Preaching
Alastair Roberts

From time to time I hear people lamenting the current state of evangelicalism and particularly of
the loss of an appreciation for preaching. I couldn’t agree more that there is a lot of bad preaching
around. Fortunately, I don’t have to sit under such preaching too often, but the fruits of it are not
hard to see.

However, although I see a big problem, I am not at all convinced that traditional evangelical
preaching is the answer (perhaps people would appreciate preaching more if we only had it once
a month, like the Lord’s Supper...). I believe that there are deep problems with many of the
traditional paradigms for preaching in evangelicalism and elsewhere. Preaching has become the
event of the weekly gathered worship of the Church, which seems to me to be a serious departure
from the biblical pattern. Even when Paul speaks until midnight at Troas, the Eucharist is spoken
of as the reason for gathering (Acts 20:7). In the context of the weekly gathered worship of the
Church, preaching should essentially be ‘tabletalk’.

While the Scriptures certainly teach about the importance of preaching, they also say a lot about
aspects of the service that evangelicals tend to downplay as a result of their emphasis on
preaching. The Scripture says a lot more about the institution of the Eucharist than it does about
Christ’s institution of the Sermon as an essential element of gathered worship.

Such a focus on preaching has created new concepts of the Church. The Church becomes defined
primarily around ideas and ever more sharply defined theological positions, rather than around
community, which is something that the Eucharist retains the centrality of. The Church has also
become organized more and more around one man’s activity (and, as James Jordan comments,
that man is not Jesus Christ). Evangelical congregations are often more passive in gathered
worship than medieval ones were and this is a serious problem. The service becomes something
that the preacher does, rather than the shared activity of the body of Christ.

Worship becomes a mere preface and epilogue to preaching. Scripture-rich liturgies are
abandoned and in some churches the congregation only open their mouths for the singing.
Pastors do not prepare the liturgy. The liturgy is an after-thought, hastily thrown together, while
most of their effort is put into crafting the rhetorical masterpiece which is the Sermon.

The pastor becomes increasingly defined by his role as the ‘preacher’. Rather than letting the
father-like leadership that the pastor exercises over the congregation condition our understanding
of the role and practice of preaching, other dimensions of the pastor’s role have been forgotten as
his preaching becomes all-important. In actual fact I am not at all sure that preaching is the most
important task committed to the pastor. One does not have to look far in evangelicalism to find
good examples of the way in which preaching can eclipse all else, reducing churches to
preaching centres. Far from building up the Church, such preaching undermines it.

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