‘How does it feel?’ sang Bob Dylan in one of his most acclaimed songs. In one way or another people have been asking me the same question over the past week. How does it feel to be back preaching? Well, it’s not the return I envisaged but in many ways these Covid-19 have helped me to get back in a limited way. Colleagues are restricted in the work they can do and that has opened up the possibility of my making a contribution while still ‘shielding.’ And I have to say it felt good. To be back in the building, to be working with our techie folk Chris and Hugh, to be engaged once again in the greatest privilege that could ever fall to a man or woman: preaching the Word. On the day there was a bit of a sticky start. After all, it has been 16 months. But the beauty of recording is that you can ‘cut’ and start again.
There has been much discussion about the value of live-streamed and recorded services. It has been much appreciated although in recent months there seems to have been a falling away since the pandemic forced us into lockdown. Personally I am inclined to believe that if the preached Word is going out by whatever means then we are called to expect results. Remember Isaiah 52: 10-11:
‘As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.’
Maybe this is what Professor Donald Macleod had in mind when he wrote in a recent email to me:
‘At the moment, the huge expansion in live-streaming of church services means that the showers of the Word are watering the earth as never before, and we have good reason to hope that they will bear fruit.’
Preachers need to embrace this vision not just in these Covid-19 days but in relation to our work in every time. Many have accepted that the very nature of our culture works against the efficacy of preaching. For the last hundred years people have been writing books on preaching in which they explore why ‘modern’ minds cannot easily accommodate preaching. And not just the ‘minds’ in society at large but also within the Church! I was recently given a book in which there is an essay on preaching by Alastair Haggart, former Primus of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. He begins by saying: ‘Of all clerical activities, preaching is perhaps the one held in the lowest esteem.‘ To be fair, he goes on to argue for the significance of preaching in the life of the Church but he has a point.
Some of that is down to preachers themselves. The German theologian Helmut Thielike once said: ‘People are not tired of preaching. They are tired of our preaching.‘ There may be more than just a grain of truth in this. Think about it. In a society where ‘story telling’ is now regarded as an occupation, were people pay to listen to comedians talking for two hours, where TED talks draw huge interest and audiences - where are we going wrong?
Come in Rob Bell. Yes I know he is a controversial figure and may have wandered from the path of Christian orthodoxy in some ways but years ago I attended one of his conferences in Grand Rapids USA. It was on preaching and in his opening address he shared his belief that the day of preaching had yet to come. He spoke about ‘this twitterized age’ in which we live and how it will eventually become more important for people to listen to ‘a real person, speaking in real time, about things that really matter.‘ And, he went on, when we are speaking of the Gospel we are handling ‘the greatest truths that anyone has ever stumbled upon.’
There is something here for our encouragement. Maybe our culture is more open to listening to a message than we habitually believe. But there is a challenge also. Do we really believe that our message is one that the world needs to hear, that it contains the greatest of all truths concerning ourselves, concerning God, concerning the destiny of humankind? That confidence was at the heart of the early Christian mission. This is what motivated the earliest followers of Jesus and which led to the judgement of pagan contemporaries that they were ‘turning the world upside down.’
That is a vision we need to keep before us with the prayer that the present output of preaching online will take the world forward to a greater sense of the Kingdom of God in our midst.
In his book on prayer Eric Alexander reminds us:
‘ . . . true preaching is not merely an intellectual or oratorical exercise, depending on human skills. It is a spiritual work, depending on the power of God to make His words living and effective, and the anointing of God, to make the preacher the vehicle of God’s grace.’
