One of the privileges of being the Training Director of the School of Preachers Trust is that I get to think, talk and write about preaching most of the time.
I find it interesting to do so with different individuals and groups in the United Kingdom and around the world.
This week I was teaching on the Crosslands Training virtual residential about Speaking God’s Words: A Theology of Sound.
I will be repeating that teaching at their in-person residentials in the first two weeks of September. At the virtual residential we had students from the UK, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Indonesia, France, Spain and the United States.
The questions that people ask about preaching tend to vary according to their background, experience and location. The things that are important to some preachers are less important to others. Yet every preacher generally tends to be interested in the two aspects of preaching that Augustine refers to at the beginning of his great book of preaching On Christian Teaching:
“There are two things on which the interpretation of scripture depends: the process of discovering what we need to learn, and the process of presenting what we have learnt.”
Most questions about preaching fail into one of these two categories: how we discover the message of the text of Scripture and how we present that to others in a sermon. Every sermon requires a delicate balance of form and content.
Over the years I have concluded that as a preacher these two aspects of preaching are closely linked. When preachers read Scripture carefully, they begin to realise that the form of Scripture and how authors have put it together is part of the way we understand the content.
The biblical writers are not haphazard in the composition of Scripture. Take Luke, who is responsible for the Gospel that bears his name and its sequel, Acts.
Luke uses the first four verses of his gospel to lay out his approach to writing:
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”
Luke models for preachers the careful process of gathering helpful content and creatively shaping that content so that it is easy to follow and leads to confidence in the gospel he is unfolding.
One of Luke’s tactics of shaping his gospel is the motif of a journey.
Luke’s Gospel travels from Jerusalem to Jerusalem. It begins with the elderly priest Zechariah in the Temple; it provides the only story about the adolescent Jesus in the Temple and ends with the disciples worshipping with joy in the Temple precincts.
The central part of the Gospel (chapters 9–19) is written as a travelogue, relating how Jesus moved steadily from Galilee to Jerusalem. This journey shows us that he is going to Jerusalem to die for us and that he calls us to “take up our cross daily and follow him.”
Photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash