Steve Chalke On Preaching

I won’t be posting a new sermon on the blog this weekend, as I’ll be repeating my recent Covenant Service sermon tomorrow morning. However I thought I’d offer some thoughts on preaching.

A couple of days ago the February issue of Christianity magazine dropped through my letterbox. There were a number of worthwhile features, but one column I turn to regularly is Steve Chalke‘s monthly column about everyday life as a church leader. This month he talks about struggling with sermon preparation. He had told his congregation how exciting Paul’s letter to the Colossians was but the found himself with a passage that bored him. What do you do? Remembering some old advice from his theological college principal he just gets down and gets on with it. He quotes William Carey’s famous self-assessment of his abilities: ‘I can plod.’ The article is entitled, ‘Sometimes it’s OK just to be OK.’ In other words, you don’t have to have dramatic flashes of inspiration every week.

Sound advice. To which I want to add one encouraging thought. My experience is that those times when the inspiration is as zippy as wading through treacle can often be the times when your preaching most connects with the people. The sermons that have most seemed like a slog to me are frequently the ones that draw the greatest number of comments afterwards about how helpful it was.

I remember first seeing this not in my own preaching but in someone else’s. In the summer of 1984 I worked on Mission To London, a series of evangelistic meetings at QPR‘s Loftus Road football stadium, where Luis Palau was preaching. I was an ‘adviser’, supervising counsellors. The mission ran for something like forty-two nights and I was there for a good half of them. It was the night when I felt like Palau’s sermon was the most boring and inspired, a wet midweek evening. Surely no-one would come onto the pitch and make a response to Christ when his preaching had been so dull?

You know what I’m going to say. I never saw – insofar as my eyes could judge – a higher percentage of people come forward that night at any time during the mission.

So if you are a fellow preacher and your preparation (perhaps even for tomorrow morning) has all the appeal of sludge, hang in there. In our weakness Christ is strong by his Spirit. Be expectant – not of yourself, but of God.

Happy preaching tomorrow.

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