Preaching to the Choir

This week a friend of ours told us that he had been at a ‘preaching conference’. Part of it was lectures about preaching and some of it was listening to sermons by experienced practitioners.

His mention of the subject prompted us to thinking about preaching in 2025! After a lifetime of listening to sermons and preaching quite a few ourselves, we have fairly strong views about the practice – not all of them for publication!

If you are or have been at some stage in your life a churchgoer, you may very well feel that you have heard your fair share of sermons. A good many of them will have been highly forgettable. At one end of the spectrum, bland and cliché ridden, at the other, fiery and loud. Stating the obvious or urging you to still greater moral and spiritual effort.

In many ways, preaching is now an archaic form, a legacy of a more authoritarian age. And it has sometimes been responsible for a good deal of emotional abuse even if done with the best of intentions. Guilt inducing, fear producing. Or extraordinarily dull, sufficient to vaccinate thoughtful hearers against religious teaching for life!

We have heard hundreds of sermons in our lives and recognise the criticisms above only too well. Indeed we have probably preached ineffective sermons ourselves! At the same time, we have heard preaching that was life-affirming, inspiring, informative. Words that have shaped our lives.

So we asked ourselves...if we had been given the opportunity to speak to the preaching conference what would we have said? If anyone had said, ‘We’d like you to talk to these aspiring preachers for five minutes about sermons, what might we have said?

Bottom line always for us is that the sermon must be biblical. We don’t really want to hear moralising or petty stories from our preachers, we want to know that they have first listened to what God is saying in the Bible and thought long and hard about what it might mean. Secondly we want to know what it might  mean to this congregation in this place at this time. Has the preacher really thought about the needs that these people have, not the needs (s)he think they ought to have. To know the kind of people you are going to speak to, are they new Christians or those who have been lifelong disciples? What sort of difficulties might they be facing? And our third concern is for appropriate language – not slang but language that people speak every day and in situations common to all sorts of people. Concrete language about real situations people face not abstract language or theological terms like redemption and justification and sanctification.

And what subjects do we want to hear people preaching on? We and most other people in churches and beyond are living in a complex world and often facing situations where very fine judgements need to be made. Basic questions like how to know God and believe in Jesus and the Bible are always needed. How to spend time and money, how to handle difficult relationships, how to cope with doubt and questioning, how to develop faith and find the will of God in your life. How to maintain hope in the warlike world in which we live, how to keep peace and build community in your world. How to forgive, how to overcome differences....etc. etc.

We are sure some of our readers have their own views on what, ir anything you would like to hear in sermons. But maybe try another exercise: if you were given a platform of some sort to ‘preach’ or give others guidance about life for five minutes, who would you like to speak to? what would you say? What would you want people most to hear? What rises to the top of your mind as being of utmost concern? What questions would you try and answer? Which Bible passage might you use? How would you begin?

Just for fun, take some time to think about your ‘sermon’, the matters of utmost concern to you. And draft a ‘sermon’ which will never be delivered but may be helpful to you at least. We always found that the person who got most out of our sermons was the person who wrote it!