Tag: preaching

John Stott on speaking out about contemporary issues

Over the Christmas period, I read John Stott’s book I believe in Preaching. The book may be 40 years old, but I found it immensely helpful, encouraging, as well as challenging. One chapter in particular stood out for me as being especially helpful, which is called ‘Preaching as Bridge-Building’. This chapter is all about how preachers must build bridges from the Bible to what’s going on in the world today. It’s not enough simply to “preach the Bible”, but we must apply the Bible to what is going on in people’s lives today.

What really spoke to me was how the book spoke into the current situation about the coronavirus and lockdown. If you’ve been around for a while, you will know that I have been a very vocal critic of the church’s non-response to the lockdowns. I have found it baffling why churches have not seriously grappled with questions of government, freedom, public health, truth, censorship, and so on. These are big issues which people are wrestling with, and yet many churches have left these issues unaddressed.

It was into this context that I found John Stott’s wisdom immensely helpful. Let me quote you a few parts of the bridge building chapter which I think are particularly relevant.

The ultimate relevance of Christ

It should be plain from these quotations that the One we preach is not Christ-in-a-vacuum, nor a mystical Christ unrelated to the real world, nor even only the Jesus of ancient history, but rather the contemporary Christ who once lived and died, and now lives to meet human need in all its variety today. To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence. He gives us a sense of self-worth or personal significance, because he assures us of God’s love for us. He sets us free from guilt because he died for us, from the prison of our own self-centredness by the power of his resurrection, and from paralyzing fear because he reigns, all the principalities and powers of evil having been put under his feet.

This paragraph is wonderful. “To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence” – I love that phrase. It made me think of another book I’ve read recently – Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto. Schaeffer says that Christianity is not simply true but it is the truth. There’s a subtle but important distinction: Jesus is the rock on which all truth is built. There is no truth in the world apart from God’s truth.

The upshot of this is that Jesus is relevant to every single situation. There is no issue in the world about which Jesus is indifferent. Nothing is too big or too small.

I wonder sometimes whether we as a church have made Jesus too small. J.B. Phillips famously wrote a book called Your God is Too Small, and I think that’s still true today. We have made God too small, we have relegated the gospel to personal morality and made it unable to speak into bigger issues going on in the world today.

Christ and social issues

Christ is not just relevant to our own personal morality, but to the bigger questions of States and governments:

The question of the Christian attitude to the evil-doer and the enemy cannot be confined to the realm of personal ethics either. It immediately raises questions about the state and its officers (legislators, policemen, judges).

As soon as you start talking about right and wrong, you have to move beyond the individual to a society: societies have a concept of right and wrong as well! For example, when the Same-Sex Marriage bill was moving through parliament, a lot of churches stood against it and got involved. Churches saw that marriage was not a purely private thing but had implications for the whole of society.

We also have a responsibility to stand up in situations of injustice:

[These issues] press upon us from every side – human oppression and the cry for liberation; poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease … civil rights and civil liberties, dehumanization by the technocracy and the bureaucracy…
These are the questions which fill our newspapers and which thoughtful university students debate all day and all night. How then can we ban them from the pulpit? If we do so, in order to concentrate exclusively on ‘spiritual’ topics, we perpetuate the disastrous separation of the sacred from the secular (implying that these are distinct spheres and that God is concerned only for the one and not for the other); we divorce Christian faith from Christian life; we encourage a pietistic Christian withdrawal from the real world; we justify Marx’s well-known criticism that religion is an opiate which drugs people into acquiescing in the status quo; and we confirm non-Christians in their sneaking suspicion that Christianity is irrelevant. All this is too high a price to pay for our irresponsibility.

Stott argues here that Christians cannot simply avoid speaking about issues of justice – such as ‘civil liberties’ and ‘technocracy’ – two issues which have been very much at the forefront over the last couple of years. (For example, see what I’ve written about freedom and technocracy). He argues that we must oppose dehumanization wherever we find it:

This respect for human beings as Godlike beings is fundamental according to the Bible to our attitude to them. It moves us to oppose everything which dehumanizes human beings, and to support everything which makes them more human.

That which dehumanizes human beings is offensive to God. Of course, the gospel is the most humanizing thing, and we must make a priority of proclaiming it. But it is also right to speak against that which is offensive to God.

Speaking against the government

From the very earliest days of the church, Christians have stood up against the government:

They [the apostles in Acts 17] were proclaiming the supreme kingship of of Jesus, and this necessarily meant denying to Caesar that which he coveted most, namely the absolute homage of his subjects, even their worship. It meant, further, that King Jesus had a community of subjects who looked to him for directions about their values, standards and lifestyle; who knew they had a responsibility to be the world’s salt and light; and who were prepared, whenever there was a collision between the two communities and their two value-systems, to defy Caesar and follow Christ, even at the cost of their lives.

Christians have always acknowledged that there is a Lord above any earthly lord, to whom belongs our ultimate allegiance. Saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a deeply political statement, because it says that any earthly government is not the ultimate power. In fact, in those days, you were required to say ‘Caesar is Lord’ – so the apostles were in fact making a very charged political statement!

As Christians we must always be prepared to say when we think the government have got it wrong or when they are over-reaching. We must grapple with a Christian understanding of government. Too often over the last couple of years, Christian leaders have gone to Romans 13 (which talks about obeying the secular authorities) without thinking through what the rest of the Bible says about the secular authorities.

Saying nothing is saying something

It is not possible to say nothing about contemporary issues.

What is certain is that the pulpit has political influence, even if nothing remotely connected with politics is ever uttered from it. For then the preacher’s silence endorses the contemporary socio-political conditions, and instead of helping to change society and make it more pleasing to God, the pulpit becomes a mirror which reflects contemporary society, and the Church conforms to the world. The neutrality of the pulpit is impossible. [My emphasis]

If we do not speak up about issues which people are talking about, then the church will simply go along with whatever the world is saying. People learn their values these days from all sorts of sources – school and university, the media, social media, and so on. The world is constantly preaching its values to us. We as Christians must be prepared to speak up about where the world’s values contrast with the church’s values – even if that means confronting deeply held views in society.

Stott goes on to talk about why we need to say something about issues which people are thinking about today:

This attitude [not speaking out] is understandable, but irresponsible. Christian people are crying out for guidance in these areas. They want to be helped to think about them as Christians. Shall we abandon them to swim in these deep waters alone? This is the way of the coward.

To avoid and duck issues which people are asking serious questions about is cowardly (if understandable). Over the last couple of years I think many people have been asking serious questions about the lockdowns: are they proportional and right? Are human relationships dispensable? Is online church really church? Should a government have this kind of power? All these questions are questions which the Bible can shed lots of light on – but unfortunately many churches have avoided them.

Developing a Christian mind

One of the biggest things we need to do as a church is to develop a Christian mind. A Christian mind is “not a mind which is thinking about specifically Christian or even religious topics, but a mind which is thinking about everything, however apparently ‘secular’, and doing so ‘Christianly’ or within a Christian frame of reference.” A Christian mind is a way of thinking about the world, a way of developing a distinctly Christian perspective on everything going on.

Stott quotes a book by Harry Blamires called The Christian Mind:

Mr. Blamires bemoans the almost total loss of a Christian mind among Church leaders today: ‘The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history … As a thinking being the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.’

Bear in mind that Stott’s book was published in 1981! If this was true of 1981, I think it’s even more the case today. Many Christians, even Christian leaders, seem to think in secular categories rather than Christian ones. This is why I think it has seemed so logical and obvious to change almost everything about the church for the purpose of safety. There’s nothing wrong with safety in itself, but it should have a proper place and not an ultimate one. The way that safety has become so important could only happen within a deeply secular culture like ours.

Let me finish with one final quote:

We who are called to be Christian preachers today should do all we can to help the congregation to grow out of dependence on borrowed slogans and ill-considered cliches, and instead to develop their powers of intellectual and moral criticism, that is, their ability to distinguish between truth and error, good and evil. Of course, we should encourage an attitude of humble submission to Scripture, but at the same time make it clear that we claim no infallibility for our interpretations of Scripture. We should urge our hearers to ‘test’ and ‘evaluate’ our teaching. We should welcome questions, not resent them.

Part of the task of a Christian leader is to help people think for themselves, that is, not to simply obey whatever the pastor says but develop a Christian mind to discern the Lord’s will (Ephesians 5:17). We need to educate people in the Christian faith, not simply reset their moral compass every week. I’ve been saying for a while now that we need to do more than ‘preach the Bible’, we need to catechise people. That is – we need to teach them the Christian faith. People have got questions and issues, and what we do is look at the Bible together.

One of the things about the last couple of years which has really got to me is that way that questions and debate have been discouraged, even forbidden (I talked about this a little in my post on truth). This is not the way that the church should be – we should seek to submit everything to Scripture. That is the way that we grow to maturity in Christ, grappling together with the difficult issues in our lives and in the world in the light of Scripture.

January 6, 2022
The conservative evangelical obsession with preaching

A few days ago I read an interesting blog post by Sam Allberry called Reigniting Our Churches. There he says:

Many, if not most, of my friends are at churches regarded as being among the best in the country for Bible teaching. But the repeated feedback I keep hearing from so many is that things feel dry. Sermons are warm but predictable. The text is handled faithfully, but there’s often a lack of connection with real life. There’s little sense of spiritual reality. Imagine the White House staffers diligently discussing matters of national policy, all the while not really believing in the power of the President or the Oval Office to enact any real change. I fear many of our churches are starting to resemble this.

It reminded me of a post I wrote a few months ago, What conservative evangelicals get wrong about preaching. That post seemed to touch a nerve, and so has Sam’s article – which I hope is a positive thing. There’s clearly a problem, but the fact that it’s being recognised means it can be addressed.

What I’d like to do in this post is touch on another issue which I think conservative evangelicals often get wrong about preaching. And before we begin – these are mistakes which I, myself, have made. I think my previous post came across as having a dig at conservative evangelicals, which was unintentional. I want to write this as critiquing ‘from within’, as it were, as a critical friend.

So, all that said. This is the problem: I think conservative evangelicals are obsessed with preaching to the exclusion of other important ministries of the Word.

An obsession with preaching

When I started attending a conservative evangelical church (when I was a student), it was very clear to me that the sermon was a big deal. The person who told me about the church sold it to me by saying “When you hear a sermon, you think ‘wow’”. You didn’t have to be around the church for long to realise that sermons were immensely important.

Throughout my time in conservative evangelical circles – first as a layman, and then as an ordained minister – this message has been constantly reinforced. For example, at college we spent a fair bit of time learning ‘homiletics’ (how to preach). Each day in college chapel there would be a sermon, and most days one of us students would preach. The topic of preaching was never far away from our discussion as students, I think it was simply a tacit assumption that being at college was a lot about learning to preach well and effectively.

In the conservative evangelical world – on conferences or online blogs etc – there are a lot of books about preaching. I’ve seen recommended (and bought!) books such as Christopher Ash’s book, The Priority of Preaching, or Tim Keller’s book on Preaching, or Zack Eswine’s book Preaching to a Post-Everything World. But it’s not just books about the task of preaching – there are also commentaries and books to help you preach particular books of the Bible.

One of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical world is the Proclamation Trust. They declare, on the front page of their website, that they serve “the local church by promoting the work of biblical expository preaching in the UK and further afield”. They put on many conferences which are explicitly to do with preaching. A few years ago I attended the Younger Ministers Conference, which was very much focussed on preaching – the afternoon sessions were by Bryan Chappell about application in preaching, and we had small groups focussed on preaching particular books.

In short, you could be forgiven for thinking that preaching was about the ONLY thing conservative evangelicals are interested in!

But here’s the problem. I ask myself: how many books and conferences have I read or been on which are to do with other aspects of Word ministry? For example, how many conservative evangelical books are there to do with pastoral visiting, or counselling, or catechising, or one-to-one work? There are a few, and they are growing (especially thanks to organisations such as Biblical Counselling UK), but I’d say there are not as many as there should be.

A Holistic approach to Word ministry

Gospel ministry should be “pulpit-centered, but not pulpit-restricted”
Peter Adam

I think this is a really helpful quote. Pulpit-centered, but not pulpit-restricted. This captures well the ministry of the Word. In the book of Acts we see the ministry of the Apostles described like this: “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.” So the Apostles devoted themselves to the ministry of the Word – but sometimes that looked like proclaiming from the pulpit (in the synagogue), and sometimes that looked like teaching in someone’s house. Each was ministry of the Word.

It’s this ‘house to house’ kind of ministry which I think is maybe lacking in conservative evangelical circles. Perhaps it’s because so many conferences, books, etc. emphasize the need for a good preaching ministry, but don’t emphasize the need for Word ministry in other contexts.

So I think the conservative evangelical world has become unbalanced. But what are the effects?

The negative effect of a preaching obsession

Are people really taking it on board?

Richard Baxter

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been re-reading Sinclair Ferguson’s book Some Pastors and Teachers. In the same chapter I quoted in that post, he also quoted from Richard Baxter’s famous work The Reformed Pastor:

For my part, I study to speak as plainly and movingly as I can … and yet I frequently meet with those that have been my hearers eight or ten years, who know not whether Christ be God or man, and wonder when I tell them the history of his birth and life and death, as if they had never heard it before. And of those who know the history of the gospel, how few are there who know the nature of that faith, repentance, and holiness which it requireth, or, at least, who know their own hearts? … I have found by experience, that some ignorant persons, who have been so long unprofitable hearers, have got more knowledge and remorse of conscience in half an hour’s close discourse, than they did from ten years’ public preaching. [My emphasis]

As a preacher, I can sympathise here with Richard Baxter! I can think of times when people have asked me questions about things which I know I’ve preached on recently. I sometimes get the impression with preaching that it goes “in one year and out the other”! Richard Baxter found something similar. But, crucially, he did something about it. Sinclair Ferguson summarises:

It was this discovery that led Baxter to arrange for every family in his parish area to have a catechism. Then, together with his two assistants, he spent two days of each week, from morning until evening, moving from house to house in his parish, teaching, gently quizzing, and with great sensitivity leading people to Christ and to the Scriptures.

Baxter rediscovered the importance of ministry ‘from house to house’. So here’s my question: why is it that modern-day conservative evangelicals seem to have lost touch with this? Why is it that so many of our books and conferences seem to focus around the public ministry of the word, and not about the house-to-house ministry? Why aren’t we having conferences about catechising? I appreciate things have changed a lot since Baxter’s day – but surely the problem remains?

I wonder if a typical conservative evangelical ministry could be made more effective by spending a bit less time on preparing sermons and a bit more time spending time with individuals to disciple them.

Preaching is not an intellectual exercise!

In my previous post about conservative evangelicals and preaching I argued that, in conservative evangelical circles, preaching could become an intellectual pursuit rather than a spiritual one. One of the problems with making preaching the only thing we really talk about is that it puts preaching on a pedestal, where it shouldn’t be.

Preaching is one aspect of the ministry of a pastor-teacher – a very important and fundamental one. But our primary calling is to love: to love God, and to love people – especially the people God has given for us to minister to (e.g., for Anglicans, in our parish). Preaching is an aspect of love – but it mustn’t be divorced from it.

I wonder if the books, the conferences, etc. ultimately send out a message that preaching is a matter of technique: simply get the Biblical theology right, read the right books, have the right small groups – and you’ll become a better preacher. You just need to know a bit more information…

And this is the problem – preaching is primarily a spiritual endeavour. Going back to Sam Allberry’s article we started with, perhaps the problem with preaching that’s dry is that it’s become an intellectual business. Ironically, it could well be the obsession with preaching in conservative evangelical circles which has led to the problem with preaching in conservative evangelical circles!

I wonder whether the best thing we could do would be to start obsessing about God – to focus more on worshipping him, on his goodness to us. Perhaps if we were so full of him and the good news, we’d find our preaching naturally followed suit? “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”. If our hearts were full of Christ, we would speak about him. Sam’s post was about a book, Truth on Fire, which looks like it might be a good start.

September 5, 2021
What Conservative Evangelicals get wrong about preaching

I have spent pretty much my entire life going to evangelical churches. These are churches where the sermon is often the ‘main event’ in a service. This was especially true in the church I attended before going to theological college. There, a very high value was placed on having “good” preaching – it was really what the church was known for. The vicar at the time said he used to spend about twelve hours per week preparing the Sunday sermon. One person said to me that he travelled a long way to come because there were no other churches close to him which had “good” preaching. It was a church that was known to have “good” preaching, and – perhaps because it was near a university town – people would come to hear the “good” preaching.

This seems to be a common theme among conservative evangelical churches (which I’ve talked about before on this blog). So the motivation behind the Proclamation Trust, for example, is to promote expository preaching – that is, preaching which aims to let the Bible set the agenda. They have whole conferences (some of which I’ve been on) which are dedicated to help with preaching the Bible. So much time and effort is spent on making sure that your preaching is as good as it can be.

The default assumption seems to be that you should spend as long as possible preparing your sermon, over several sessions. This is reinforced by the people who speak at conferences (such as Vaughan Roberts, who I mentioned in my post about the EMA) saying that they spend several sessions over several days preparing to preach. You need to painstakingly analyse sentence flow diagrams, consult weighty commentaries, think about interesting ways to communicate. You really need to make sure you get into the text, so you can preach the main point clearly.

There’s a huge amount of pressure to make sermons good. But I do wonder whether there is something lacking.

A bit of background

I came to the church I am now part of as a curate, straight from theological college. The church was (and is) conservative theologically and Biblically based. However, it is not one of the churches which people know by name – it’s not one of the ‘network’ conservative evangelical churches.

One of the things which struck me early on was the preaching. Our vicar (now retired) was a very good speaker – but I don’t think his sermons would be very ‘Proc Trust’. His sermons were always based on the Bible passage and theologically orthodox. But I think sometimes they were a bit of a rush job – he was so busy during the week with his various jobs: at one time he was the Rural Dean of TWO deaneries (32 parishes!), and he was always busy pastorally. I once took a day to prepare a sermon and he said, “Enjoy it while you have the time!”

C. H. Spurgeon

He had a very different style as well. Sometimes he would take the passage as a starting point and then ‘leap off’ to talk about something else – always Biblical! But there were quite a few occasions where I thought, “I agree with that, but I don’t think I would make that point from this passage”. In fact, his style reminded me a little of Spurgeon (another man who, despite being nicknamed ‘the prince of preachers’, would probably not preach ‘Proc Trust’ approved sermons!).

The other thing that struck me was that the church was (and remains) a very loving and generous church family. Many in the church family did not simply hear the gospel, but they believed it as well. The Holy Spirit was and is at work in the hearts and lives of many people. People love the Lord, and each other. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture – as with any church, there are many flaws. It’s what you would expect from a church made up of sinners! But, nonetheless, there’s a lot of spiritual life, which – I have to be honest – I haven’t always experienced in conservative evangelical churches.

All this has made me wonder.

What’s the point of preaching?

I started going to my previous church while I was a university student. One of my friends encouraged me to go. He said that, when you listened to a sermon there, you thought ‘wow’! He wasn’t wrong – the sermons opened my eyes to new ways of understanding the Bible. I encountered things such as Biblical Theology for the first time. It made a big impact on me as a young student. My understanding really grew.

At the same time, I’m not sure that those days were times of great spiritual growth. Part of the problem is that I think the sermons encouraged understanding more than they encouraged obedience and trust. That is, I came to the church to hear the preacher help me to understand the Bible – and not so much to be encouraged in my trust in the Lord. Hearing the sermon was a bit like seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of the hat. You’d go into a sermon thinking, “I wonder what he’s going to get out of this passage.”

The problem with this kind of preaching is that it encourages an intellectual view of the Bible. Preaching becomes simply communicating information to enable understanding. Now, of course, preaching is about understanding – I think of Romans 12:2, for example: “be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. Our hearts are changed as our minds are changed. But the two things – heart and mind – must go together.

Liam Goligher recently wrote a wonderful summary of the difference between preaching and teaching on Twitter. There he said:

Teaching provides things to learn and to do while preaching should leave us aghast and awed in the presence of God whose voice we have heard. Teaching must send us out to serve; preaching must lift us up to heaven!

Preaching is something which lifts us up to heaven – I rather like that. Preaching is part of worship, as we build our relationship with the infinite-personal God (as Francis Schaeffer would put it). Teaching is more about understanding and information; preaching is about relating to and worshiping the God who made us. Of course, the two things are not mutually exclusive, but there is a distinction.

When preaching becomes teaching

I wonder whether part of the problem is that, for many conservative evangelical churches, ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching’ have merged into one. For example, I’ve heard it said by a few different people I know that good preaching should teach people how to read the Bible. That’s probably true. But I don’t think that should be the end goal. Sermons shouldn’t primarily be to teach believers theology, but to encourage them with the gospel that they may lead a transformed life.

Maybe part of the problem is because churches have stopped catechising new believers. I think many churches try to do everything in Sunday sermons – perhaps because they do not realise there is another way. They tacitly assume that people will learn everything they need to through studying the Bible in sermons and home groups – rather than intentionally catechising people in the faith.

Now, I do appreciate that every doctrine you would learn in a catechism you could also teach while preaching through a book of the Bible. But I think the goal of a catechism is different to the goal of preaching: catechesis is more about teaching. If you’re catechising people about the doctrines of grace, preaching can focus not so much on teaching those doctrines but encouraging people in their walk with the Lord using those doctrines as a foundation.

I would say preaching is not about teaching people something from the Bible, but applying it to their hearts: encouraging people with the gospel, so that they go back to their lives with confidence to face with coming week. It’s not to teach people those doctrines but to encourage people with them. There’s an important difference.

Our greatest need

Robert Murray M’Cheyne, the 19th Century Scottish pastor, once said:

Over the last seven years since I was ordained, I have come to believe that this is absolutely true. I’ve come to truly understand that the Word is not something which must simply be comprehended on an intellectual level but allowed to change our hearts. Books such as True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer have really helped me understand this.

A sermon is not about a transfer of information. It’s not about me reading the passage, understanding it, and then communicating that to others. It’s about the Word of God speaking to us, as Christians. I am not helping people to understand the Bible – I am helping people to apply it to our lives, now, as one Christian to another. It’s more than information – it’s God applying his word to our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Occasionally in preaching classes I’ve been given the advice, “First preach the sermon to yourself”. This is very good advice. If you can’t preach the sermon to yourself first, if it does nothing for you, then it won’t do anything for those who you’re preaching to. That is the exact thing we are communicating: not a piece of information, but a spiritual, life-transforming message.

This is what I am getting at: the most important thing a preacher needs is not the intellectual grasp of a passage, but to be walking closely with the Lord. A simple man who has been humbled by the weight of his own sin and is depending on the Lord will accomplish far more than someone who has a lot of knowledge but is self-sufficient. In fact, a lot of knowledge could even be a barrier (1 Corinthians 8:1, “knowledge puffs up but love builds up”).

What this means for sermon prep

Over the last few years I’ve started to worry less about sermons. I don’t worry too much about spending hours refining my exegesis of the passage, or finding just the right words. That’s not to say I skimp on it! But I try to spend a bit more time dwelling on what the passage has to say to me as a Christian. How should I be changed as a result of this? What difference does it make to my life? In other words, the balance of my time in preparation has shifted in a more “spiritual” direction.

I often find that a passage will speak into a particular situation going on in my life, or the world / church. I take that to be the voice of the Holy Spirit, helping me to direct what I say.

Sermon preparation is not merely an intellectual exercise in terms of analysing sentence flow diagrams – it’s a spiritual excercise. We need to listen to the voice of the Spirit speaking to us through the words he inspired. That doesn’t mean we can skip over sentence flow diagrams (although I don’t usually do them for other reasons!) – but rather that at every point we need to be praying and asking God to guide us.

Perhaps it would be helpful to see sermon prep as our whole lives before preaching: not just the actual tasks we complete in order to prepare a sermon, but our whole spiritual state before God. Spending time in prayer and humbling ourselves before God daily is sermon preparation. Speaking to people is sermon preparation. And so on. Perhaps that would help to get away from sermons being something we do intellectually to something we do with our heart, soul, mind and strength.

Where does that leave us?

A year ago I wrote about Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis. There I said that part of the problem in conservative evangelical circles is that orthodoxy is reduced to holding a set of intellectual propositions. If you sign up on the dotted line of various doctrinal beliefs, you’re in the club.

I think something similar could be said for preaching. Why is it that people like Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis could do the things they did, without anyone really noticing? Is it because it’s possible to preach a “biblical”, exegetically-correct, theological sermon – without really preaching from the heart?

Over the last few days I’ve been reading The Church at the End of the 20th Century by Francis Schaeffer. I’ve really benefitted from reading his works, and I’d recommend them to anyone. One of the things he says in the book is that everything starts with relating to the God who is there. The whole reason we exist is because God made us and we are his, we are made for him. Without him, without relating to him, we are nothing. Our natural sinful condition is to think that we can cope without him. I think this can be true of spiritual exercises such as preaching.

Yesterday I read this, which sums things up for me:

Suppose that when we awoke tomorrow morning and opened our Bibles, we found two things had been taken out. Not as the liberals would take them out, but really out. Suppose God had taken them out. Suppose the first item missing was the real empowering of the Holy Spirit; and the second item, the reality of prayer. Consequently, following the dictates of Scripture, we would begin to live on the basis of this new Bible in which there was nothing about the power of the Holy Spirit and nothing about the power of prayer. Let me ask you something: If that were the case, what difference would there be today from the way we acted yesterday?

If God is real, the Spirit is real, and prayer is real – our sermons should reflect that. My fear is that too often they don’t.

Cover image is the EMA at the Barbican back in 2017, borrowed (without permission) from this page – sorry!

Further reading…

Ray Ortlund’s sermon on 2 Timothy 1:3-8 and then his seminar on suffering were very helpful for me in beginning to think about these things! (The seminar was what put me onto Francis Schaeffer in the first place). I think what he says about Reformed Christianity in an American context would apply to the conservative evangelical British context.

Also I think Humble Calvinism by J.A. Medders is relevant.

February 7, 2021
Why we should be grateful for Vicky Beeching
I recently talked a little about Vicky Beeching’s book – Undivided – and why I think it is dangerous for the church. I stand by what I said there – but, at the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and I think there are reasons to be grateful to Vicky Beeching. In particular, I think the book exposes the truth in two ways:

1. It exposes the truth about people.

One of the things which has really come home to me over the last month is the lack of depth and theological understanding in the UK church. It is pitiably weak in certain quarters.

Vicky’s story is a powerful one, for sure – but in a church which knew the Scriptures and the gospel, it wouldn’t have made a dent. My heart weeps for the many faithful Christians who will read this book and be swayed by it. Why are they swayed? Because they do not know the Scriptures deeply enough. This has something which I have hitherto only suspected – but Vicky’s book has brought into painfully to light.

There’s an intriguing moment at the end of John 6:

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, ‘Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you – they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.’ For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, ‘This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.’
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t dilute his teaching to make it easier for people to follow him. The words he speaks are “full of the Spirit and life”. If you want to follow him, you must follow it all – or it will be worth nothing. Vicky Beeching’s book – and the question of gay marriage in general – exposes people for who they really are: are they followers of Jesus, who take up their cross and follow, however hard it may be? Or will turn back and no longer follow him at this point?

Joshua said to the people of Israel as they entered into the Promised Land: “choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Josh 24:15). We are at the point where the church has to choose whom it will serve – the gods of equality, sexual liberation and personal fulilment – or the God of the Bible. It cannot be both.

That said, if people do not know the Scriptures deeply enough, then they do not entirely have themselves to blame:

2. It exposes where the church has gone wrong.

If the church had been teaching the faith as it should have been, there would be no problem. I’ve been realising, however, that the church has not been teaching the faith – in particular, I think the church has failed in catechesis: teaching a basic systematic understanding of the faith. This is where I think many evangelical churches fall down – they preach the Bible week by week, which is vital, but neglect other things which are vital. I talked about this a little when I started my New City Catechism series.

In particular, I think the church has lost the understanding of sin that was so key at the Reformation: the idea that sin is pervasive and infects everything – our desires, our minds, our wills, everything. Too often people have a fairly weak view of sin as ‘bad things we do from time to time’. Children are often taught that kind of understanding to begin with, but sadly it seems that many adults never move beyond it. I know this from personal experience – I think for many years I saw sin as being something I did rather than something more fundamental, a matter of the heart. As Jesus said in Mark 7:21 “it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come”. We’re not sinners because we sin – we sin because we are sinners. Because our hearts are wicked and corrupt, we bring forth the fruit of sin.

Recently in our church we’ve started using Order Two communion – the order in Common Worship (the standard CofE liturgy) based on the Book of Common Prayer. The confession has generated a bit of discussion, and it struck me that it’s the understanding of sin which is under question. (I should say that I minister in a conservative evangelical church which has had a strong Bible-preaching ministry for forty or more years!) I’m not saying this to criticise the church, but rather I think it illustrates that even among solid evangelical churches there has been a failure to adequately teach the faith which can leave believers exposed when error comes in. If people are rocked when they read Vicky Beeching’s book – or, more personally, when a close friend or family members ‘comes out’ – then it shows the church has not properly equipped them.

We as a church have often focussed so much on the ‘nice’ bits of the faith – worship and praise, the love of God, etc – that we’ve neglected the important doctrines of sin, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, hell, etc.

One of the things I’d like to see – as an Anglican – is a revival of the theology of the Book of Common Prayer. I honestly think the church wouldn’t be in half the mess it is if the prayer book had been retained as the staple diet of the church – or its theology, at least. Common Worship (released in 2000, which almost every church uses now) waters down so much of the gospel content that you can bend it to almost any theology. In our midweek communion service we’ve been using Order Two for nearly a year now – and it’s like balm to my bruised soul: I am free to be just exactly who I am before God – a sinner who is saved by grace, nothing more, nothing less. Hallelujah!

My wife had an interesting perspective on this – she grew up on Common Worship (or its precursor) – and didn’t really understand communion. She made the comment to me that the communion service suddenly became much clearer when using the Prayer Book style service. The BCP communion preaches the gospel in a way that Common Worship doesn’t.

What happens now?

I think there are reasons to be grateful, and reasons to be confident. Now that Vicky Beeching’s book – amongst other things – have exposed the truth, we can do something about it. I feel that for too long in this country we’ve been muddling along as a church, saying a few nice ‘Jesus’ things where appropriate but staying in the shallows, theologically speaking. That won’t work any more.

What this country needs is a revival, and a revival will not happen without people who are committed to living out Jesus’ teaching in every area. People who are willing to take up their cross and follow him. People who are willing to stand up and be counted.

This has been the case before in previous generations – as I mentioned when I talked about the hymn O Jesus I have promised. It can be so again. I think God often allows these things to happen to purify the church – to turn halfhearted people either out of the church, or move them to obey him in a more wholehearted way.

A wholehearted church can make a big difference – I was encouraged earlier today to read Ian Paul’s post on revival – Christianity eventually became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire by growing at around 3.42% per year. That’s not a huge amount – and yet it changed the course of history.

So what practical difference should we make as a church? Many things, of course! But in practical terms, in broad brush stroke terms, what I’d like to see is:
- Pastors and teachers who are trained properly and able to teach their congregations the faith. I only realised the value in theological training after spending three years at theological college – I’m so glad the CofE made me do it, otherwise I’d probably have said “I’ve got the Bible, I’ve got a commentary… now let me at it! No need for this academic stuff!” Any church serious about growth needs to invest in the quality of its theological education. Putting down deep roots into the Scriptures and theology are essential for surviving testing times – and only people who have those deep roots can help others to gain them.
- A revival of catechesis – as I’ve already talked about.
- A renewed commitment to church planting. I am heartened that so many churches seem to be talking about church planting at the moment. I was talking to someone recently who said that the best way of reaching people is by planting a church – if the church in the UK is serious about reaching the unreached, we need to be serious about planting new churches. I was taught at college “Growing churches are church planting churches” – and I think this is true. The UK needs more churches.
Above all, we should have confidence in the glorious truth of the gospel – that we have a God who saves sinners, and even today is still drawing men and women to himself. I was reading a book yesterday – Matt Lee Anderson’s book on questioning – and in the chapter I read last night he said that the purpose of questioning is to fasten our minds on the truth. There is an objective truth out there, and we are only deluding ourselves if we deviate from it. This is what our society is finding out the hard way is it tries very hard to write out the fact of God’s truth. We as Christians know God’s Word, his truth, and we should be confident in proclaiming it as we know it is the way that God transforms lives and societies.

I finish with the words of Paul to his protege, Timothy, his charge which I look to to describe my ministry and I think are appropriate here:

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather round them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

A few years ago we preached through 2 Timothy, and it struck me then that it is one of the most prophetic books in the Bible – it describes our situation exactly in the church at the moment. And yet, the solution is the same: preach the gospel. Let’s have confidence in doing just that.
July 27, 2018
Preaching, Rhetoric and Michael Curry

OK, OK, I know everyone is bored of talking about Michael Curry now. But I wanted to pick up on one thing which few people have really talked about – the delivery and style of his sermon, rather than the content. In my previous post I said that it was powerful, and Ian Paul has already written what preachers can learn from him. But I think, having had a week to reflect, there is more to say – which is that the sermon wasn’t a great sermon in terms of a piece of communication. Let me try to explain by reflecting on what I try to do in a sermon. These are some of the lessons I’ve picked up over the last few years of preaching – I do this in the hope it may be helpful for others preachers or public speakers.

1. What is the main message you are trying to get across?

One of the best lessons I ever learned when it comes to preaching was – before you write the sermon, you need to come up with a short – preferably single sentence – aim of the sermon. Can you boil it down to the ‘in a nutshell’ version? If you can’t – chances are, it won’t be a good sermon. This is one of the real insights I got from Haddon Robinson in his classic book ‘Expository Preaching’.

What most new preachers do is look at a passage, and try to come up with a few helpful things to say about it – but there’s often nothing to hold it together, no overarching theme.

I’ve found the most effective sermons are those with a particular aim / purpose. You have a particular truth about God, which flows from the Bible passage, that you want to communicate. I’ve found this will be enormously helpful in preaching – because then when you preach you won’t be saying random things, but rather trying to communicate a particular truth.

At theological college, in my first year preaching class we learned to ask four deceptively simple questions about our sermon: What do people need to know? And why? What do people need to do? And why? A sermon is not simply a transfer of information, it’s a call to action. In order for that to be effective you need to have a clear purpose of the sermon, a goal, an aim.

Let’s think about Michael Curry for a second: did he do this? I’m not sure that he did. He talked a lot about love – he mentioned it over 50 times – but was there a particular message? If anything, his message was “wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all tried harder to love each other” – which, leaving aside the problems I’ve already talked about – I’m not sure is a particularly coherent Christian aim.

2. The ‘So What?’ test

Another factor of a sermon, as I’ve already mentioned, is a call to action. That is – preachers don’t want people simply to understand something. They want them to do something. In every sermon I preach I try to think about ‘application’ – that is, how the particular theological truth I’m communicating connects with people’s lives – how they can put what I’m saying into practice. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes this is not so easy – but it’s really important to do.

For example, if you’re teaching on (say) Romans 8:28, rather than simply saying “God works everything for good in your life” – it would be much more effective to say “think about the toughest situation you’re facing right now. God can and will use even that situation for good.” I’d maybe give an example from my own life of how God used a tough situation.

In other words, don’t just give people the abstract truth – ground it in concrete things.

Did Michael Curry do this? Again – he talked a lot about how love can change the world, but he didn’t really talk about what we should actually do – beyond simply ‘love each other more’. I don’t think that’s really a helpful application – particularly given that we find it difficult to love. That’s the thing: the rubber hits the road in preaching when you talk to people about how to deal with genuine struggles they have. If you don’t deal with people’s sin, you haven’t really preached.

3. Talking like a normal person

Another of the really helpful things I’ve learned over the years about preaching is that God uses the whole person to preach. God doesn’t call preachers to leave behind everything when they come into the pulpit. God uses me, a sinner, to preach to other sinners, to talk about finding his grace. God has given me my personality, my life, my experiences, gifts, etc – I bring them all with me into the pulpit.

In other words, when people see you in the pulpit, they should see ‘the real you’. I think this is another mistake people who start out preaching (or public speaking) often make: they write out sermons in full, and them read them as if they’re reading the news. I’d say – God has given you a personality for a reason. Don’t become someone else in the pulpit – just talk as you would talk to a friend. In this day and age, authenticity is a big thing – people can perceive when you’re trying to put on an act. Being genuine matters a lot more than it used to.

You need to engage with people on an emotional level – and in order to do that, they need to see you as a real person – not someone you’re presenting to mask the real you. (On a practical note – I’ve found it helpful to get away from writing out a full script with sermons. We write differently to how we talk. But it’s not time to talk about that here,)

Did Michael Curry do this? This is a tricky one because I certainly think his personality shone through. At the same time, I’m not sure he came across as very authentic – he didn’t talk about himself or reveal anything. I don’t think he really connected emotionally. To me, the sermon was like listening to Blur – it may sound technically impressive but didn’t get you in the heart like Oasis. (Yes, I’m an Oasis man rather than a Blur man. I know that many people prefer Blur, so this point is of course subjective… if you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up ‘Britpop’)

4. Leave them with Jesus

The apostle Paul wrote these words in his first letter to the Corinthians:

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. 1 Corinthians 2:1-4

What had prompted him to write this? It’s possible there were others coming in who the Corinthian church thought were brilliant because of their excellent preaching – they were rhetorically gifted and their sermons sounded learned and wise. But they weren’t preaching the true gospel. Paul, by contrast, says that he did not come “with eloquence or human wisdom” but rather preaching “Jesus Christ and him crucified”, “with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power”. Why? “So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

I think this is the heart of the matter: true preaching leaves people with Christ. There’s a lovely line in the last verse of the hymn “May the Mind of Christ my Saviour“:

May His beauty rest upon me
As I seek the lost to win,
And may they forget the channel,
Seeing only Him.

“May they forget the channel, seeing only Him.” I think that’s a wonderful description of good preaching: people are left with the beauty and glory of Jesus, rather than the preacher. This is what I love about Spurgeon – he was extraordinarily gifted with words, but he always, always, always brought people to Christ. Spurgeon knew, as all good preachers do, that Christ is what we need. People don’t need a good sermon for its own sake – people need Jesus.

Did Michael Curry do this? I think it’s hugely telling that after the sermon people weren’t talking about Jesus – they were talking about Michael Curry. Straight after the sermon, the commentator Huw Edwards summarised the sermon by talking about love – and not at all about Jesus. And that, to my mind, is the biggest failure of the sermon.

I am not a great preacher, but in every sermon I try to commend Christ in some way. I was preaching at a wedding this afternoon, and I said to them – if you want to love, don’t look to yourselves, look to Jesus. Christ is the one we proclaim, not ourselves. Judging by what people have been talking about this last week, Michael Curry did a pretty good job at proclaiming himself… not so much a good job at proclaiming Christ.

I pray that it may never be the case for me that people talk or think about me and the sermon more than they talk or think about Christ.

May 26, 2018
Preaching and communication: Lessons from the Sermon on the Mount

Over the last few weeks I’ve been spending a bit of time in Matthew 5 preparing for various sermons. As well as being struck by how rich the Sermon on the Mount is – you could easily do a sermon series on the Beatitudes, for example – I’ve been struck by how profound Jesus is as a communicator. Jesus is a wise, learned and skillful communicator – he communicates deep truths in a way which we can understand.

I think there are lessons to be learned here for preachers – not least myself! Here are a just two of the things I’ve found to learn from with Jesus’ preaching, I’m sure there are many other things you could say.

Use positive and negative examples

Several times Jesus uses this technique. We are to be salt and light – salt, in the sense of being distinctive and preserving and preventing decay, and light, in the sense of doing good deeds. We are to avoid taking revenge but positively love our enemies. The negative – what we are to avoid doing – coupled with the positive – what we should do.

How often in my sermons do I only focus on one or other of those? I think it’s very helpful to have both together. What bearing does this particular passage have on my life? What should I not be doing? And what should I be doing instead? Christians sometimes have a (not totally undeserved) reputation for being ‘Thou Shalt Not’ people. But we need to hear both the negative and positive side: our vision needs to be transformed.

How do we turn away from our sins, and what do we turn to instead? I think this is helpful to think about as a general rule in sermon preparation.

Use (several) everyday examples

Jesus used salt and light as an example. Everybody knows what salt and light are – it makes it easy to understand his point. Jesus illustrated complex, abstract points with simple, concrete things. I think this is a big challenge for me: I like to deal in fairly abstract ideas, it’s a lot harder to ground them in reality. This is one of the things Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick. George Orwell wrote about this as far back as 1946 in “Politics and the English Language”. People can latch on to things which are concrete and specific, ideas and concepts can be harder to grasp.

The other thing is, Jesus often illustrates with several practical examples. In the passage I’m preaching on Sunday morning (Matthew 5:38-48), Jesus says: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” – before giving no less than four practical examples of what that might look like.

One fairly short principle, followed by lots of very practical application. Quite a difference from my sermons.

Although we often focus on the content of Jesus’ teaching – rightly, of course – I think it’s good sometimes to take a step back and look at how Jesus taught. It’s something I know I need to bear in mind each time I preach. Am I showing people what obedience to God would look like – positively and negatively? And do I help ground what I’m saying in regular, everyday experience?

February 15, 2017