Proclaimer Blog
A tune up for preachers
A couple of weeks back I was at week 2 of New Word Alive along with three or four thousand others. It was thirteen years since I last went to (old) Word Alive, and it was a delight to be back. I was there with my family, and one of the simple joys of it for us was to be together with such a large number of believers. (Other smaller delights: the pretty setting of Conway Castle, and a run along the sea-front.) When you spend most of your time in a smaller church, as we have for the last nine years or so, that is a pretty significant pleasure.
I was at NWA to lead a couple of seminars on preaching, aimed at more experienced preachers, to which I gave the title ‘A tune-up for preachers’. As the focus I took issues of communication: illustration, application, and the physical aspects of preaching. The latter especially might not be regarded far and wide as PT’s bread and butter, but every wise preacher knows how vital it is, and it’s something I have been thinking about for a while. I said at the outset that I was assuming that everyone there had all the key convictions about expository preaching in place and was always working on them – and that if they did not they should ignore everything that followed, as I don’t have much interest in helping someone be a better communicator if what they’re about is something other than expounding Scripture faithfully.
One of the elephants in the room around PT circles is that a faithful exposition that has a decent number of illustrations and makes a stab at application can still be profoundly dull and uninspiring. I increasingly want to say (both of my own sermons and others’) that such a sermon is only partially faithful to Scripture at best. One thing God’s word never is, is dull and uninspiring, and preaching needs to be faithful to Scripture’s character, as well as to its propositional content. Lord preserve me from ever making it seem dull – even accidentally, out of a (right) desire to point my hearers away from myself and to Christ.
Over the next few days’ blogs I’ll give you a few more musings from these seminars, along with some stuff from the cutting-room floor that didn’t make it into the seminars.