Proclaimer Blog
Blogging through Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers
Now that the Cornhill term is over I’m getting down to some more intensive reading on preaching. One I’m particularly enjoying is Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers. The book contains lectures delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969. As I chip my way through it, a blog per chapter will crop up here occasionally, summarising the content and offering some reflections.
Chapter 1. The Primacy of Preaching
On the second page, Lloyd-Jones says: ‘the main trouble arises from the fact that people are not clear in their minds as to what preaching really is.’ He then speaks of some of the key factors, as he sees them:
– a right reaction against ‘pulpiteerism’, which seeks in the end to entertain through showmanship;
– an emphasis on ‘personal work’ / ‘counselling’ will grow to the extent that confidence in preaching fades;
– tape-recording is ‘the peculiar and special abomination at this present time’. (It’s perhaps a mercy that he didn’t live to see any church websites – or indeed this http://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/, although many of us are hugely grateful for it).
The chapter ends with an excellent summary which reminds us how preaching was central to the ministries of Jesus and the apostles, with Acts 6 emerging as a crucial one in the Doctor’s understanding of the issue.
Reflections
He is surely right that our understanding of the nature of preaching is not as rich as it ought to be. My colleague Jonathan Griffiths and I are doing a little work on this, and are finding that quite a number of otherwise excellent books on preaching aren’t as richly exegetical and theological as one would like them to be in answering the question: what is preaching?
He does not play ‘personal work’ off against preaching, as later chapters will show, but the insight is surely right: a pastor who spends so much time with dozens of individuals during the week such that sermon prep time is regularly squeezed out is a pastor who has lost confidence in what he ought to be most confident about.
The six pages on the primacy of preaching in Jesus and apostles is a wonderful little tonic for a pastor to return to, to show him where his weekly priorities might have been more set by man than by Scripture.