A lot of people in our congregations do not attend Bible study groups and
neither do they read many theological books. The main input they get about the
Christian Faith is through the Sunday sermon. There is therefore a need for
sermons to contain an element of teaching as well as exhortation. I perceive a
number of dangers in this.
Sermons can easily turn into Bible studies, which doesn't work because few
people in most congregations have Bibles open in front of them, and too many
Biblical references become confusing. They can include so much material that
people lose track of what is being said and forget most of it even before the
sermon has ended. They can become so long that people switch off. As a
supernumerary who likes to think he is fairly theologically literate I confess
that sometimes the main thing I remember about a sermon is how many minutes it
lasted.
As a Local Preachers' Tutor I used to advise new preachers not to try to
squeeze too much into their sermons, but to save something for next time they
were with the same congregation. When a sermon draws to a close, people should
be left sighing for more, not sighing with relief.
John Barnett
On 08 August 2021 at 15:55 NEIL BISHOP <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Two thoughts occur to me.
My mentor when I trained as a local preacher back in the 1970s used to
say that he wondered whether Jesus had ever been in love and whether he had
been married - and presumably widowed - before beginning his ministry. Like
Ray, he felt these would be interesting possibilities from the point of view
of incarnating human experiences. He himself had enjoyed a brief period being
in love and in a typical marriage relationship before illness cruelly
intervened, so the idea was of special interest to him.
The other thought is that many of our listeners have not been trained to
listen to and appreciate nuanced arguments and comments. They only hear the
headline not the paragraphs or concluding sentence clauses of subtle
qualification which follow. I have heard this used as a reason to keep
theology out of sermons and I can understand that but it is of course not the
right answer to the problem.
Neil Bishop
