The Pulpit Leads the World
Preach the Word: An Overview
Every editor anxiously wonders whether a collection of essays will in the end form a coherent book. To our delight this volume has come together not only in a way that provides good coverage of the subject at hand, but also with essays that reiterate many of the same themes, thus giving the volume an overall unity and coherence. We have grouped these sixteen essays under four broad headings. By way of introduction, I would like to offer you, our readers, a brief yet enticing preview of each of the sections in the hope of whetting your appetites.
Interpretive Principles and Practices
"What you believe about the Bible determines everything," Kent Hughes was fond of saying to me as a College Church intern nearly a decade ago. He meant this not just in general terms, but specifically as it relates to preaching. If you believe the Bible to be the Word of God written, God's words in human words, it should shape your entire approach to preaching. In other words, there are specific interpretive principles and practices that ought to flow naturally from one's conviction about God's Word. In this first section, our contributors invite us to reflect upon some of them: things such as listening carefully to the text of Scripture, approaching the study of a passage inductively, appreciating the historical dimensions of a biblical text, seeking to preach both Old and New Testaments as Christian Scripture, and being sensitive to the various genres of the Bible.
It should become clear as one reads these essays that if expository preaching is to be done well, certain habits of study need to be developed and certain pitfalls, both practical and theoretical, need to be avoided. However, as important as right interpretation and interpretive methodology are for preaching, the ultimate criterion of success is faithfulness. This section of essays thus concludes on the right note with pastor John MacArthur helping us to hear once more Paul's charge to Timothy: "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth" (2 Tim. 2:15).
Biblical and Historical Paradigms
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is arguably the most oft-cited work of the twentieth century. It is also responsible for injecting into our everyday parlance the term "paradigm." A paradigm is a model. Our second section of essays provides us with a few paradigms, a few models for modern-day preachers. The first is a biblical one, the model of the rugged and indefatigable apostle Paul. Both Bruce Winter and Duane Litfin explore aspects of Paul's gospel proclamation and set him up, as it were, as a pastoral paradigm for twenty-first-century preachers. Then, drawing upon the rich legacy of history, Wallace Benn and J. I. Packer offer us a glimpse into the lives of the great Puritan pastor Richard Baxter and the towering Anglican divine Charles Simeon. Baxter provides us, as Benn demonstrates, with a model of how the preacher's pastoral care for his flock can enhance, rather than detract from, his work in the pulpit. And Packer's reflections on Simeon's life paint for us not only an impressive picture of an exemplary preacher and homiletician, but a moving portrait of a life and ministry characterized by earnestness over the long haul.
Contemporary Challenges and Aims
Expository preaching has never been easy. Indeed, as Don Carson rightly points out, challenges have confronted the pulpit in every generation. That being said, as this third section of essays recognizes, there are some distinctive challenges in the twenty-first century: multiculturalism; rising biblical illiteracy; shifting epistemology; increasing social, cultural, and technological complexity; rapid change; and a dearth of models and mentoring.
These are some of the challenges. But if this is what preachers are up against, what should they be trying to accomplish? En route to an answer Phillip Jensen reminds us of the theological basis and rationale for preaching. In simplest terms, preaching is communicating God's Word in human words. Or to borrow from the apostle Peter, it is speaking the very "oracles of God" (1 Pet. 4:11). Don Carson defines it with the single, felicitous phrase: "re-revelation." Hence, preaching is nothing less than God re-revealing himself through the exposition of his sacred Word. Quite an ennobling vision of what transpires in the pulpit! As to the aims, then, of preaching in the twenty-first century, Philip Ryken rightly points in a threefold direction: through the proclamation of the Word, expository preachers must seek the reformation of the church, the reconciliation of the world, and the glorification of God in Christ Jesus. Anything less is less than truly biblical preaching, that is, preaching with Scripture-informed aims and ends.
Training and Example
Who is responsible for training future preachers? When hearing this question, our thoughts tend to run toward the seminary. And not without good reason, since for over a century now, the seminary has been the primary conduit of formal ministerial training for pastors and preachers; and this situation is not likely to change anytime in the near future. So it is incumbent upon the church to think seriously about what seminary education ought to look like. To this end, Peter Jensen, dean of Moore College, Sydney, Australia, provides an incisive and sobering analysis of the state of seminary education today, bedeviled as it is by increasing fragmentation, specialization, and generalization. However, his is not simply a song of lament. Rather, the burden of Jensen's essay is to challenge seminaries to prioritize the training of preachers amidst everything else they do. As Jensen contends, "It is the business of the whole faculty and the whole curriculum to produce preachers." Or to put it concretely, the sermon is the aim of the seminary.
Of course, seminaries are not the only ones who should produce preachers. The church is ultimately responsible to raise up her own shepherds. Thus in every generation the church must set itself anew to the task of raising up its own. But what might this look like in our day and age? Setting his proposal against the backdrop of the preacher-led Puritan movement in Tudor England, David Helm identifies several twenty-first-century strategies to help raise up not just a few but a whole generation of gospel preachers. This inspiring proposal is complemented by Jon Dennis's seasoned reflection upon Paul's charge to his pastoral understudy, Timothy: "Preach the Word!" (2 Tim. 4:2), which Dennis suggests provides us with a call and a model for training and deploying gospel ministers.
This entire collection of essays concludes, then, where it ought: with a warm, engaging and indeed fascinating sketch of Kent Hughes's life and ministry. Randall Gruendyke, longtime friend and former associate of Kent's at College Church, has done a great service in putting Kent's story down on paper. Such an exercise, however, serves more than the public record; it provides us with a living example of faithfulness to one's calling and faithfulness to one's Lord. We all need examples - preachers not least. May the reader see in this story an inspiring portrait of how the Pauline paradox of grace and discipline (1 Cor. 15:10) came to expression in the life of one godly and much-beloved pastor!
The Pulpit Leads the World
These are tumultuous and indeed unsettling times. As the rising tide of post-Christian secularism threatens to capsize the evangelical church and as many foul breezes rip across her deck, it is the pulpit that should be out in front, leading, navigating, warning of danger, signaling hope. Regrettably, however, it is the pulpit that is all too often relegated to the rear, pastors choosing instead to lead with all the rest. As a result, many churches are left adrift in a sea of moral and theological confusion, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Furthermore, as the pulpit recedes from the prow of many ministries, the church of Jesus Christ forfeits her divinely appointed means of bringing sinners to the Savior - and the world suffers.
This collection of essays on expository preaching, a labor of love and tribute to our friend and colleague Kent Hughes, is offered in hopeful anticipation of fairer days. So too we pray for favorable winds and a rising tide - a new generation of gospel preachers who heed the example of our honoree by ordering their lives and ministries around the conviction that the pulpit is ever the earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.
Soli Deo Gloria!