Why is So Much Preaching So Poor? (Part 1 of 3)

Preaching is fundamental to Protestantism. The proclamation of God's word is the primary means by which the Christian encounters God. So the obvious question is: why is so much preaching so poor?

This is not a problem found only in small churches of which nobody has ever heard. A few years ago I was at a conference where a group of preachers were being showcased as models to follow. One of the featured preachers who was from one of the largest and most well-known evangelical churches in the YRR universe delivered a sermon which was full of endearing personal anecdotes. By the end, I really warmed to him as a person. But as preaching, it was simply awful, functionally unconnected to the biblical text he had read beforehand. Frankly, he could have replaced the Bible reading with a soliloquy from King Lear and would not have had to change one sentence of the sermon. Well-delivered and moving it may have been; but as preaching it was complete bosh. But sadly it was bosh presented to a crowd of thousands as a model of what to do in the pulpit.

So why is it that so much preaching, even celebrity conference preaching, is so poor? One cannot answer this in a single sentence. Sermons can be poor for a variety of reasons. Here are the eight which seem to me most significant. I divide them into the theological, the cultural and the technical.

Theological

First, the theological: to preach well, the preacher has to understand what he is doing. Understanding what a task is is basic to performing the task well. If you think that preaching is about communicating information or providing entertainment or fostering a conversation, that will shape how you preach. The greatest danger for seminary students is that they assume the lectures they hear in class are the model for the sermons they are to deliver from the pulpit.  They are not. Preaching is a theological act. The preacher finds his counterpart not in the lecture theatre or the classroom or, most ghastly of all, on the stand-up comedy circuit. He finds him in the Old Testament prophets, bringing a confrontational word from the Lord which explains reality and demands a response. 

Cultural

Second, there is a failure to provide proper context for the training of preachers. Seminaries can only do so much; and preaching three or four times to classmates while being videoed is not adequate preparation for the pulpit. This situation is not helped by the strange Presbyterian practice of discouraging those who are not licensed to preach from preaching. How can one license a man to preach unless one knows he can preach? And how can one know that unless he has had some real experience in a real church situation? The loss of the evening service in many churches is not simply a sad testimony to the loss of the Lord's Day; it also limits preaching opportunities for those in training. Churches need to do a better job of encouraging those who think they might be called as preachers to test their gifts, perhaps at Sunday afternoon services at care homes or elsewhere. Creative thinking is required.

(To be continued)

 

From an article published November 2013 at: http://www.reformation21.org/articles/why-is-so-much-preaching-so-poor.php by Carl R. Trueman - Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary. His latest book is The Creedal Imperative (Crossway, 2012).