Proclaimer Blog
May no new thing arise
I love reading – and not just Christian books, but newspapers, novels (old and new), biographies, history books. I'm a bit of a bookworm. However, I must confess, that one series of books I read time and time again are Patick O'Brians series of 21 naval novels set in the early 19th Century. They are boys-own stuff; lots of swashbuckling but with interesting character development and botany! O'Brian knows his stuff – both naval, botanic (I think!) and Catalan – for one of his heroes is a Catalan independentist. He has this character regularly speak a Catalan proverb: May no new thing arise. We rather like that here in the office as a tag for ministry. It's not that we don't want new things in terms of new birth and new levels of sanctification of course; by no means! Nor do we reject application and delivery that is relevant to a 21st Century audience.
However, we do recognise that much of ministry is same old, same old. This is necessarily so because people don't change and, thankfully, God and his word do not change. Therefore, novelty as a ministry objective is very, very dangerous. This is a sweeping statement – I recognise that. And it is true, we have to be looking at the ways we do things constantly to evaluate ourselves against Scripture. But fundamentally there is nothing new that a preacher has to do. And God help the preacher who makes it his objective to find something new to say.
Tidball (in Preacher keep yourself from idols) is very helpful on this.
The teachers of the early church never moved beyond the original apostolic gospel, even though they constantly engaged in making fresh applications of it. Time and time again, they drew people to the original apostolic gospel and encouraged them to remain loyal to it, while always seeking to make it relevant to the new challenges believers were facing.
May no new thing arise.