Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-048

GOOD PREACHING (2)

From ‘Sunrise Sunset’ (HarperCollins/Harper San Francisco), Rowland Croucher’s book of daily meditations. Feel free to use or adapt it.

How are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? Romans 10:14.

Good preaching is pastoral (comforting the afflicted) and prophetic (afflicting the comfortable). It is interesting, warm, ‘confessional’ (the preacher is a sinner needing grace too), dialogical and interactive. Preaching is ‘communicating truth through personality’ (Phillips Brooks). The best preachers are ‘bilingual’, understanding both the language of theology, and the language of the people.

Good preaching exalts Christ: our response is not ‘what great oratory!’ but ‘what a great Saviour!’ Good preaching has both heat and light: heat without light leaves us scorched and brittle; light may help us ‘see’ (and as Horace Bushnell once said, there can be no preaching worth the name if there is no thinking), but knowledge without faith won’t save anybody. Good preaching touches mind and heart and will: we learn, we love, and we change.

It goes without saying that good preaching is not constantly negative, opposing anything and everything. We shepherds sometimes spend too much time mending fences and not enough time feeding the sheep. There will always be a prophetic dimension to our preaching, calling us to repentance. Sometimes, in our unwillingness to offend, our message is so muted and implicit that it has no cutting edge, and the main point virtually escapes the listener.

Lord, may preachers understand both your Word, and our world. Amen.