Proclaimer Blog
Don’t forget the autumn ministers
We're looking forward to welcoming some of you to the autumn ministers conference. It runs from 11-14 November (Mon through Thurs) at Hothorpe Hall in Leicestershire and we're looking forward to having David Gibb (Leyland) preaching and teaching on Book 1 of the psalms and Wallace Benn on maintaining momentum in ministry – both personally and as church leaders. These are critical issues. We're excited about Book 1 of the psalms too because these rich songs and poems are not always straightforward to preach as Christian literature. As with all our conferences, we've also planned in time to relax and meet with friends, so we hope and trust and pray the time away will be refreshing both physically and spiritually.
I've enjoyed reading Lee Gatiss' St Antholin's lecture on Edmund Grindal recently. He was strong on preaching and defended preaching groups/conferences robustly to Queen Elizabeth. I don't think our present Elizabeth as quite the objections that her namesake did, but it amused me to see why he thought preaching conferences were such a good idea:
- Preaching conferences make ministers more skilful preachers.
- They remove preachers from 'idleness, wandering, gaming etc'
- They persuade the doctrinally dodgy to confess the truth.
- They drive ignorant ministers to study harder.
- They show lay people that the clergy are not lazy.
- The train up good preachers to 'beat down Popery.'
Paraphrased by Lee of course. I'm not sure we can say, hand on heart, that these are our six drivers behind preaching conferences, but they made us smile and have a ring of truth about what we do. We long to better handle the word of God. We long to see godliness develop in preachers whom we serve. We long that as iron sharpens iron, we would help one another to grasp, understand and believe the truth. We long to encourage good and faithful study of God's word. We long that churches would see their pastor's progress. And we long to enable preachers to refute falsehood, even though we might not express it as "beating down Popery."
So, yes, these made us smile. But they also still ring true, 450 years on. Book here for the full Grindal experience, otherwise known as the autumn ministers conference. Lee's booklet on Grindal is out shortly from the Latimer Trust.