Proclaimer Blog
Pastoring the elderly
We had an interesting evening about the elderly at church last Sunday with Stephen Hammersley, CBE, the new Chief Executive of Pilgrim Friends Society. Some of the stats are breath-taking in terms of the growth in the numbers of those over 65 and also those over 85 (where dementia becomes a 25% reality).
It occurred to me once again that we are ill-equipped as churches to know how to minister into these situations. Stephen suggested, for example, that the secular care-world is much more advanced in understanding dementia and how to help those who suffer than the church is. In the church, very few people have begun to build any kind of pastoral theology around this huge issue.
Two quotes, in essence saying the same thing, stood out. First Billy Graham: ‘All my life I was taught how to die as a Christian, but no one ever taught me how I ought to live in the years before I die…it is not easy.’ Then John Stott: ‘I knew I had to prepare for eternity, but no-one told me I had to prepare for being old.’
Alongside these we might put the young pastor who, in my head at least, says, ‘All my training I’ve been taught how to minister to the fit and well, no-one ever taught me how to minister to the elderly.’
A glance at the bookshelves confirms the diagnosis. So many, many books on youth work. Some of them really good. So few books on pastoring the elderly (any decent ones at all?).
We need some thinking and help. It’s not just the NHS that has a ticking time bomb because of the ageing population. It’s the church too. Your church, in all probability.
Proclaimer Blog
Evangelical Ministry Assembly 2015
Easter has now come and gone and so it’s time to think about summer. In particular, time to get thinking about the EMA. This year’s conference is at the Barbican centre and runs from 22-24 June 2015. We think we’ve got one of the most important and exciting programmes we’ve had for some time. It’s pretty obvious that we’re living in a confused world and, frankly, many Christians are confused too. But when you stop and look carefully you realise that many of the issues we’re confused about are to do with identity. If only we had a more robust doctrine of humanity then some of the identity crises we face would diminish. We’d at least be able to think about them clearly.
So our plan this year is to tackle this important subject head on. Christopher Ash will be leading the morning expositions from some of the central chapters of John’s gospel. Bruce Ware and Tim Keller will be helping us work through a robust theology of humanity and how it relates to communicating the gospel. Reuben Hunter, Andrew Reid and Vaughan Roberts will be taking the closing expositions: Christ incarnate, Christ crucified and Christ glorified.
Our seminar streams are a mix of those for preachers (a preaching masterclass with Peter Adam, preaching Genesis with Andrew Reid, preaching refresher with Jonathan Griffiths), practical (Bruce Ware on the pastor at home, Kathleen Nielson leading a women’s track) and those related to our main topic (Mike Ovey on gender, John Wyatt on beginning and end of life, Tim Keller on crossing boundaries) plus a special seminar hosted by me on breaking down the barriers of race, age and class in church life.
Frankly, I want to go to everything! I hope you can make it. It promises to be an exciting three days together and – as always, the chances to connect with friends, make new ones, browse the excellent bookstore and sing praises to our God are all worth their weight in gold.
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.
Proclaimer Blog
PT at its worst
I recently heard an online interview in which a good man described the view that preaching is simply good Bible explanation as ‘PT at its worst’. I don’t mind that too much. I know the kind of thing he’s talking about. I’ve heard it a few times myself. PT’s heartbeat is to insist that if a man hasn’t worked to get his text right then he can have all the homiletical skills and emotional force in the world, and it still isn’t good preaching. If that’s taken too strongly in isolation from other aspects of the preaching gift, you will indeed get us at our worst.
However we here never want to push it further than it was intended to be pushed. One way this plays out for us is in what we try to give students at Cornhill, and how we try to assess them as they come to the end, giving advice to their sending churches. We’re not big on pulpit-craft, but we are constantly working on aspects of effective communication, alongside all the central text-work.
Now if someone in the end is not all that gifted at getting to the heart of the message of a Bible-text, we want to tell them so, even if they’re hilarious and inspiring story-tellers. It would in the end be unkind to them and to the church not to. We’re not telling them that they’re useless in God’s hands. If we communicate it well, we’re helping them see where they would be round pegs in round holes, in the Lord’s service.
But what about those students who are terrific at getting to the heart of a text, but who struggle to hold the attention of a body of listeners and fail to project much sense of an encounter with the Lord in and through the preached word? Well, it’s not always easy, but we try to ensure we tell them that we don’t yet see in them the gifts to be the lead preacher in a church. (We are, after all, the Proclamation Trust, not the Explanation Trust.) The Lord may one day grow that gift in them, but we don’t yet see it. If we didn’t communicate that to them, then we would see people leaving Cornhill who will bore congregations rigid but who think they’ve got our stamp of being good preachers. That would be PT at its worst.
Just saying, so you know what to expect if you think of sending someone to Cornhill.
And perhaps it helps us in assessing in our own church families who the next generation of preachers might be whom (we trust) the Lord will raise up.
Proclaimer Blog
The Passover sermon
On Good Friday I preached on Exodus 12. I admit that finding new Easter messages each year is both frustrating (I’m sure I’ve preached this sermon before) and exhilarating (isn’t this a wonderful privilege to preach on the cross?). This year I went for the Passover link – I wanted to help people see the riches there are in this typology.
There’s lots that can be said about Exodus 12, including some obscure details that it is possible to read a lot into (for example, the lamb being “guarded” for 14 days). I concentrated on just two verses – 12 and 13 – which give you Jesus’ sacrifice as both judgement on enemies (v12) and substitute for sin (v13). Rich, indeed.
But where do you go for application? This is where your biblical theology helps out. For the Passover takes you two places:
First, it takes you to the Lord’s Supper and so it takes you to a call for thankfulness. Then it takes you to 2 Cor 5.7 which is not just a proof text that “Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed” but links that truth to a call for gospel living. In full, “For Christ our Passover Lamb…”
An amazing truth. With deep implications.
Proclaimer Blog
Tracing themes in the Old Testament
One of the ways to preach Christ from the Old Testament is to see how he is the fulfilment of the many key themes that run throughout the Bible’s pages. This is rich picking for the preacher or Bible teacher and one of our issues is that we simply don’t know the themes well enough: what to look for? But here’s a simple solution: read Hebrews.
Just pause and think. I wonder if every major theme is covered?
- Revelation (chapter 1)
- Humanity (chapter 2)
- Moses (chapter 3)
- Land (chapters 3-4)
- Priesthood/high priesthood (chapters 5-7)
- Covenant (chapter 8)
- Tabernacle/Temple (chapter 9)
- Sacrifice (chapters 9-10)
- Faith (chapters 11-12)
With application at the end. It’s a masterclass of course with each segment segueing in the next. I love it – one of my favourite books of the Bible (am I allowed that?). And rich ground for the OT preacher. It would not be a bad discipline to read Hebrews through before getting ready to preach any OT book.
Proclaimer Blog
A tale of two sermons
A fortnight ago I heard two sermons in the space of just a couple of hours. Well, I say, sermons, but one was on the radio and was a pretty poor attempt. Both quoted 1 Cor 15. The first was from the Bishop of Leicester. It drew heavily on the reburial of Richard III (what a lot of nonsense!). Death comes to us all, said the speaker. True enough. “For in Adam all die” he said. Brilliant, I thought, we’re going to get the rest of verse 22.
It was not to be. Instead, we just got the burial of Richard III as a reminder that we all die and that – launching straight to 2 Cor 12.9, “My grace is sufficient for you” – that when people we love do die, God gives us sufficient grace to get through.
Never mind the leap of logic (I did not love Richard III and so his death doesn’t make me too sad). It was a wilful omission. To say “For in Adam all die” and NOT to say “so in Christ all will be made alive” is more than carelessness. It is obfuscation.
How thankful I was, therefore, to sit in a quite different sermon just a few minutes on where 1 Cor 15 was also quoted, but fully, together with gospel appeal and gospel comfort.
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
Amen and Amen.
Proclaimer Blog
The Spirit’s exegetical masterclass
I was reading John 21 this morning – appropriate stuff for Easter time. This is what I read:
22 Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.” 23 Because of this, the rumour spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?”
It’s one of those places where the Spirit himself does some exegesis for us. What I like about this particular moment is that the inspired text encourages us not to make texts bear what they were never intended to do.
For sure, without verse 23, we would have interpreted verse 22 the same way – but because of history, not because of exegesis. We would have said something like, “Well, we know John lived to an old age and died, and that Jesus hasn’t returned” so we would not make Peter’s mistake and load the text up.
But if we had been first Century Christians, would we really have had that insight? I doubt it. So here is the Holy Spirit’s Exegetical Lesson – take care not to load onto texts weights that they cannot bear.
Mark 13.7 anyone. For starters?
Proclaimer Blog
‘Framework’ preaching, part 4
“Don’t be a framework preacher” is a warning often given round these parts. I’m reflecting on it in this little series of posts. So far I’ve pointed out that: (1) everyone has frameworks and systems that they bring to Scripture; (2) these frameworks are wonderful tools and also highly dangerous gifts for the preacher; (3) the best way to wield these frameworks as good tools for expository preaching is to get yourself as well tooled up with rich theology as you can.
In this final post I want to say this: sometimes deliberately preaching a framework is a good thing, but it’s a bad staple diet to offer.
If your church happens to have a confessional commitment that shapes its belief and life in particular ways, it is surely reasonable occasionally to make that the focus of a particular sermon or short series – effectively saying, “Here’s the biblical basis for why we believe and live as we do in this church/denomination” (although a 39-part series, say, is probably too long!). The point of our framework warning is not to say that a preacher ought never do that, but to post a strong warning against lazily sliding into that while kidding yourself that you’ve put in the hard slog required to expound faithfully the passage that’s been set.
The same is true of doctrinal preaching. Cornhill students often ask how much of a church’s preaching ought to be explicitly doctrinal. I try not to give a ‘party line’ answer to that, because there shouldn’t be one. All I can give is my own practice when I was a pastor. I wanted 80% of our diet (i.e. our staple) to be consecutive exposition, with occasional and deliberate doctrinal asides. The remaining 20% was thematic, divided into pastoral and doctrinal. I reckoned that pattern had a fighting chance of keeping me sharp on letting Scripture speak for itself to the people, while ensuring that they were also slowly educated in the right kinds of framework that would help them make sense of biblical truth as a whole.
Proclaimer Blog
‘Framework’ preaching, part 3
“Don’t be a framework preacher” is a warning often given round these parts. I’m reflecting on it in this little series of posts. So far I’ve pointed out that everyone has frameworks and systems that they bring to Scripture, and that these frameworks are wonderful tools and also highly dangerous gifts for the preacher.
Now I want to go a step further and zoom in a little on the two key kinds of framework: biblical theology and systematic theology. My simple point for today is this: the preacher has got to be well schooled in both. As a preacher, I want to go discerningly to both Sydney and Philadelphia (and not just for my holidays).
A good biblical theology effectively gives the preacher a proper understanding of the full biblical context in which his preaching passage is set. What is here that builds on key themes that have been developing so far? What is here that will be further unfolded in what comes later? That context is crucial is helping us see what the divine author intended us to be struck by in this particular passage.
Moreover, a good biblical theology is made up of good biblical theologies. The narrative of Scripture is very rich. It can be recounted and summarised in more than one faithful way. British evangelical circles learnt an enormous amount about biblical theology, from a particular perspective and to our huge benefit, from Sydney in recent years. That appears to be being broadened in some places now by a discovery of how that can be enriched by a covenantal account of Scripture, and that is all to the good. The title of a recent monster-work – Kingdom Through Covenant – to my mind brings the two perspectives together well.
A good systematic theology gives the preacher a proper understanding of how the content of his preaching passage relates conceptually and logically to other related themes in Scripture. It will also sometimes give him eyes to see links that the passage itself makes that he might otherwise have missed. A personal example: Reformed soteriology has a particular focus on the whole of Christ’s heavenly and earthly career as involved in his work of salvation. Learning of this and becoming convinced that it’s right there in Scripture helped me to see the OT as pointing forward to Christ in rather more profound ways than I might otherwise have done.
As with biblical theology, good systematic theology is really good systematic theologies. We should never allow our framework to set into a stone-hard monolith which ends up explaining a great deal of biblical material away.
These frameworks are necessary tools for the task of being the best expository preachers we can be. It’s a mistake to think we have done the job well when all we’ve really done is polish our tools, just as it’s a mistake to think we can do a good job without the right tools.