Proclaimer Blog
What we’re talking about when we talk about preaching
On the second page of his new book on sermon application (Cutting to the Heart, IVP) Chris Green says something that you might think ought to shock us. He says that, in his experience of training young preachers, they found far more resources to help them with text-work than with sermon application. He concludes: ‘I noticed that it wasn’t just their pastoral inexperience that made them dry and unapplied – they actually had an assumption that being dry and unapplied was what they were supposed to be doing.’
It’s worth reading that quote again (the italics are his, by the way). Not many of these young preachers will have been explicitly taught ‘your job is to be dry and unapplied’. Although a few teachers have in fact sometimes been heard to say something like that about application, the argument hasn’t been hugely influential. Yet somewhere along the line a large number of the men whom Chris has trained have imbibed the notion. How did that happen?
There’ll be a number of answers to that, but Chris points us to one: they’ve been given far more training resources on exegesis than they have on application. And of course any diligent disciple will naturally assume that what his teachers and mentors talk about most is what they really value, and what they don’t talk about much doesn’t really matter. Perhaps a generation of preachers who are now old enough to be looked up to by younger men assumed that good application is vital, but didn’t talk about it much. And of course, as we know from other areas, what one generation assumes, the next often denies.
These older preachers may well be terrific appliers of Scripture in their own sermons, but if that’s not something they talk excitedly about at length when they talk about preaching, the younger men are not likely to notice it. (Someone said to me when I came to Cornhill: Don’t forget that the things the students will remember most about your teaching are the things they see you get excited about. Wise advice.)
So a question for all of those old enough to be training young preachers, including those who pastor smaller churches and have maybe just one young man they’re trying to bring on as a preacher… Those we train will draw equally strong conclusions from what we don’t talk about as from what we do. You don’t have to deny something outright to be heard to do it down.
Is it vital to bash your head against a text for as long as it takes to discern what it says, not what your framework says? Of course it is, a thousand times over. But if that’s what I talk about most of the time when I talk to younger preachers, if that’s the only thing about preaching I’m heard to get excited about, the preachers I turn out won’t be what they should be.