This book has done sterling service but it ceases to be useful if it comes to entomb the lively, life-giving story to which it bears witness. And if it becomes a kind of text book, pushing preaching remorselessly towards cerebral utterance, erudite exegesis and the careful language of lawyers, then we must surely work hard to release the message we preach from its bondage. And the internet (I never thought I’d be caught admitting this) is just the catalyzing force which might enable this to happen. It might just be for the twenty-first century what the printing press was to the sixteenth. It might be the tool which allows our story to take wings again.
Here are essays which view the art of preaching from a variety of standpoints – that of the listener, or of the herald commissioned to announce good news, or of the cultural context within which sermons are prepared and delivered. We are given pen pictures of the place of preaching in our varying church traditions. I especially liked the insight given of how the ‘Black church’ goes about it – all that interaction, those sighs and hallelujahs, the rhetorical ‘tricks of the trace’ and the heightened atmosphere where expectation features large, the sheer drama of it all.
I have already referred to the art of preaching, and that is an appropriate way of describing it. In the Middle Ages, the three strands of the ars preadicandi laid it upon the preacher to persuade, instruct and delight his hearers in equal measure. And there’s much in what follows that addresses one or more of these lines of thought, although I personally might have wanted a little more attention given to the way ‘delight’ might be created in the hearts of those listening to sermons.
I was sure there would be a reference within these pages to the classical definition of preaching given by Phillips Brooks in his 1877 Lectures on Preaching given at Yale. There invariably is, but I didn’t expect it to appear quite as late in the book as it does. ‘Truth through personality’ remains as good a starting point for understanding the essence of preaching as any. I’ve used it often enough myself. But how I wish someone would amplify that definition with just a little more reference to what Brooks wrote just a few sentences later. This how he went on:
The truth [proclaimed] must come really through the person, not merely over his lips, not merely into his understanding and out through his pen. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him.
The gender-exclusive language employed by Brooks is, of course, of its time but our insistence on a literary style more generous to all its readers cannot prevent us from sensing and agreeing with the thrust of his argument. Nor from recognizing the distinction he makes between two different kinds of preacher. He writes how
the Gospel has come over one of them and reaches us tinged and flavoured with his superficial characteristics, belittled with his littleness. The Gospel has come through the other, and we received it impressed and winged with all the earnestness and strength that there is in him.
Brooks brings his case to its conclusion with a graphic contrast. ‘In the first case’, he writes, ‘the [preacher] has been but a printing machine or a trumpet. In the other case he has been a true [human being] and a real messenger of God.’
I and, I suspect, all of us who attempt the noble art of preaching, can easily acknowledge that we have gone down each of these paths from time to time. Preaching has been both an exercise emanating from our thinking selves, an exhortation lacking depth or subtlety, and also something altogether more profound. When our words are conceived in the deepest parts of our being, when they resonate with everything we try to do in the rest of our lives, when they are marked with the ring of sincerity and truth, it is not difficult to recognize the way our words acquire an energy and strength which is not of our own making. The God-given-ness, God-blessedness, of the humble work of ordinary men and women who endeavour to say something meaningful about the extraordinary generosity of their Maker, the unfathomable love of their Heavenly Father, is surely as much a miracle as any ever recorded. Here is the bread from heaven that feeds us and our listeners now and evermore – humble scraps which somehow nourish multitudes.
Those of us who preach know how passionate an exercise it all is. Those who listen deserve only the best fare, food which offers a foretaste of the heavenly banquet itself. And those who have put their heads together, given some serious thought to the preacher’s task, and now offer their work to the public are to be commended for continuing the struggle to give preaching a future at least as significant and transformative as its past.
Leslie Griffiths, One of Mr Wesley’s Preachers
Contributors
Ruthlyn Bradshaw has been in ministry for 37 years. A native of Montserrat, she migrated at an early age to Boston, USA, where she received most of her formal education and early theological training. After some years she returned to her homeland, Montserrat, and for several years served as pastor, until the volcanic eruption caused her to migrate in 1997 to England, where she currently serves as senior pastor for two branches of the New Life Assembly Fellowship of Churches. Her penchant for learning, culminating in a Master’s degree in Applied Theology from Spurgeon’s College in the UK, has added to her capacity to preach and counsel with uncommon insight. She is currently a doctoral student and faculty member in two theological institutions.
Susan Durber is a minister of the United Reformed Church, presently serving as Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge, where she is leading the college in its development from a traditional theological college to a resource centre for the whole of the URC. She has served churches in rural, inner city, suburban and city centre settings. She publishes prayers, books and articles on preaching, and contributes regularly to the URC’s Reform magazine. She is also on the Standing Commission of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches.
Leslie J. Francis is Professor of Religions and Education within the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, University of Warwick, England, and Canon Theologian at Bangor Cathedral, Wales. His research interests are in practical theology, empirical theology and the psychology of religion. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which research traditions within the field of ‘personality and individual differences’ may help to inform a ‘theology of individual differences’. It is this theological approach that has given rise to the SIFT method of biblical hermeneutics and liturgical preaching.
Paul Johns is a Methodist Local Preacher and Director of the College of Preachers. He has spent most of his working life as a management consultant working in industries as diverse as food production, finance and football. As well as tutoring in preaching, he writes plays and stories and is a former contributor to BBC’s Thought for the Day. He also works voluntarily for a small Christian–Muslim development agency promoting interfaith co-operation in Bosnia and visits that country frequently. He has Masters degrees in History from Oxford and in Theology (preaching) from the University of Wales.
Richard Littledale is the Minister of Teddington Baptist Church, in West London, and has always had an interest in innovative and creative communication. He has written books for the Baptist Union of Great Britain and the Saint Andrew Press on the subject. His first book with Saint Andrew Press, Stale Bread, is a guide to narrative preaching, and his second, the Preacher’s A to Z, is a preacher’s companion on the craft and practice of preaching. Richard is a regular contributor to Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2 and a tutor with the College of Preachers.
Duncan Macpherson is a Roman Catholic Permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Westminster. He preaches regularly in several Catholic churches as well as in those of other Christian traditions. Retiring from lecturing in Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s University College, Twickenham, in 2000, he obtained his D.Min. in Preaching from the Aquinas Institute in St Louis Missouri in 2003. He is a tutor and executive member of the College of Preachers and is the features
