Preacher’s Personal Life

Essential Ingredients of the Best Preachers

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Yesterday I listed Greg Haslam’s five ingredients for good preaching.  Today I’ll finish the chapter (11 in Preach the Word), by sharing his list of key ingredients in a good preacher.  Again, I present these for your thoughts, not to agree or disagree with his list.

1.    A compelling call from God. “In my view the number one reason why there is so much bad preaching today is because our pulpits are often occupied by preachers who do not have a divine mandate to be there.”  (p.155)  He urges every preacher to ask himself three questions – who put you there?  Who keeps you there?  Who can get rid of you?

2.    A growing, varied and fresh life with God. “We can think of preaching as the run-off or surplus of all that wells up in the life of the preacher.  But, sadly, many preachers are running on empty much of the time.  They have allowed other things to crowd their time with God.” (p.156)

3.    Happy with their own identity, both as a person and as a preacher. “My plea to all preachers is: be the genuine article. . . . We do not need clones of great preachers like Dr Lloyd-Jones or Billy Graham.  Since preaching is, as Brooks defines it, ‘truth coming through human personality,’ God surely wants us to be free to be ourselves.” (p.157)

4.    Increasingly liberated from the fear of man. “In order to be faithful to God, we have to become relatively indifferent to men’s resistance, criticism or opposition to us, as well as to their flattery or ridicule.”  (p.157)

5.    A genuine love for the people. “If it is true that fear drives out love, thank God it is also true that love will drive out fear.”  (p.158)

6.    A conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. “As preachers we always need to be aware of our true source of power and we need to tell God how much we depend upon His Holy Spirit.” (p.158)

7.    Infectious in zeal and enthusiasm. “Absorbed in what they have to say, they will absorb the attention of others.  Often, even the most casual and indifferent hearer realizes something important is taking place.  If the truth of the message does not grab you, how can it be expected to grab anyone else?”  (p.159)

Again, points to ponder, but to keep the post from becoming too long, I won’t add comments.  Would your list of seven ingredients be the same?  Longer?  Different?

Easter Laughter

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Helmut Thielicke described Spurgeon’s humour as “Easter laughter,” that which comes as a “mode of redemption because it is sanctified – because it grows out of an overcoming of the world.”  (See Mohler, He is Not Silent, p165.)

We recently enjoyed a CD of Chuck Swindoll funny stories.  Some were funnier than others, but his laughter was a real blessing to us all.  As he stated on that CD, one person wrote in and told him, “Chuck, you can stop preaching, but never stop laughing.  Your’s is the only laughter that ever comes into our home.”

A leader that frets and stresses under pressure is not a leader that followers will find reassuring.  There is a need for a certain calmness that comes from confident faith in God’s purposes.  Likewise, there is a benefit in a certain laughter.  Not drunken laughter.  Not distracting myself from reality laughter.  Not immature laughter.  But confident in God, all is in control, Easter laughter.

Don’t force it, but don’t be afraid of it either.  Appropriate humor and laughter in a message may be more than therapy for listeners – it may be the conveying of a deep personal faith conviction.

What Convictions Do You Convey?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Over time, listeners catch things from the preachers they hear.  Its not just the content of each particular sermon, but also the personal convictions of the preacher that will mark listeners over time.

What do listeners catch from hearing you?  Do they catch a conviction that God’s Word can be trusted?  That it is enjoyable to read and study?  That God is knowable?  That God is in control?  That Christianity is firmly founded on fact?  That we are deeply loved?  That . . .

These kinds of convictions don’t fully come through because you preach a single message on the subject.  They come through and mark lives when they have already come through and marked your life.  We are not mere transmitters of information.  We are not neutral entities in God’s ministry that somehow hopefully will disappear in the course of our preaching.  No, we are lives that continually convey the convictions and affections that have captured our hearts.  Our passion forged in personal study and close walk with Christ over time will shape the convictions with which we infect others.

What convictions do we convey?

Preachers are Theologians not Therapists

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Following on from yesterday’s post, I found the following quote quite insightful:

The rise of therapeutic concerns within the culture means that many pastors, and many of heir church members, believe that the pastoral calling is best understood as a “helping profession.”  As such, the pastor is seen as someone who functions in a therapeutic role in which theology is often seen as more of a problem than a solution.

This is from Al Mohler’s book, He is Not Silent, p108.  This is a helpful distinction.  Have we fallen into thinking of our function as primarily therapeutic?  Cambridge Dictionary defines therapeutic as “causing someone to feel happier and more relaxed or to be more healthy.”  Yes, in the final element our task does involve promoting spiritual health.  However, not every sermon will make listeners feel happier or relaxed.  Sometimes our task is a discomforting one.

I notice particularly Mohler’s observation about theology.  If preaching and pastoral work is about therapy, then theology is often seen as more problem than solution.  Is this why so many churches promote unity at all costs, avoiding key biblical and theological areas in order to keep everyone happy?  If you were to take the theological pulse of your congregation, what teaching of Scripture would be deficient?  If that were less than comfortable to address, would you still do it?  Later Mohler states that “when truth is denied, therapy remains.” (p121)  May it never be true of us that we pander to the yearnings of our age and only offer therapy to a self-centric people.

Preachers are Theologians

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The health of any church depends, in part, on its leaders functioning faithfully as theologians.  It’s part of the package for any elder (pastor, minister, leader, whatever term you are used to).  Leading, feeding, caring and protecting.  How are we to lead others on God’s behalf if we’re unclear on the nature of the church, it’s mission, God’s character and plan?  How are we to feed the saints if we’re not wrestling with the great doctrines of the faith and setting them forth?  How are we to care effectively for souls if we never consider what a human consists of and how they function in relation to salvation and walking in the Spirit?  How are we to protect the flock if we’re unaware of theological trends and errors in the general atmosphere of the contemporary church at large?

The pastoral functions of any church leader require that theological reflection and processing be involved in the ministry.  It is a dangerous error to presume that theology is a function of the academy or the research university.  It is worrying to find many preachers and leaders who think that their task is not that of theology.

If you preach, then you influence.  If you influence, then you lead.  If you lead, don’t make the grave error of divorcing your ministry from that of theology.  If you do, then both your ministry and theology will suffer.  You will suffer.  And so will they.

The Difference Two Feet Make

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I am not referring to how much better it is to preach with both legs still intact, nor a cunning reference to the beautiful feet of those who bring good news.  I mean distance.  Two feet.  60cm.  That makes a world of difference.

Beginning preachers, and some that have preached for years, tend to preach their message at arms length. They study and prepare, but it is all about the notes.  From the Bible to the notes to the people.  Arms length. Somehow there is a nervousness about this thing out there called the message.  The preacher is anxious about saying the right words and that anxiety sometimes shows.  Even without showing overtly, it does leave the message somewhat flat, somewhat all about the words.

But two feet make such a difference.  If the Bible study, the message preparation and the delivery can all be brought two feet closer, the preaching is very different.  Instead of something the preacher is straining to not forget, now the message comes from the heart.  Instead of preaching being truth preached by a personality (often stilted in the effort to remember the message), now the message can be truth through personality.  Instead of a message being handled at arms length from the Bible text to the listeners, via the notes of the preacher, now the message comes through the preacher with the force of the life transforming power of the Word clear and unhindered.

I am not saying anything about notes in this post, in favor or against.  I am saying everything about Bible study that is personal rather than professional (for the sake of others), about message preparation that is unique to you rather than following someone else’s prescribed formula, about delivery that comes from the heart (whether or not you need notes to nudge that) rather than merely transferring information from notes to listeners.

It’s hard to pin down exactly how one message can be preached at arms length, while another comes through the heart of the preacher.  Yet as a listener it is usually not hard to tell the difference.

Problems with Plagiarism

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I’m just reading an article by Dr David Lose.  He describes his experience of hearing a sermon preached that he had just read in a book by another author.  A good sermon…plagiarised.  What’s the problem? After all, nobody lost any royalties and God still uses His word.

It’s about integrity.  It’s about the lying to your congregation and misrepresentation of yourself.  The trust of the people in you as the pastor and in preaching in general, is eroded.  This is true of whole sermons, as well as illustrations and other sermon content.  Any time we pass something off in the first person as our own, we lie.

He goes on to offer counsel in response to defense statements that may be offered.  What if I’m not a good preacher?  What if I’m really bad?  He suggests getting training, working at it, attending his seminary (fair enough, he wrote the article).  And if you’re really bad, he suggests finding another line of work (or getting help – which would be my first suggestion since the pastoral office is never intended to be a one man for all roles concept).

Do we have to cite every source when we preach?  Not at all.  The issue is not naming every commentator we have read, but letting others know when a thought is not our own – “As one preacher put it…” or “One commentator writes…”

We need to be aware of this issue.  Some of us may not undermine our integrity as preachers at all in this way, but some preachers constantly do.  It wouldn’t do us any harm to do a quick self-check.  Do I adapt illustrations from others and make them sound like my own experience when they were not?  Do I import chunks of sermons from online or from books without telling listeners what I am doing?  Do I allow a pithy statement to appear as my own when I have read it somewhere?

It’s a useful article, if you want to read it, click here.

First Priority

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Just to mix up the content on this site, I am dipping into a book by Andy Stanley and Ed Young, Can We Do That? I’d like to share one of their suggestions.  “We make the message the first priority of the service – and of the pastor.”

In the busy and complex life of church ministry, not to mention the complex relationships between different interest groups, it is important to remember how important the Sunday morning message is.  It is probably the only ministry of the church that has the potential to reach the whole church.  It is probably the ministry of the church most likely to reach visitors and guests (and online listeners if you are into MP3 ministry).

Yet how easy for it to slip down the list when it comes to planning the service, or planning your own weekly schedule for preparation.  Do we need to take stock and make sure the preaching of the Word is getting the priority attention that it needs to be done well?  Are there tasks to be offloaded so that the preacher can be free to preach?  As preachers do we need to be more deliberately inaccessible at certain times to prepare properly?

Acts 6:4 comes to mind.

Lessons From Mini-Biography – A.W.Tozer

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Periodically I’m picking up 50 People Every Christian Should Know by Warren Wiersbe.  It’s refreshing to get a mini-biography in six or seven pages.  I just read Alva McClain the other day – a man who served faithfully despite ill-health.  Today I’m enjoying the A.W. Tozer entry.  I love this bit:

Tozer walked with God and knew him intimately.  To listen to Tozer preach was as safe as opening the door of a blast furnace!

Tozer wrote with the intent that the reader would yearn to go and learn for themselves, putting down Tozer and picking up Bible.  I long for that as a primary response to my preaching.

Tozer is described as a Christian mystic – a term generally spurned, and usually misunderstood, these days.  However, definitions are everything.  What if being a mystic means what Wiersbe says it meant for Tozer?  Being aware of the spiritual world, seeking to please God, cultivating close relationship with God, and relating that experience to daily life.  What if that were the definition.  Is that true of us?  What if mysticism goes deeper, or is defined differently?  Whatever we do with the term mysticism, we must face this question: is our Christian experience a set of definitions, a list of orthodox doctrines, or a living relationship with God?

Doctrine, devotion, intimacy with God and spiritual service.  Not bad nudges from six brief pages of mini-biography!

Pseudo-Expository Preaching – Part 2

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Yesterday we saw how it is possible to preach a pseudo-expository sermon by failing to live up to all four elements of an expository preaching definition.  We looked at preaching without relying on God’s Spirit (making it a human-powered exercise).  We looked at preaching from a text, but not really preaching the text (a common form of pseudo-expository preaching).  Now for the other two elements:

3 – The issue of effective communication. I suppose this is somewhat subjective, but I would argue that a preacher deliberately not improving in their ability to communicate (perhaps due to a misunderstanding of 1Cor.2:1-5), is undermining their own stewardship of the ministry opportunity.  Furthermore it is worth noting that our communication is not just about logos and pathos during the delivery, but the ethos of the entire life.

4 – The emphasized relevance of the passage. It is not the preacher’s job to “make the text relevant.”  It already is relevant.  But it is our job to underline, to emphasize how it is relevant to the particular listeners before us.  Pseudo-expository preaching that is pseudo because of inadequacy in this respect is easier to spot if you’re looking for it.  The text is explained, but application is ignored.  “Now may the Spirit of God apply to our hearts the truths we have seen in His Word . . . “ that’s a confession of pseudo-expository preaching!  The whole thing is the Spirit’s work, not just this bit.  The issue of relevance and application part of our task as preachers.  We have to be concerned about the text and about the listeners.

I suppose we could deploy a task force of pseudo-expository detectives.  Some pseudo-expository preaching is blatant and as easy to spot as a daylight ram-raid on a high street jewellers.  However, other pseudo-expository preaching would require a team of detectives with forensic back-up (I’m thinking of the “sneak thieves” in that great children’s book, Flat Stanley!)  But it is not our task to deploy task forces of pseudo-expository detectives.  Instead, let’s imagine such a task force visiting us.  What would they find?  Would they unearth some aspect of pseudo-exposition?  Could they, in grace, of course, put their finger on a lack of spirituality, or exegetical rigor, or communicative effort, or concern for listeners in need of biblical encounter with God?