The colour of preaching
A friend of mine once said, ‘You can tell the colour of a preacher’s sermons by the colour of the spines of the books in his library!’ He was being a little facetious, but there is more than a grain of truth in his observation. Too many sermons belong to a bygone era because their composers have spent too much time living in that era – at least in a virtual sense through what they choose to read. Their sermons may be exegetically accurate and doctrinally orthodox, but they can be utterly divorced from the world their congregations live in.
It brings us into the realm of the preacher’s self-understanding in terms of who he is and how he’s called to function. The long-hand answer to that is found in some measure in the range of Greek and Hebrew words associated with preachers and preaching (and that may be the basis of a future post), but there is a more succinct answer as well. It is captured in the title of John Stott’s book published in the UK as I Believe in Preaching. Its US title is Between Two Worlds.
The rationale for the decision to publish under a different title came from Stott’s reference to John Chrysostom in one of its chapters. There he highlighted the fact that the ‘Golden Mouth’ of preachers in the 4th Century church saw himself as a bridge between two worlds: the world of the Bible and the world(s) in which his hearers lived.
On the one hand his labours in the first of those worlds, the Word of God, was constrained by all the disciplines of careful exegesis with all its many facets, how it was communicated was constrained by the world into which he was speaking. In that sense, the ‘what’ of his message was fixed, but the ‘way’ it was delivered was not.
“Those preachers who have had the greatest impact have not only connected deeply with the text they proclaim, but also with the people and culture into which they speak.”
It’s not hard to see illustrations of this principle at work in the ministries of Christ and of the apostle Paul. In the case of Christ, a glance at how he ‘preached’ – albeit one-on-one – to Nicodemus and to the woman at the well in two consecutive chapters in John shows how the same essential message was conveyed in two very different ways to two extremely different people. With Paul, the same can be seen in Acts 17 in three preaching opportunities recorded there. The first two, addressed to Jewish, biblically literate audiences, were very different from the third addressed to the Areopagus. In all three he preached Christ; but in the third he preached him without naming him. The same has been true for preachers in all ages; those who have had the greatest impact are those who have not only connected deeply with the text they proclaim, but who also connect deeply with the people and culture into which they speak.
What does that mean in practical terms? Pastor A.N. Martin codified it in his counsel to preachers in relation to their reading habits. Of the six books that he urged ministers to be reading in any given week, one at least had to have a secular bent – and this on top of having a weekly subscription to Time or Newsweek! Or, for those who prefer British role models, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones would saturate himself in the weekend papers as part of the finishing touch to his sermon preparation for Sundays. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his sermons caught the attention even of the unbelieving world of his day.
The point is this: if we are not only going to be faithful, but also increasingly effective preachers, then we need to cultivate the art of not just speaking out of the Word, but into the world!
