The problems of preaching

Preaching is difficult.

Yes, it is spiritually difficult – it costs, it hurts, to preach well. But that’s not what I mean just now.

It is an astonishingly difficult task to ask of anyone to find a worthwhile and meaningful – and, ideally, engaging and entertaining – message weekly, or, commonly, twice a week, for the same group of people. It is something we ask of almost no-one else in our culture. There are a select handful of newspaper commentators who do it in print, and are rightly revered by other journalists. No broadcaster that I can think of, since the demise of the astonishing Alistair Cooke, would dream of doing it without a battery of researchers and writers in support. Yet we expect our pastors to succeed in the task.

Talking to another member of my local church recently, I reflected on my own experience of the preaching ministry within a local fellowship. I have, it happens, only rarely, and for fairly brief periods, been the sole preacher in a church; I have fairly often sat under preachers called to a maintain the pulpit ministry alone – some of them extraordinarily able. When I began my own ministry, I regarded team preaching as a necessary evil; when in a particular circumstance four of us, all in full-time employment, had to work together to maintain the pulpit of a church in a difficult context, I thought it would be a problem: there would be problems with continuity and coherence of the teaching, but we would work to do the best we could. That team lasted, with minor changes, for over two years. By the end of that time, I had changed my mind: team preaching – with the necessary work to ensure continuity and coherence – is, for me, the ideal; solo preaching is common, but to be regretted.

Why so? For the reasons I began with. Preaching is, just, hard. In particular, all of us have native styles, particular weaknesses, idiosyncracies, and even our own strengths. I think I am fairly self-aware about my own preaching. There are some things I do pretty well, and there are some serious weaknesses (I am not, for instance, good at detailed application – I am far more comfortable with ringing truths that remain in elevated oratorical splendour, without ever touching messy ‘reality’). Were (Deus avertat…) I to have sole occupancy of a pulpit, over time, inevitably, my weaknesses would become magnified, and my strengths vitiated.

We speak sometimes of preaching being ‘food’ for God’s people; to feed on one foodstuff, rich in potassium and vitamin A, but lacking magnesium and vitamin C, is not good for us; eventually we will be desperate for a tiny dose of what we have been missing, and even sick of the the good things we have been getting in excess. So with preaching. It is not about (in abstract) how good a preacher is – it is about the need for God’s people to receive Biblical instruction, powerful inspiration, practical help, warm comfort, prophetic challenge, and all the rest – most of us who preach can only provide perhaps two or three of these with any competence.

So, ideally I believe, we need a preaching team, indeed, a diverse preaching team – ordained and lay, some male members alongside the women, different ages, different cultural backgrounds, different styles and gifts. I know that ideals are never attained, but examining an ideal helps us, often, to come to a more clear-sighted evaluation of where we are and how we might address the imperfections of our present context.

7 Comments

  1. Aric Clark
    Mar 3, 2010

    Thought you might like to know this post provoked a response on my own blog. I especially agree that team-preaching is ideal.

  2. Mark L
    Mar 4, 2010

    A hearty yes and amen to this from my end Steve. The irony is that sometimes some church members (I guess we all have “fans”, maybe not as many as we’d like!) seem to prefer solo. But on your analogy that probably is a bit like eating the same food all the time. Strangely some people might not get bored with that but it’s hardly good for them…

  3. Tony
    Mar 4, 2010

    I’ve scheduled a reply on my blog to appear tomorrow. I agree about preaching teams, but …

  4. Steve H
    Mar 7, 2010

    Thanks for comments, folks (and to others who have responded on their own blogs – Julie, …)

    I agree with most of the points people have made. A preaching team needs to ensure continuity of message, certainly – that means, at a minimum, working together over the texts week by week, listening to each other, so that there is a significant degree of shared voice. This perhaps answers Tony’s point about listening to ‘star’ preachers online most effectively, also.

    Mark – interesting. I wonder whether the problem is a latent clericalism? One of my sadder memories of pastoral ministry was the unshakable conviction on the part of some church members that, roughly, ‘God’=’the pastor’ and ‘the church’=’the pastor’ – so if I had not been to visit, the church didn’t care and God didn’t care (even though I knew, and had probably arranged for, several other members of the pastoral care team to visit). Perhaps the same in the pulpit – God speaks through the pastor, and not otherwise?

  5. lynn
    Mar 12, 2010

    Steve, you don’t know just how helpful this post was to read at this time.

    Permission to quote from you?

    Lynn

    • Steve H
      Mar 15, 2010

      Thanks, Lynn. Of course. But if you are going to tell Karl that he’s running MBC wrong…

      • lynn
        Sep 15, 2011

        Just read this, 18 months later….!!

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Some recent wanderings « P e r ∙ C r u c e m ∙ a d ∙ L u c e m - [...] Holmes emerges from a wee blogging exile to share some thoughts on the problems of preaching. Categories: Theology Comments…
  2. Preaching, prepared ministry, and other things that aren’t quite work « Knowing Experimentally: Rachel Muers's Blog - [...] by rachelmuers in Uncategorized. Tagged: ministry. Leave a Comment Steve Holmes wrote a post on ‘the problems of preaching‘,…
  3. Preaching is Hard… & it is Easy | Two Friars and a Fool - [...] There’s a good post about the difficulties of preaching over at Shored Fragments. [...]

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

get facebook like button