Proclaimer Blog
John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Preaching
In Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers he describes at one point what you might call the preacher’s glory-moment: ‘an awareness of a power not your own thrilling through the whole of your being … You are a man ‘possessed’, you are taken hold of, and taken up’ (p.326).
Stott, by contrast, speaks of the same kind of moment in I Believe in Preaching in a very different way: ‘The most privileged and moving experience a preacher can have’ is when ‘the preacher is forgotten and the people are face to face with the living God’. His illustrations are telling: the preacher is then like a best man at a wedding or an orchestra conductor at a concert, whose very role is to fade into the background (pp.326-28). Note the key difference here: whether, and to what extent, we should pay much theological attention to the preacher himself, as the man he is at that moment, as a vehicle for what God is doing in his sermon. Preachers need the humility to get out of the way, says Stott (p.328). I think Lloyd-Jones would respond with something like: ‘certainly, get your pride in your eloquence and your cleverness out of the way; but don’t self-effacingly get yourself out of the way: you can’t; you mustn’t. You as a person, not just as a talking-machine, are God’s means at that moment.’
This theology finds expression in the kind of phrases which Lloyd-Jones often used at key moments in his sermons: “I am here this morning to tell you…”. Stott, however, is so concerned that preachers not abuse their authority that he judges it wise not to say “I say to you”, but to stick mostly with the first person plural. In light of all this, I doubt that it is incidental that Stott’s book is called I Believe in Preaching, whereas Lloyd-Jones’ title is Preaching and Preachers. My hunch is that this particular difference between the two men’s views gets close to the heart of things.
Many observations could be made about this, but here is just one. The view you take on this point is massively determined by personality and culture. If you dislike public displays of emotion and come from a culture in which the person who seems to deflect attention coolly away from himself is usually judged to be the better man, then Stott will probably appeal to you. If, though, you are someone who thinks that displays of passion often convey greater truth and authenticity than deliberate coolness, especially when it comes to the things of God, then you’ll probably prefer Lloyd-Jones on this point.
It’s not that Scripture has nothing to say on this – it does. But before we ever get to that, we need to have some perspective on the extent to which our theology of something as personal to us as preaching is driven by our own sense of how we want others to see us.