it's a good thing I like to dance
Mystery quote time. Who said this?
“Preaching is not the totality of the church. And if all you have is preaching, you don’t have the church. A church is a body of people who minister to each other. One of the purposes of preaching is to equip us for that and inspire us to love each other better.”
Guesses?
William H. Willimon on preaching and The King’s Speech:
The King’s Speech reminded me what a high vocation it is to enable others to find their voice in service to a God who uses our weakness to bring God’s gospel to speech. I preach today as the recipient of Lionel Logue-like instruction. One spring afternoon at Yale Divinity School I confessed to my teacher, Bill Muehl, that I was self-conscious about my thick southern accent, which everyone in New Haven seemed compelled to note and ridicule. “You can make good money in Texas with that accent,” Muehl assured me.
When I told him I had no intention of preaching in Texas, Muehl said, “Pity,” and then handed me a stack of reel-to-reel tapes. “Listen to these,” was his only instruction, “they are some of the greatest preachers of our time.”
I took the tapes back to my dorm room and spent the rest of the day listening to sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, William Sloane Coffin and Halford Luccock. Immediately I noted that none of these great preachers possessed a great voice—all of them had odd speech quirks and vocal weaknesses. I got the point: as in the Bible, God tends to call the “wrong” people, without a surfeit of gifts, to do God’s work.
Fosdick in particular made me laugh, with his high-pitched, nasal twang. But I couldn’t stop listening. Fosdick must have had something really important to say, I thought, for why else would a guy who sounded like that be speaking in public? I thought: I may not have the best voice in the world, but it’s as good as Harry Emerson Fosdick’s! That day I became a preacher.
As Paul says, God demonstrates God’s power in our weakness. In speaking up to smooth-talking Hitler, faltering, stammering King George demonstrated a peculiar power. But for any of that to happen, God needed someone to help the king find his voice. This is the difficult and holy vocation of the teaching of preaching.
Read the rest of Willimon’s post here. Order the book The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy here.
Thabiti Anyabwile responding to the assertion that the traditional sermon is the culprit in “crippling discipleship.”
I think that assertion errs in at least two ways:
1. It assumes that the primary or perhaps exclusive way of making disciples is the Sunday morning sermon.
Wherever that’s being assumed, it seems to me to be wholly in error. Preaching is necessary to but not sufficient for making disciples. It takes the entire body with every member every day to make solid disciples.
The reason we have spiritually immature believers (which we’ll always have in some measure) and burned out pastors isn’t because the pastor preaches every Sunday (which most pastors enjoy doing). 
The reason we have immature believers and burned out disciples is because so many Christians are not opening their lives, inviting others in, and making spiritual deposits in intentional disciple-making relationships.
The problem isn’t that we have preachers; the problem is that every disciple is not themselves making disciples as our Lord commands.
2. The assertion errs because it makes preaching to believers unnecessary when the NT makes it necessary.
Paul explicitly commands Timothy to “preach the word” in the gathered assembly. What word is that? Likely the OT, which Paul says elsewhere was written for our instruction and example. Insofar as Timothy is to “preach the word,” he’s doing some form of exposition in the assembly. It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
That was found in the comments section of a post called “Who’s Doing the Talking in Our Church Gatherings?” The entire post and about 2/3 of the comments are worth reading here.
I’m looking to do some collaborative sermon prep with you all.
I’m studying Ephesians in preparation for the launch of a new sermon series this week. Part of goal of the series is to communicate clearly about the goals of the many transitions we are making as a church.
I’m working with the metaphor of “a house on wheels” using a picture I took yesterday as a starting point (see below). We are trying to move a group of about 500 people out of the old one-focus paradigm of “if you build it they will come” to a new paradigm of both gathering for corporate worship but also scattering as witnesses being important as well.
Help me develop the ideas and applications if you’re interested. Comment below. Email me. @ me on Twitter. Facebook me. Whatever works…
“Preaching does not have to be an individualistic sort of activity. In fact, great preaching well understands this. The true preacher is not over against the Christian congregation but rather is an expression of the congregation.
The true Christian preacher affirms the faith of the congregation, and raises up the hope of the congregation. Much of the genius of great preachers is their ability to express the faith of the people to whom they are preaching”
Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, p. 271
(via:Doug)
A few weeks ago I wrote a post called “What If Pastor Can’t Preach?” in which I explored the idea that a lead pastor doesn’t necessarily need to be a great preacher. That started a good discussion worth reading in the comments section.
Yesterday someone left the following question there:
I came to this looking for insight on how to address our Pastor’s mediocre sermon writing and sub-par speaking skills. I love my pastor like a brother, but he clearly is not gifted for the puplit. In our small, struggling to survive congregation where he is the only one preaching, we have few returning visitors. Rambling thoughts, awkward phrasing & pacing, constant ums, and the tendency to jam new concepts into the sermon at the last minute challenge even the most attentive listeners.
Though exceptional in small groups due to his in-depth scriptural knowledge, few newcomers stick around long enough to see that side of him.
I no longer invite friends to church as each and every one has decided to “continue their search elsewhere.” He is extremely defensive about his sermons and no longer approachable on the subject.
Now what?
Darryl Dash responded:
If what you’re saying is true, it merits an open and honest conversation with the pastor. I’ve been in his place, and it’s tough in the short term but worth it. If you do love him like a brother it won’t be an attack that leaves him flattened. The good news is that poor preachers can improve. They may never be great, but they can become decent.
If the pastor is not willing to receive honest feedback, that’s a separate and probably more serious issue. It has to be done safely and with the right people, but we all need to be willing to hear feedback from others.
Well done.
I read Darryl’s blog regularly. If you’re interested in practical observations about pastoring and local church life you should too. His blog is here.
More often than not I find something quotable in the writings of Douglas Wilson… like these from a recent post entitled “Not the Clerk of Session“.
“The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching always comes down to the point of decision. Good preaching is aimed at the will; all good preaching aims at conversion. If the people are not converted, they need to be. If they are, then a message aiming at true conversion will encourage them, not beat them up. As Luther put it, we are called to a lifetime of repentance.
Good preaching reminds every Christian soul that we live before the God who sees and knows the heart, and who will sift those hearts in the great day of judgment.”
And then this:
“A distinction should therefore be kept sharp between the preaching of the Word, and the shepherding of souls. The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, but this does not mean that a minister can see hearts. When it comes to the division of soul and spirit, the Scriptures are sharper than a sword. But at the same point, fallible ministers can be as sharp as a pound of wet liver. But the fact that he cannot see this or that heart exhaustively should not prevent him from preaching the Word searchingly.”
Read the entire post here.
My favorite weeks are the ones when I’m preparing to preach. Last week was one of those weeks.
During the week Darryl Dash posted a “preaching cheat sheet” based on Haddon Robinson’s book “Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages”
I have two of my own that I, like Darryl, have posted beside my desk. One is based on John Piper’s article The Marks of a Spiritual Leader, the other is from a section of John Stott’s book “Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today“. You can view these three resources either by blog post or PDF by using the links below posted below.
Haddon Robinson (blog post | PDF | order the book)
John Piper (blog post | PDF)
John Stott (blog post | order the book)
Now, go work on a sermon… my next one is in two weeks. The passage is Galatians 6.
This is a very compact summary of a chapter from Stott’s book “Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today“.
1. Choose your text
2. Meditate on it (sub-conscious incubation) What did it mean then? What does it mean now?
3. Isolate the dominant thought
4. Arrange material to serve dominant thought
5. Add the introduction and conclusion
6. Write down and pray over your message
From John Piper’s article The Marks of a Spiritual Leader, here’s a section where he seeks to give some of the essential characteristics of a good teacher. These have been helpful to me in preparing to preach and teach.
Download as a PDF.
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