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.