And how will they hear without a preacher?
Romans 10:14
Has preaching fallen on hard times? An open debate is now being waged over the character and centrality of preaching in the church. At stake is nothing less than the integrity of Christian worship and proclamation.
How did this happen? Given the central place of preaching in the New Testament church, it would seem that the priority of biblical preaching should be uncontested. After all, as John A. Broadus–one of Southern Seminary’s founding faculty–famously remarked, “Preaching is characteristic of Christianity. No other religion has made the regular and frequent assembling of groups of people, to hear religious instruction and exhortation, an integral part of Christian worship.”
Yet, numerous influential voices within evangelicalism suggest that the age of the expository sermon is now past. In its place, some contemporary preachers now substitute messages intentionally designed to reach secular or superficial congregations–messages which avoid preaching a biblical text, and thus avoid a potentially embarrassing confrontation with biblical truth.
A subtle shift visible at the onset of the twentieth century has become a great divide as the century ends. The shift from expository preaching to more topical and human-centered approaches has grown into a debate over the place of Scripture in preaching, and the nature of preaching itself.
“for a sermon to be genuinely biblical, the text must set the agenda as the foundation of the message–not as an authority cited for spiritual footnoting.” Anglicans have the lectionary with compatible readings from Scripture. I look for themes that repeat themselves in the readings. However it seems to me that the saying “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other is good advice. The contrasting approaches in short are, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.