InterviewBlog | John Stott: a past Q&A on preaching today
John Stott: a past Q&A on preaching today
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 24.12.22
What do you believe is the state of preaching today?
JS Let me begin by saying that I’m an unrepentant believer in the power of the pulpit. I believe in preaching. I know it’s regarded by many people as an outmoded form of communication, as what somebody’s called an echo from an abandoned past. Who wants to listen to sermons nowadays? People are drugged by television, they are hostile to authority, they are weary and wary of words, and they don’t want to listen to sermons. But I believe that it’s possible to recapture the sermon as an authentic means of communication today. There is something unique about preaching when you have a living person facing living people – as hopefully a Spirit-filled preacher addressing Spirit-filled people – there is a chemistry that happens that doesn’t happen on television or even on other forms of communication. So I believe that there is something about preaching that is unique and I want to see it captured.
So why is biblical preaching so rare?
JS Preaching must be – maybe not expository in the sense of going through a long passage of scripture and giving a running commentary on it, I don’t mean that – but that every sermon must be a biblical exposition, it must wrestle with a passage of scripture, a verse, a paragraph. The reason why biblical preaching is so important is that it is the exposition of the Word of God and it is the Word of God that needs to come to people, it’s the Word of God that challenges people and that matures the people of God.
