Chapter 7.  The Congregation

MLJ has two errors in view in this chapter.  On one side, he is critical more than once of young preachers he knows who became so enamoured with the Puritans that they modelled themselves on their preaching as closely as possible.  On the other side, he rejects the notion that the preacher can’t seriously expect to communicate well in the modern world until he has (say) worked for six months in a factory in order to get alongside people there, or dropped language such as ‘justification’ that unbelievers don’t understand.  He grasps the nettle of 1 Cor 9.19-23, and says that its main thrust is that ‘we are to do our utmost to make ourselves clear and plain and understood’.  He enjoys recounting an occasion when his preaching at an Oxford University mission was described by a student as suitable for ‘a congregation of farm labourers’, which was meant by the arrogant young man as a criticism and taken by MLJ as a compliment!

What runs right through the chapter is this:

–  man’s basic problem is his deadness in sin before God, and every kind of person has the same problem;

–  the gospel ought to be proclaimed clearly to mixed congregations;

–  the preacher can be confident that the Holy Spirit will apply to each person what they need to hear from the sermon.

 

Reflections

Forty years on, some of us may find some of MLJ’s illustrative anecdotes quaint and dated, but his simple point is a real tonic for the preacher:  no gimmicks;  no cleverness on display.  Instead straightforward simplicity is needed that isn’t ashamed to set out a doctrine like justification, acknowledging that it seems alien, but then expounding it so that all can understand and be drawn to Christ.

For myself, the Oxford mission anecdote was telling.  Would I really have taken the intended criticism as a compliment?  I can think of an occasion some time ago when a more educated church-member told me that my preaching was too simple, and wasn’t feeding them the way they wanted.  If I’d read this chapter on that occasion, I would have been urged to press on and not be swayed (which I was, for a while), since the truly spiritual intellectual will want a clear, understandable message.  Preachers who have not had much formal education can be encouraged;  those with lots of letters after their name might need to be chastened.

Chapter 6.  The Preacher

The next logical question to ask, says MLJ, is:  who then is to be a preacher?  Important here is Acts 8.4-5, which describes all kinds of Christians as ‘gossipping the gospel’ (v.4, Greek verb: euangelizomai), but the apostle Philip as ‘proclaiming’ (v.5, Greek: kerusso).  Only the latter, says MLJ, is what we call preaching.  In summary, in the NT preaching is confined to apostles, prophets, evangelists and teaching elders.

This view of preaching requires a notion of the ‘call’ of the preacher.  The tests of a genuine call are:

a sense of preaching being ‘thrust upon you’ in your own spirit;  wise Christians confirming it;  a concern for the lost;  a sense of ‘I can’t do anything else’;  a feeling of personal unworthiness.

 

All of this should be confirmed by the church discerning four things in potential preachers:  a settled knowledge of the truth;  a godly life;  an understanding of people;  ability, both in intellect and in a gift of speech.  He regrets that ability is too often put first by churches.

 

On the specifics of training, he recommends these elements:

–  thorough knowledge of Scripture

–  original languages, just in order to keep a man ‘accurate’

–  knowing the biblical theology that comes out of Scripture, and grasping it systematically

–  church history, especially knowledge of heresies (in order to avoid them), and of great revivals (in order to stay encouraged).

 

Overall, preachers are born and not made, but born preachers can be improved, and the best way for them to improve is by reading the sermons of past greats.

 

Reflections

His use of Acts 8.4-5 to discern a distinct activity of ‘preaching’ is right, I think.  It’s not easy to make the right kinds of distinctions, but in the NT there does seem to be something distinct about ‘proclamation’.

The notion of the preacher’s ‘call’ has been a vexed one, with some exalting it to almost mystical status, and others denying it in order to get as many trained people out into word ministry as possible.  In this chapter, it is clear that MLJ is writing in reaction against those who deny any restrictions on who may preach, so it may well be unfair to build a strong theology of ‘call’ on the basis of the proper corrective that he was offering  in his context.

His emphasis on preachers needing experience of life seems pertinent to me, if they are not to slide into being lecturers.  That is not always to do with age.  A few men in their early twenties are able to show understanding of people’s experience of life, and some never can, however old they get.

Chapter 5.  The act of preaching

MLJ describes this chapter as a general introduction to sermon delivery.  Certain elements must be present:

–  the whole personality of the preacher being exercised, including bodily action

–  a sense of authority and control of proceedings, since he has been sent to declare something

–  the element of ‘freedom’, being open to ‘the inspiration of the moment’

–  interplay between preacher and congregation

–  seriousness

–  liveliness (since seriousness isn’t dullness)

–  zeal (since we are personally involved as witnesses)

–  warmth

–  urgency (since the preacher ‘is there between God and man’)

–  persuasiveness

–  pathos (also emotion):  we must love the people, and that will show in our preaching

–  power (more on this later, he says).

 

The chief end of preaching is ‘to give men and women a sense of God and his presence’.

If we glimpse what preaching is, we’ll conclude that we’ve never really ‘preached’, but we’ll keep trying.

 

Reflections

There is much here that is wise.  I can do a good ‘delivery health-check’ on my preaching by comparing it to that list.  Do I have such a desire not to be thought boring that there is too little of the seriousness of the gospel in my preaching?  Am I so tied to my prepared notes that I don’t wisely adjust certain things when I see who is present and how they are reacting?  I think so, sometimes.

What is intended by saying that preaching should aim to give a sense of God and his presence is also right, I think.  Since the preaching of Christ ought to be received as the word of God (1 Thess 2.13), it is hard to see how that can be done without a sense in the hearers of also receiving Christ who is real and present by his Spirit.

I do find the line about concluding that I’ve never really ‘preached’ troubling.  There is a sense in it of something which I can’t find in the NT.  For all his acknowledged human limitations, we have no indication that Paul doubted that his preaching was truly preaching.  MLJ intends by the point to spur the preacher on to greater power and zeal, and that is a good aim.  He may well, though, end up discouraging the preacher by giving him too low a view of the effectiveness of his ‘ordinary’ weekly preaching.

Chapter 4.  The form of the sermon

He starts with some thoughts on sermon content.  Our primary call is to deliver the whole message of Scripture.  We much of course expound the part, but always in a way that shows that it is part of a whole.  This is why systematic theology is so vital.

 

He then moves on to sermon form.  The sermon is not an essay or lecture, since both lack ‘the element of attack’.  It must always be expository, but not a verse-by-verse running commentary.  The preacher should be like the OT prophets, with a ‘burden of the Lord’, that is, a single message to proclaim.

 

Getting more specific on sermon form, he recommends that it should:

–  start with exposition

–  ask of the text, ‘what’s the particular doctrine here?’, in order to get to something which is part of the whole gospel

–  arrange its heading with logical progression, understood as parts of a whole

–  make applications regularly throughout.

 

Reflections

There is no doubt that his understanding of the role of systematic theology in preaching is open to abuse, if used as an excuse to jump quickly out of the text into the preacher’s favourite doctrines.  But MLJ is more careful than that (at least in the theorising of this chapter).  If what the preacher ultimately should preach is the gospel, then he has no choice but to engage in systematic theology, whether he likes the idea or not.  MLJ’s proposed question is a good one to ask of a text:  what’s the particular doctrine here?

His insistence that the sermon should be understood as a single entity, communicating one basic message, is good.  I sometimes come across the idea that ‘expository’ preaching means cramming in as much exegesis as possible from as many verses as possible.  Instead, preachers should expound the ‘burden’ that the text gives them to expound.

Chapter 3.  The sermon and the preaching

Partway through this chapter, MLJ gives what he calls the basic definition of preaching.  What is that man doing there?, he asks…

–  ‘he is standing there as a mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address those people’

–  ‘he is there … to do something to those people’

–  ‘the hearer knows that he has been dealt with and addressed by God through this preacher’.

This explains, he says, why he once refused an invitation to debate with an atheist at the Oxford Union:  ‘God is not to be discussed or debated’.

 

He then makes another distinction:

–  The message of salvation (kerygma):  the declaration of God’s being and glory, of sin and of Christ.

–  The teaching element (didache), which edifies believers.  This itself has two aspects:  experiential and instructional.

It follows that there are three kinds of preaching:

–  primarily evangelistic (which should occur at least weekly in a church)

–  instructional-experiential

–  instructional-didactic.

He readily acknowledges that these aren’t strict distinctions, and the elements will often be mixed together in a single sermon, but it’s important for the preacher to keep them distinct in his mind.

 

Reflections

His basic definition of preaching is robust and bold, and rightly so.  It should both hearten and humble the preacher to read a definition like that every time he preaches.

His outworking of his definition of preaching often assumes that large numbers of unbelievers will be in church every week.  It may well be that, less than fifty years on, we live in different times.

The ‘three kinds of preaching’ analysis deserves some reflection.  Probably most of us preachers naturally default to one of the three, and end up being fairly narrow in our aim over a stretch of time.  Keeping those three categories in mind, and deliberately moving between them, may well help our preaching hit a wider variety of targets.

Chapter 2.  No Substitute

A key principle set out in this chapter is:  ‘the ultimate justification for asserting the primacy of preaching is theological’.  What he is particularly thinking of is that natural man’s deepest problem is his spiritual blindness, to which God’s salvation in Christ is the only answer.  And only the preaching of the church is fitted to address this problem.

That is why ‘social-gospel preaching’ empties churches, whereas in fact proper gospel preaching stirs believers up to great acts of compassion and social justice.

Personal counselling ought to be seen as secondary to preaching, in which the preached message is followed up with individuals.

Reading a Christian book or watching some Christian teaching on television can never replace preaching.  There are two reasons for this:

– in reading or watching, the individual is ‘too much in control’, since  they can put the book down or switch the TV off whenever they like;

– ‘the very presence of a body of people is part of preaching’, and that exerts spiritual influences on the listeners  –  influences which are hard to describe, but nevertheless are very strong.

 

Reflections

His understanding of the relation between a church’s preaching and ministries of mercy is one which has been effectively re-articulated well for us in recent controversies, and is not an issue likely to go away.

The final section was for me the most stimulating.  I don’t think that many of us have been trained much to understand preaching as essentially and particularly defined by the corporate setting in which it takes place.  At this point he makes his argument from reason and experience, as well as from Scripture (he quotes 1 Thess. 1.6ff).  I’m not sure if that passage makes the point as strongly as he thinks it does, but I do think that overall he is right:  there is something essentially different about sitting in a body of people who together receive a preached message, that isn’t exactly replicated in other settings.

Now that the Cornhill term is over I’m getting down to some more intensive reading on preaching.  One I’m particularly enjoying is Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers.  The book contains lectures delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969.  As I chip my way through it, a blog per chapter will crop up here occasionally, summarising the content and offering some reflections.

 

Chapter 1.  The Primacy of Preaching

On the second page, Lloyd-Jones says:  ‘the main trouble arises from the fact that people are not clear in their minds as to what preaching really is.’  He then speaks of some of the key factors, as he sees them:

–  a right reaction against ‘pulpiteerism’, which seeks in the end to entertain through showmanship;

–  an emphasis on ‘personal work’ / ‘counselling’ will grow to the extent that confidence in preaching fades;

–  tape-recording is ‘the peculiar and special abomination at this present time’.  (It’s perhaps a mercy that he didn’t live to see any church websites  –  or indeed this http://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/, although many of us are hugely grateful for it).

The chapter ends with an excellent summary which reminds us how preaching was central to the ministries of Jesus and the apostles, with Acts 6 emerging as a crucial one in the Doctor’s understanding of the issue.

 

Reflections

He is surely right that our understanding of the nature of preaching is not as rich as it ought to be.  My colleague Jonathan Griffiths and I are doing a little work on this, and are finding that quite a number of otherwise excellent books on preaching aren’t as richly exegetical and theological as one would like them to be in answering the question:  what is preaching?

He does not play ‘personal work’ off against preaching, as later chapters will show, but the insight is surely right:  a pastor who spends so much time with dozens of individuals during the week such that sermon prep time is regularly squeezed out is a pastor who has lost confidence in what he ought to be most confident about.

The six pages on the primacy of preaching in Jesus and apostles is a wonderful little tonic for a pastor to return to, to show him where his weekly priorities might have been more set by man than by Scripture.