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Preach the Word!: The Call and Challenge of Preaching Today
A wide range of outstanding teachers, preachers and communicators were invited to share their skills, wisdom and strongest convictions on a host of themes related to this great task, and a large number of delegates gathered each month at Westminster Chapel, London to give them an enthusiastic hearing. The transcripts of these teaching sessions have been edited and distilled into this outstanding single volume. "Preach the Word!" is the guide on preaching and technicalities of teaching; historical perspectives; different preaching styles; and, modern day approaches.
626 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2006
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June 25, 2023
As an anthology book, 'Preach the Word!' contains a mix of good, bad, and exceptional chapters. While some chapters felt repetitive, they served a purpose in reinforcing and representing the information.
The book covers a wide range of topics with its extensive collection of over 50 chapters. However, it would have been beneficial to include more practical advice, although it's important to note that there are other books available for that specific purpose. There are occasions of such practical advice that might have at least merited a full chapter, such as 'carrying a flashcard of your sermon skeleton to ingrain it in your heart.'
Among the many chapters, a few stood out to me. Chapter 32, titled 'Thirteen Things I Wish I Had Known About Preaching,' provided valuable insights. Additionally, chapter 41, which focuses on 'Seasoning Your Sermons,' left a lasting impression. The entirety of section five is noteworthy, and I particularly enjoyed the examples presented in Mike Pilvachi's chapter on Preaching to Youth. These chapters are worth revisiting in the future.
On the other hand, it is essential to highlight some flaws within the book. Liam Goligher's chapter contains historical inaccuracies, and the same can be said for Doug Williams' chapter on 'Pentecostal and Black Preaching.'"
I have put some of my favorite quotations from the book below.
People suffer from burn-out not, I would suggest, because they have too much work as burn-out comes because people such, but because they have too few jobs. In other words,
are only doing one job, instead of the three we are all called to do. If we do all three jobs for which we were created, we will not suffer burn-out.
p. 33
You know that it is worthy of your best talents, worthy of a lifetime' labour and dedication. On any Sunday you
can give it your all and still know that the Word deserves more. It is no small task
that the Church has set upon your shoulders. Being called to preach the gospel, you can do no more than to promise as long as you have breath, and there is someone to listen, then by God's grace you will give them the Word.
p. 42
Since the Bible is the Spirit's book, we need His help in order to interpret it. The person who is best able to interpret a book is the author himor herself? occasionally heard discussion have discusses a book. programmes on Radio 4, in which a panel of critics of the book discusses a book. In listening to such discussions I am always stunned when I hear the commentators arguing with the author about what she meant by a particular aspect of the plot or a particular sentence in the mouth of one of her characters, and telling her that she meant something other than what she is saying she meant! It is ridiculous! But we do it with God all the time!
p. 79
Recently a painter came to paint the vicarage and was with us for about ten days. On the tenth day I realised I hadn't evangelised him at all, so I thought now, just before he left, was a good time. I made him a cup of coffee and we started chatting. It is very interesting what strikes non-Christians because he started talking to me about the car park, commenting, Your car park is always full, not just on Sundays every day it's packed full. A lot of people come to church, don't they?' Then he began to talk about his experience of church and how he had been forced into going as a small boy which resulted In him being put off church. At that point I said, Do you mind if we change the subject? You're talking about my least favourite subject.' He said, 'What's that?' I said, 'The church.' He said, But you're a vicar.' I said, 'I know but I hate talking about church.' He said, 'What do you like talking about?' I said, 'Jesus.' So he said, 'Tell me about Jesus then.' As I started talking to him about Jesus, his eyes began to fill with tears.
p. 91
Beneath everything, he says, there is a deep, silent undercurrent of expectation and longing that something might happen. What is that 'something'? Barth says it is that people want to find out and thoroughly understand the answer to this one question, 'Is it true
- this talk of a loving and good God?' He goes on to extrapolate that thought further. People do not shout it out, but let us not be deceived by their silence. Behind their blood and tears, deepest despair and highest hope, is a passionate longing to have Word spoken. The Word that promises grace in judgement, life in death and the here and now God's Word this is what animates our churchgoers…
p. 116
We preach to smite the disenchantment that so saps the energies of our shouldershrugging, post-modern weariness with the glory of the resurrection. Ask yourself this question: Does it take the message of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus to achieve the ends for which you are aiming in your preaching? If not, then you are not preaching the gospel, but offering self-improvement techniques with a Christian veneer!
p. 120
the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was sitting shouted the speech. As he seemed to be concluding behind Dr King on the platform and was beginning to feel very let down by the flat tone of and about to turn and sit down, she out to him, 'The dream, Martin, the dream tell them about the dream .. tell them the At that point Dr King launched into the famous words, I have a dream, that one day on dream!'
the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood ...' Preachers, whatever else you do, tell them the dream! Open the eyes of people's hearts to the vision and the hope of God's alternative kingdom manifest by God's alternative community.
p. 121
True biblical preaching cleanses consciences with the washing of the water of God's Word. It leads minds polluted by the lies and spin of the culture to be detoxified and renewed at the fountain of truth. It dazzles people with a vision of how God's will for their holiness is the sure and certain way to their happiness. It empowers feeble wills to go over the barricades of cultural conformity and to be risk-takers for Jesus. That is the effect of preaching.
p. 123
The day is 22 November 1963. He is in a playhouse watching one of his creations being performed on stage. There is a scene in the middle of the play where a character, according to the script and the demands of the plot, turns a on a transistor radio and tunes into a local station. On this day the theatre is full. The actors are caught up in the drama of their performance the scripted lines, the choreographed movements, the contrived emotions. The audience is spellbound, pulled into the world wonderfully conjured up before them, when along comes this scene. The character takes the radio and flicks it on: there is a crackle and hiss of static. He dials the tuner, a jumble of noise, voices surge and fade, music blares and stutters and then, stark and urgent, a voice breaks through, 'Today in Dallas, Texas President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed.' The actor quickly switches off the radio but it is too late. The reality of the real world has with just a few plain words burst in upon the closeted self-created world of a play being staged, and the play is over. is That is what preaching will do. Preaching the Big Story of God's redemptive plan that centres in Jesus Christ and is about the renewal eventually of His whole cosmos will at some point, by the power of the Spirit, break in upon the unreal drama that people are being sold by the devil as the best one they are going to get. This is a divine drama: it is the Trinity drama of the Father, the Son and the Spirit into which we are drawn and what a breathtaking mystery it is. As Chesterton once said, 'This story answers the yearning for romance because it is a love story and answers the needs of philosophy because it is a true story.' Go and preach it.
p. 146
The words we utter as preachers may not simply lead to the transformation of the life of another: they may transform it there it and then. Some words are powerful, for example: This meeting is adjourned', 'I now pronounce you husband and wife', "You have just won £500,000%, as the cheque is handed over on the TV quiz show. They carry the inherent power to make a difference in people's lives from that moment onwards. They are what philosophers call 'performative utterances',' i.e. they actually convey what they say and they effect the very things that they describe, and they often do so there and then. Preaching is one of those performative activities. We as preachers are not merely reporters, where people can take or leave what we say; we are in a very real sense creators, albeit in a secondary sense to the way God is.
p. 150
One Sunday morning in the 1880s a horse-drawn cab driver picked up a London tourist who wanted to go over the river to the Elephant and Castle to hear C.H. Spurgeon. The driver asked his passenger, 'You don't believe everything he says, do you?' He received the simple reply, 'No, no, but he most certainly does.
p. 159
It is also important to touch every area of the personality. An old preacher said to me once, In every sermon there should be an element of wonder, an element of wooing and* an element of warning.' We should be aiming to be complete in our preaching, and with this in mind there are a number of checks we can put in place. For example, we can ask: Is my preaching really relevant to where people are? Does my preaching really cover all of life? Does it cover people at every stage of life? Does it cover every kind of profession? We want people to feel included in the message. Most of all I seek to ensure that my preaching touches the three aspects of human personality. include something that will speak directly into the mind. I do this, not so that people will think I am more clever than they, as someone once advised me should do, but so that their understanding is enlightened. Preaching must enlighten the mind.
p. 273
We should aim to get down to have made on the text as a result of our personal study and our reading of between four and six main points which are the 'bones' of the text. Any more than that, and it will probably be too much to try and tackle in one sermon. We need to get those key points onto a single sheet of paper, or better still a single piece of card which we can carry around in our pocket. We are aiming to arrive at a mental X-ray of the passage. Then, if anyone were to ask us to summarise the passage we had been studying, we could give a simple explanation of the bones of
points on which everything else depends.
p. 317
As well as reading widely, we as preachers need to learn to listen to the members of our congregations. An excellent way of learning about their lives is by visiting them at their is
workplaces. I do this three or four times a week, meeting people for breakfast or lunch and, whenever I can, pray with them about their work. I believe it is my duty to understand the lives of those to whom I am preaching. I need to understand how difficult it is for them to get up in the morning and face the many pressures on their lives. In order to be able to relate to young people, also try to watch at least three hours of MTV week, which I do in the gym. I don't know which is more painful: the exercise machines or the MTV! We have to know the worlds in which our people live. We don't have to like to them, but we do have to know them!
We also need to visit people in their homes across the age-groups and across the spectrum of society: married, single, divorced, widows, the elderly.
p. 323
As preachers we need to take seriously our task of equipping Christians not just for the 3,000 hours they will spend in church-related activities, but for the 88,000 hours they will spend over the course at of their lives at the work they have been called and gifted to do.
p. 325
have often asked black preachers how they have managed to preach so fluently and how they are able to get their illustrations to live in the way they do. They usually tell me that they have preached their stories to themselves first in the shower or driving along in the car so that they can find the best words to use. Black preachers are very aware that they only have one shot at their sermon and therefore it has to be memorable. It has to hook into the minds of those listening; it has to grab their soul and release enthusiasm in their hearts. The art of story-telling is very much a part of what black preachers do:
p. 443
A prepared messenger is more important than a prepared message.
(Robert Boyd Munger)
Nothing can happen through you until it has first happened in you.
(Lloyd Ogilvy)
The first building blocks to church growth are the inner disciplines of the pastor.
(Dan Ryland)
p. 471
We live in a culture of confusion. We don't know who we are any more. We no longer know how to define ourselves. We used to buy clothes with the labels sewn onto the inside of our clothes; now we wear clothes with the labels sewn on the outside to tell people something of who we are. We're so confused about our identity that we also think everybody else is equally confused about theirs. And so when we talk about someone like Jesus, we don't think He really knew who He was. In the film The Matrix, the key figure, a young man called Neo, is the saviour of the world but he doesn't even know it himself. He's confused about his own identity. Similarly, many often assume that Jesus must have been confused. This iS not true.
p. 489
As we think about the making of a preacher, I want to suggest to you that one of the great challenges for us as preachers is not to let preaching become a habit. Bergman says, "The gospel can simply become an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. Our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, quality into quantity and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes.' This is a theologian's way of saying, We can get really boring.' We can do what we do. In the vestry of Westminster stereographic report of a sermon delivered by Chapel there is a Spurgeon on 4 September 1881, in which he makes this statement: I dread getting to be a mere preaching machine, without my heart and soul being exercised in this solemn duty lest it should merely be clockwork.' In Robert Munger's words, 'A prepared messenger is more important a piece of than prepared message.'
As preachers we
p. 554
It is particular failing of Charismatic Christians that we only notice the extraordinary. In his fabulous book, which won Book of the Year in Australia a couple of years ago, Seeing God in the Ordinary, Michael Frost writes, We have locked God into the so-called sacred realms of church and healings and miracles and marvels. We seem to be trying so hard to bring down fire from heaven in our worship services while all along God's favour is to be found in sunshine on our faces, the sea lapping at our toes, picking our children up at school, at or note from a caring friend.'3 We fail to notice what God is doing. While we cry out for God to work in mighty ways, He is saying: 'I was at work when your son handed you that painting from his class today. Didn't you notice?'
Anyone who wants to be a narrative story-based preacher, needs to open their
p. 579
The book covers a wide range of topics with its extensive collection of over 50 chapters. However, it would have been beneficial to include more practical advice, although it's important to note that there are other books available for that specific purpose. There are occasions of such practical advice that might have at least merited a full chapter, such as 'carrying a flashcard of your sermon skeleton to ingrain it in your heart.'
Among the many chapters, a few stood out to me. Chapter 32, titled 'Thirteen Things I Wish I Had Known About Preaching,' provided valuable insights. Additionally, chapter 41, which focuses on 'Seasoning Your Sermons,' left a lasting impression. The entirety of section five is noteworthy, and I particularly enjoyed the examples presented in Mike Pilvachi's chapter on Preaching to Youth. These chapters are worth revisiting in the future.
On the other hand, it is essential to highlight some flaws within the book. Liam Goligher's chapter contains historical inaccuracies, and the same can be said for Doug Williams' chapter on 'Pentecostal and Black Preaching.'"
I have put some of my favorite quotations from the book below.
People suffer from burn-out not, I would suggest, because they have too much work as burn-out comes because people such, but because they have too few jobs. In other words,
are only doing one job, instead of the three we are all called to do. If we do all three jobs for which we were created, we will not suffer burn-out.
p. 33
You know that it is worthy of your best talents, worthy of a lifetime' labour and dedication. On any Sunday you
can give it your all and still know that the Word deserves more. It is no small task
that the Church has set upon your shoulders. Being called to preach the gospel, you can do no more than to promise as long as you have breath, and there is someone to listen, then by God's grace you will give them the Word.
p. 42
Since the Bible is the Spirit's book, we need His help in order to interpret it. The person who is best able to interpret a book is the author himor herself? occasionally heard discussion have discusses a book. programmes on Radio 4, in which a panel of critics of the book discusses a book. In listening to such discussions I am always stunned when I hear the commentators arguing with the author about what she meant by a particular aspect of the plot or a particular sentence in the mouth of one of her characters, and telling her that she meant something other than what she is saying she meant! It is ridiculous! But we do it with God all the time!
p. 79
Recently a painter came to paint the vicarage and was with us for about ten days. On the tenth day I realised I hadn't evangelised him at all, so I thought now, just before he left, was a good time. I made him a cup of coffee and we started chatting. It is very interesting what strikes non-Christians because he started talking to me about the car park, commenting, Your car park is always full, not just on Sundays every day it's packed full. A lot of people come to church, don't they?' Then he began to talk about his experience of church and how he had been forced into going as a small boy which resulted In him being put off church. At that point I said, Do you mind if we change the subject? You're talking about my least favourite subject.' He said, 'What's that?' I said, 'The church.' He said, But you're a vicar.' I said, 'I know but I hate talking about church.' He said, 'What do you like talking about?' I said, 'Jesus.' So he said, 'Tell me about Jesus then.' As I started talking to him about Jesus, his eyes began to fill with tears.
p. 91
Beneath everything, he says, there is a deep, silent undercurrent of expectation and longing that something might happen. What is that 'something'? Barth says it is that people want to find out and thoroughly understand the answer to this one question, 'Is it true
- this talk of a loving and good God?' He goes on to extrapolate that thought further. People do not shout it out, but let us not be deceived by their silence. Behind their blood and tears, deepest despair and highest hope, is a passionate longing to have Word spoken. The Word that promises grace in judgement, life in death and the here and now God's Word this is what animates our churchgoers…
p. 116
We preach to smite the disenchantment that so saps the energies of our shouldershrugging, post-modern weariness with the glory of the resurrection. Ask yourself this question: Does it take the message of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus to achieve the ends for which you are aiming in your preaching? If not, then you are not preaching the gospel, but offering self-improvement techniques with a Christian veneer!
p. 120
the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was sitting shouted the speech. As he seemed to be concluding behind Dr King on the platform and was beginning to feel very let down by the flat tone of and about to turn and sit down, she out to him, 'The dream, Martin, the dream tell them about the dream .. tell them the At that point Dr King launched into the famous words, I have a dream, that one day on dream!'
the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood ...' Preachers, whatever else you do, tell them the dream! Open the eyes of people's hearts to the vision and the hope of God's alternative kingdom manifest by God's alternative community.
p. 121
True biblical preaching cleanses consciences with the washing of the water of God's Word. It leads minds polluted by the lies and spin of the culture to be detoxified and renewed at the fountain of truth. It dazzles people with a vision of how God's will for their holiness is the sure and certain way to their happiness. It empowers feeble wills to go over the barricades of cultural conformity and to be risk-takers for Jesus. That is the effect of preaching.
p. 123
The day is 22 November 1963. He is in a playhouse watching one of his creations being performed on stage. There is a scene in the middle of the play where a character, according to the script and the demands of the plot, turns a on a transistor radio and tunes into a local station. On this day the theatre is full. The actors are caught up in the drama of their performance the scripted lines, the choreographed movements, the contrived emotions. The audience is spellbound, pulled into the world wonderfully conjured up before them, when along comes this scene. The character takes the radio and flicks it on: there is a crackle and hiss of static. He dials the tuner, a jumble of noise, voices surge and fade, music blares and stutters and then, stark and urgent, a voice breaks through, 'Today in Dallas, Texas President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed.' The actor quickly switches off the radio but it is too late. The reality of the real world has with just a few plain words burst in upon the closeted self-created world of a play being staged, and the play is over. is That is what preaching will do. Preaching the Big Story of God's redemptive plan that centres in Jesus Christ and is about the renewal eventually of His whole cosmos will at some point, by the power of the Spirit, break in upon the unreal drama that people are being sold by the devil as the best one they are going to get. This is a divine drama: it is the Trinity drama of the Father, the Son and the Spirit into which we are drawn and what a breathtaking mystery it is. As Chesterton once said, 'This story answers the yearning for romance because it is a love story and answers the needs of philosophy because it is a true story.' Go and preach it.
p. 146
The words we utter as preachers may not simply lead to the transformation of the life of another: they may transform it there it and then. Some words are powerful, for example: This meeting is adjourned', 'I now pronounce you husband and wife', "You have just won £500,000%, as the cheque is handed over on the TV quiz show. They carry the inherent power to make a difference in people's lives from that moment onwards. They are what philosophers call 'performative utterances',' i.e. they actually convey what they say and they effect the very things that they describe, and they often do so there and then. Preaching is one of those performative activities. We as preachers are not merely reporters, where people can take or leave what we say; we are in a very real sense creators, albeit in a secondary sense to the way God is.
p. 150
One Sunday morning in the 1880s a horse-drawn cab driver picked up a London tourist who wanted to go over the river to the Elephant and Castle to hear C.H. Spurgeon. The driver asked his passenger, 'You don't believe everything he says, do you?' He received the simple reply, 'No, no, but he most certainly does.
p. 159
It is also important to touch every area of the personality. An old preacher said to me once, In every sermon there should be an element of wonder, an element of wooing and* an element of warning.' We should be aiming to be complete in our preaching, and with this in mind there are a number of checks we can put in place. For example, we can ask: Is my preaching really relevant to where people are? Does my preaching really cover all of life? Does it cover people at every stage of life? Does it cover every kind of profession? We want people to feel included in the message. Most of all I seek to ensure that my preaching touches the three aspects of human personality. include something that will speak directly into the mind. I do this, not so that people will think I am more clever than they, as someone once advised me should do, but so that their understanding is enlightened. Preaching must enlighten the mind.
p. 273
We should aim to get down to have made on the text as a result of our personal study and our reading of between four and six main points which are the 'bones' of the text. Any more than that, and it will probably be too much to try and tackle in one sermon. We need to get those key points onto a single sheet of paper, or better still a single piece of card which we can carry around in our pocket. We are aiming to arrive at a mental X-ray of the passage. Then, if anyone were to ask us to summarise the passage we had been studying, we could give a simple explanation of the bones of
points on which everything else depends.
p. 317
As well as reading widely, we as preachers need to learn to listen to the members of our congregations. An excellent way of learning about their lives is by visiting them at their is
workplaces. I do this three or four times a week, meeting people for breakfast or lunch and, whenever I can, pray with them about their work. I believe it is my duty to understand the lives of those to whom I am preaching. I need to understand how difficult it is for them to get up in the morning and face the many pressures on their lives. In order to be able to relate to young people, also try to watch at least three hours of MTV week, which I do in the gym. I don't know which is more painful: the exercise machines or the MTV! We have to know the worlds in which our people live. We don't have to like to them, but we do have to know them!
We also need to visit people in their homes across the age-groups and across the spectrum of society: married, single, divorced, widows, the elderly.
p. 323
As preachers we need to take seriously our task of equipping Christians not just for the 3,000 hours they will spend in church-related activities, but for the 88,000 hours they will spend over the course at of their lives at the work they have been called and gifted to do.
p. 325
have often asked black preachers how they have managed to preach so fluently and how they are able to get their illustrations to live in the way they do. They usually tell me that they have preached their stories to themselves first in the shower or driving along in the car so that they can find the best words to use. Black preachers are very aware that they only have one shot at their sermon and therefore it has to be memorable. It has to hook into the minds of those listening; it has to grab their soul and release enthusiasm in their hearts. The art of story-telling is very much a part of what black preachers do:
p. 443
A prepared messenger is more important than a prepared message.
(Robert Boyd Munger)
Nothing can happen through you until it has first happened in you.
(Lloyd Ogilvy)
The first building blocks to church growth are the inner disciplines of the pastor.
(Dan Ryland)
p. 471
We live in a culture of confusion. We don't know who we are any more. We no longer know how to define ourselves. We used to buy clothes with the labels sewn onto the inside of our clothes; now we wear clothes with the labels sewn on the outside to tell people something of who we are. We're so confused about our identity that we also think everybody else is equally confused about theirs. And so when we talk about someone like Jesus, we don't think He really knew who He was. In the film The Matrix, the key figure, a young man called Neo, is the saviour of the world but he doesn't even know it himself. He's confused about his own identity. Similarly, many often assume that Jesus must have been confused. This iS not true.
p. 489
As we think about the making of a preacher, I want to suggest to you that one of the great challenges for us as preachers is not to let preaching become a habit. Bergman says, "The gospel can simply become an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. Our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, quality into quantity and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes.' This is a theologian's way of saying, We can get really boring.' We can do what we do. In the vestry of Westminster stereographic report of a sermon delivered by Chapel there is a Spurgeon on 4 September 1881, in which he makes this statement: I dread getting to be a mere preaching machine, without my heart and soul being exercised in this solemn duty lest it should merely be clockwork.' In Robert Munger's words, 'A prepared messenger is more important a piece of than prepared message.'
As preachers we
p. 554
It is particular failing of Charismatic Christians that we only notice the extraordinary. In his fabulous book, which won Book of the Year in Australia a couple of years ago, Seeing God in the Ordinary, Michael Frost writes, We have locked God into the so-called sacred realms of church and healings and miracles and marvels. We seem to be trying so hard to bring down fire from heaven in our worship services while all along God's favour is to be found in sunshine on our faces, the sea lapping at our toes, picking our children up at school, at or note from a caring friend.'3 We fail to notice what God is doing. While we cry out for God to work in mighty ways, He is saying: 'I was at work when your son handed you that painting from his class today. Didn't you notice?'
Anyone who wants to be a narrative story-based preacher, needs to open their
p. 579
January 19, 2021
A very interesting collection of writings on different aspects of preaching. As you would expect from a book by many authors, some chapters were more immediately useful than others. However, this is a book to dip back into again and again. The aim of the collector of writings and organiser of the preaching meetings seemed wholly genuine.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews