Proclaimer Blog
Jack’s back again.
A few people emailed me about last week's post about long series. It's quite true, of course, that long series are not necessarily good things without qualification. What – one reader pointed out – the problem was with the recent series of 24 is that the series was unable to sustain interest from viewers because of the quality (or lack of it) and the inability to sustain a coherent plot line.
All of this should ring bells for preachers. Long series can work, I submit, but we need to make some caveats:
- long narrative series will fail if the preacher robs the divine story of its pace, colour, characterisation and detail. Too much narrative teaching does this in spades. Our people cannot cope with a 36 week series on Numbers if we reduce everything to a series of bald propositions. Dull.
- long series will fail if we preachers fail to reflect the detail of the text in the glory of the gospel we are preaching. There are only so many times we can say "…and Jesus is the king we need" when preaching 2 Samuel. David is indeed a type of Christ, but the glory is in the detail as much as it is in the big picture. We need to preach the detail in the context of the big picture. That is not the same as simply preaching the big picture.
- long series will fail if don't allow the tone of the text to drive the sermon. I've been very aware of this preaching through Ezra recently. Sometimes, the text is gloomy. There is not much light. We are so keen to bring each sermon to its own gospel climax that we can fail to do justice to the tone of the text. That's a tough tension to hold, but we must try.
In many of these cases, our people are robbed of the dynamics of the section of Scripture that God intended. Long series can really only ever work if we are true to the way things were written down by the Spirit inspired authors.
We also need to be honest about our own limitations. Some of us will struggle more than others with long series. We are not all equally gifted. In the goodness of God and his sovereign power, that is all right. Preaching is more than what we are able to put in. But we must also think of ourselves with sober judgement, and that includes our teaching gifts. Put simply: some of us are more able communicators than others. That is no justification for the status quo. We must always be working and praying on communicating more effectively. And it's in this context that we can preach long series.