Proclaimer Blog
The ministry of the word is an And
John Benton has written a perceptive piece as his leader in this month's Evangelicals Now. You can read it online here. His point, in essence is, thank God for courses which are teaching people to preach accurately. But this is not enough. Are we teaching (and showing people the importance) people how to pray. We don't just need accurate preachers. We need powerful preachers.
Amen and amen.
And, I might add. It's not just the preachers. It's churches too. How many church prayer meetings whether in small groups or in a larger context, spontaneously (i.e. without being asked) pray for the coming Sunday's ministry? Not many. We've moved in our church from having an elders prayer meeting before the service (very priestly!) to having a church prayer meeting – i.e. everyone's invited. It's small still – but the point is, we call everyone to pray for the ministry of the word. It's that important.
This idea of preachers and churches praying is the subject of a challenging chapter by John Armstrong in the book he edits – now somewhat out of date, but still worth some time. It's called The coming evangelical crisis.
More recently, we felt so strongly about this that we asked Stuart Olyott to write an article for our annual brochure, The ministry of the word is an and, which we've now uploaded to the site as a pdf here.