Different Kinds of Preachers

Welcome again to Things Unseen, where this week, we’ve been reflecting on the subject of preaching. It’s important because Jesus urged us to take heed both how we hear and what we hear, but it’s also very important because we need to heed Paul’s appeal in Ephesians 6:18–20. Right after his teaching on the Christian’s spiritual armor, he urges the Ephesians to pray for preachers and to pray for their preaching.

When students begin courses on preaching at seminary or theological college, their teachers often give them a preaching grid by which they can assess each other as they listen. It may ask questions like: Was the main point clear? Were the illustrations appropriate and helpful? Was the introduction attention grabbing? Was the conclusion well handled? Was the length of the sermon appropriate? I hope my just mentioning this will help you imagine the ordeal a student can go through if he doesn’t think more highly about himself than he ought to. Who is really sufficient for these things?

Now, I have to confess that my own theological education didn’t include any teaching on preaching, and we were never given a preaching grid. Actually, I used to think that preaching grids were probably evil inventions of American professors of preaching to make their students feel completely inadequate—and perhaps they were—but in some ways that’s important. But they also do have a practical point: they provide a framework of reference for students and help them to see what’s important, and perhaps help them to correct some of their mistakes.

On the other hand—and this may just be a personal view—I’ve sometimes felt that when a teacher of preaching insists on his students following his own pattern, perhaps saying, “No, John, we do it this way,” the great danger is that everyone gets squeezed into the same mold, and then some will end up like David wearing Saul’s armor. It just doesn’t fit. And the sad thing is that it can squash the gifts that a young preacher actually has by insisting that he uses gifts that he doesn’t have. And I think I’ve sometimes seen that happen, and it can take years for a man to untangle his true preaching self. Actually, I’m convinced that Ezekiel could never have preached one of Isaiah’s sermons, or Paul preached the sermons of the Apostle John. Phillips Brooks was surely right and biblical when he said that preaching was characterized by truth coming through personality.

And I think this is something that helps us avoid the cult of preacher personality, which is probably as bad, if not worse today than it was among the Corinthians. After all, they only had Peter, and Paul, and Apollos to compare. But we’ve got YouTube, and Vimeo, and a multitude of other ways we can listen to endless numbers of preachers. I’ve even seen lists of “the ten best preachers” and so on. And you often hear people say, “My favorite preacher is so-and-so.” So, how can we avoid that cult of the favorite or the best preacher?

Here’s something I found very helpful when I first read it as a teenager. In one of his letters, our old friend John Newton, whom we’ve met before in these podcasts, answers a question that he’d been asked: Why is it that one man’s preaching helps me more than another’s? How can we answer that question without, as it were, creating a league table of preachers? And Newton’s answer is to say this: remember that God shapes individual men not only with different gifts, but with different burdens, emphasis, and personal characteristics, and you too have your own particular needs. And so, it shouldn’t surprise us that one man’s ministry may be especially helpful to me at a particular time, or another man’s preaching minister to me in a special way. Sameness would mean everyone was wearing Saul’s armor, and it doesn’t fit everybody. It’s not a one size fits all. So, instead of comparing, we should rejoice in the fact that there are different shapes, and sizes, and hues, and burdens in different men’s preaching. Comparisons are odious, but thanksgiving for each is altogether appropriate.

Perhaps, I can underline this with a couple of personal comments. I think I’ve had the privilege of hearing and knowing most of the men that many of us who listen to Things Unseen would regard as the finest biblical preachers from, let’s say, the 1960s to the 2020s. And two things strike me. One is that although they were all faithful to Scripture, their preaching styles were very different from each other, and the burdens you could sense in their preaching varied. The second is this—and I would say this about the man whose preaching made most impact in shaping my own life and ministry—nobody should have regarded his style as a model for themselves. If he’d gone to preaching school, every single preaching teacher under the sun would’ve tried to change him. And that’s been a great lesson to me, to learn to feed on the good food of the Word, no matter who is preaching it to me. I hope that you think the same way.