Proclaimer Blog
Preaching crosses the divide
One of the things that never ceases to surprise me is how preaching crosses evangelical divides which sometimes seem otherwise uncrossable. We never set out to make PT a place of evangelical networking alone – but on reflection it is not surprising that it has – to some extent – become that. Take our PT Cornhill training course. This year and last we've had Anglicans (from all kinds of churches including St Helen's, St Ebbe's, HTB, All Souls, coMission, village and rural churches, plants, evangelical and those only loosely so), FIEC, Independent Baptists, BU, Congregationalists, Presbyterians (IPC and Independent), Brethren, Calvary Chapel, Irish Baptist (our longest commuter!), Acts 29, NFI….the list goes on.
We have different tribes within our kind of evangelicalism. That should not surprise us. We have different convictions about churchmanship, baptism and so on which means that churches are necessarily different. But we all have key convictions about preaching, and churches and ministers can gather based on this core conviction. It's why the EMA and our preaching conferences have become places which demonstrate evangelical unity as a significant by-product.
And it works locally too. I belonged to a little preaching group when I was a local church pastor. It was made up of people from different kinds of churches and we developed close friendships which last through. The fellowship there became more significant than, say, a local denominational fraternal. It's why I often encourage local church ministers to set up such groups. We can fill our diaries with meetings, of course, but here is something useful and beneficial to plan in because preaching crosses divides that other efforts simply fail to tackle.