A Boring Preacher Is a Contradiction in Terms
For the last few years I’ve had a growing desire to study more intently the craft of preaching. I get regular reps on Sundays, typically over thirty a year, and I have the responsibility of mentoring our other preachers. Yet I still feel the gaps between the preacher I want to be and the preacher I am. I say this even as people often compliment my preaching and notice improvements, particularly in the areas of boldness and confidence. In short, after ten years in one church, I’m hungry.
So, this is the year it begins. In January I grabbed all my preaching books that were scattered in alphabetical order on my bookshelves and created an entire shelf devoted to the topic. I’m buying other books and making Amazon wish lists of books to buy in the future. I signed up for a six-week cohort course with The Gospel Coalition led by Jeremy Treat. I’ve also committed myself to writing each week a five-hundred-word entry in a preaching journal about what I’m learning. The journal has nearly seven thousand words so far. I even have a working title and even a preface written for a book on preaching. I do this not because I’m necessarily going to write the book, though I want to, but because I learn best as I write and dream and pray and envision. I’m calling the book Hammer Fire Rain: Reflections on the Life of the Word of God in the Life of the Preacher. It would major on the many metaphors for God’s Word and how those affect not merely the sermon but the preacher across his life. I consider this book a “ten-years in the making” type of project. Preaching books, like marriage books, are best written by those with a long obedience in the same direction, unbroken vows, some gray hair, and a few ugly scars—yet also with a community of people who love them anyway.
The volunteer pastor at our church who did my annual review heard some of these rumblings and got me a gift for Christmas: the famous book Preaching and Preachers by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I’m glad he did. I’d never read it before. The book is adapted from a series of lectures he gave in the late 1960s. Lloyd-Jones had a long and celebrated career. He’s famous for several things, including being a medical doctor before a pastor and preaching through book of Romans at Westminster Chapel from 1955 to 1968. Those sermons have been published in a fourteen-volume series and have a page count of over five thousand.
I’d love to tell you more about what I’m learning from Lloyd-Jones, what I’m learning as I preach, and what I might someday write about preaching. For now, I just want to pass along a little section from the book in a chapter titled “The Art of Preaching,” in which Lloyd-Jones suggests that boring preachers should not be. In fact, they cannot be, he says. Even the idea of a boring preacher he calls “a very serious matter.”
Whether you preach or lead any Bible studies at all, I hope you’ll find the words encouraging and challenging.
The preacher must never be dull, he must never be boring; he should never be what is called “heavy.” I am emphasizing these points because of something I am often told and which worries me a great deal. I belong to the Reformed tradition, and may have had perhaps a little to do in Britain with the restoration of this emphasis during the last forty years or so.
I am disturbed therefore when I am often told by members of churches that many of the younger Reformed men are very good men, who have no doubt read a great deal, and are very learned men, but that they are very dull and boring preachers; and I am told this by people who themselves hold the Reformed position. This is to me a very serious matter; there is something radically wrong with dull and boring preachers. How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes?
I would say that a “dull preacher” is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher.
With the grand theme and message of the Bible dullness is impossible. This is the most interesting, the most thrilling, the most absorbing subject in the universe; and the idea that this can be presented in a dull manner makes me seriously doubt whether the men who are guilty of this dullness have ever really understood the doctrine they claim to believe, and which they advocate. We often betray ourselves by our manner. (Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, 85–86, paragraph breaks added)
At church on Monday our staff discussed this long paragraph in our weekly “preaching debrief” meeting. We, of course, agreed. But our solution for having less boring sermons was not so much that preachers should rack their brains on how to add more pop and pizazz, say, by adding spicy illustrations or dramatic gestures or having the tech booth turn up the volume to eleven.
Instead, we believe that Lloyd-Jones—and more importantly the Bible—tells us to focus more on our personal intimacy with God and rightly divided doctrine, and this, in time, will lead to riveting preaching, the kind of sermons that cause people to put down their phones, lean forward, and listen with their face. This is the view Paul takes when he writes to the church in Colossae. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” Paul writes, “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”
Our teaching and admonitions—and for that matter our singing—should overflow from “the word of Christ dwelling in [us] richly.” When Paul speaks of the word of Christ, he means a kind of shorthand for the gospel, the good news story of the life, death, resurrection, and promise of the second coming. When this good news dwells in us richly, good things happen.
In a recent podcast episode of the Expositors Collective, seasoned pastor Ray Ortlund shared some cautions about focusing too much on preaching. The cautions felt timely as all these grand thoughts about preaching bubble up within me and spill out in my journal entries, and as I add books to my shelf and enroll in courses. Ortlund said early in his pastoring he essentially overestimated the singular role of preaching. He has since learned, he told listeners, not that preaching is less important but that gospel preaching is always meant to exist within a broader pastoral and warm relationship between preacher and people.
To this, I say amen. As I give all this time to preaching and thinking about preaching, I don’t want to overestimate the singular role of preaching. To consider again Paul’s words in Colossians 3:16, he says “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” The you is plural. The relationship of preacher and parishioners—both immersed together in the gospel—matters.
So I’ll press on, encouraged but cautioned, striving not to be a boring preacher by dwelling more and more richly in the word of Christ among a congregation dwelling in the same.
And what I learn about the craft of preaching and word of Christ, in time, I hope to share with others, maybe with you.
* Photo by Kristina Paparo on Unsplash