Proclaimer Blog
Two fundamental preaching mistakes (2)
If pursuing style over substance is not your temptation, praise God! But you are almost certainly tempted in the other direction. For the second fundamental preaching mistake is to pursue substance over style. All that matters in this kind of preaching is getting the text right. Now, don’t hear me wrong. Preachers must get the text right. But to think that in doing so, they have done all they need to prepare a sermon, they are sadly mistaken, dangerously mistaken.
I’ve just come back from a small European preaching consultation – a great time away with 12 other brothers from around Europe. One of our guys from Latvia gave me a great insight: we sometimes describe expository preaching as giving God the microphone, but if people are asleep in your sermons, you’ve just taken the microphone away from him again. Or, to push the metaphor, if doing the hard work of getting the text right is giving God the microphone, an empty delivery is just pushing the mute button.
Many of us conservative evangelicals readily extol the virtues of substance. We’re right to do so. But we must not ignore style. How we convey what we are to convey is important too. A good preacher is not just one who gets the text right, but conveys it in a way that engages listeners. Quite what that means, of course, is heavily dependent on your congregation and setting.
But it must be something you are thinking about. In the second year at Cornhill we keep working on students’ handling of the text: but not at the exclusion of style, for want of a better word. So we evaluate and try to help them with how they deliver what they have prepared as well as the content. That’s essential. We must avoid the kind of intellectual arrogance which assumes that if we’ve understood the text, then the sermon job is done. That’s as much a fundamental preaching mistake as pursuing style over substance, something we’re rightly critical about. It’s time for us to be critical about this imbalance too.