you're fully on board and then you get home and realise that you were just caught up in a moment. Yes the second is far more enjoyable, but we all know really that it's nothing more than an appeal to our emotions.

Incidentally, have you noticed how modern worship revolves around purple uplights and that weird swirly haunting sound in the background? That's Pathos, and it works in setting a mood.

Then there's Logos. Which is wisdom or knowledge. Mr Spock, the forerunner of Sheldon and sub-geniuses everywhere is a great example of this. Spock would never say something cool like 'don't tell me the odds', he already knows the odds, and the permutations.

Logos is all the learning stuffed into one place.

We need this in a sermon. We come to church to learn stuff about God, and maybe about ourselves. But we need more than Logos because we aren't students at university getting empty heads filled. If all your sermons are just teaching the history of a subject, that's not a sermon, that's a seminar. Please don't do this.

A lot of my time is spent looking at this stuff. I have books and commentaries and essays on Bible times and ancient languages, it is vital that I know this stuff, but I am not going to stand in front of a church and recite Wenham and Walton on the Historical Jesus stuff. I am going to make it interesting.

Finally there's Ethos. Represented in Trek by Bones McCoy, my favourite character from the original series. You will probably understand Ethos from ethics. You see, it is all well and good knowing stuff and being entertained, but what is the point? That's a question I wish more people would ask when listening to a sermon. Yes we know that the Good Samaritan has a message about uptight religious people being too heavenly minded to actually help people, but why leave the message there? What's wrong with taking that next step and offering some practical grounds to get involved in actually helping people?

Ethos appeals to our sense of right, and can help shape it. It is the 'why' of a sermon. Why we should care for the poor and marginalised.

Star Trek didn't invent all this stuff, Aristotle wrote about these three archetypes years ago, it is the basis of good story telling and of conveying a great message.

Often churches focus on the first two, just sticking information into someone's brain while entertaining them. Some times they fail in either or both of them.

Churches are so focussed on 'the truth' that they miss out the Ethos of a message: What is true and what to do.

I find this fascinating. Because we have left the application out of preaching we have churches full of people who just do nothing. They hear a message every week but it either doesn't sink in or the relevancy to how we live is never told. Obviously not every church, but I find this enough to comment on.

And this is where you come in. You have a responsibility to yourselves to hold your preachers accountable. If they aren't challenging you the way Jesus challenged His followers to live a different kind of life, one of mercy and compassion, of love and reconciliation, please go and talk with them. Your time is too precious to spend listening to dull, ineffective sermons which don't speak to you. Vote with your feet if you need to. Go seek out new churches and new sermons, and boldly go where no one has gone before.