7 suggestions to encourage good preaching

1. Pray for the preachers. Pray specifically that they will work hard at the Bible passages (1 Tim. 5:17) and preach them faithfully, passionately and in a way that engages with us.

2. From time to time, tell the preachers you are praying for them and looking forward with expectancy to the sermon. That will be a great encouragement and incentive to them to prepare well.

3. Be there. You may be surprised what an encouragement it is just to have you there, and what a discouragement to have you absent.

4. Thank them afterwards for things you learned. Don't flatter or just give them very vague comments about how good it was (if it was). Try to be specific and focus on the biblical content of the sermon, rather than just stories, anecdotes or illustrations. Tell them if there was something in particular you found helpful.

5. Be prepared to be constructively and supportively critical. Ask the preachers to help you see where they got a particular point in this passage; this will sharpen them up if, in fact, it didn't come from the passage, or indeed the Bible. It will encourage them to stick more to the Bible more next time. Be humble and respectful in the way you do this; remember, it is much harder to preach than to criticise preaching.

6. Relate to your preachers as one human being to other human beings. Remember that the best sermon by a remote preaching hero, heard on an MP3 recording, is no substitute for the word of God preached by a human being face to face with other human beings in the context of trust and love.

7. Be on the lookout for gifts of preaching and teaching in the church, and be ready to tap someone on the shoulder and suggest they develop these gifts and get further training. Mention these ideas to the pastoral leadership team in your church.

From Listen Up!, Christopher Ash, Director of Cornhill Training Course, London

Creation to Consummation 2010

Creation to Consummation 2010 from Steven Lee on Vimeo.

Creation to Consummation 2010
The Temple and God-Pleasing Worship
4 talks examining the Bible's overarching story, especially on the topic of worship
with Dr. David Peterson, former principal of Oak Hill Theological College
Luther Centre, Petaling Jaya
23-26 June 2010

Click here for more info and to sign up!

7 suggestions on reading the Bible

Seven suggestions for how we should read the Bible:

1) Reverently. Remembering the Bible is the word of God, the revelation of the Creator and Redeemer, means above all reading the Bible reverently.

2) Prayerfully. We have the Spirit to guide us into truth.

3) Collectively. Reading the Bible solely or merely as an individual plays into the notions of modernism. Reading the Bible collectively is a good antidote to such privatized, individual reading....Reading the Bible collectively also puts us in the historical and global community, which means that the Bible is not our individual possession.

4) Humbly. It's helpful to read the Bible humbly, to be careful not to equate our interpretations of the text with the text itself. The Bible is innerant, in other words, but our interpretations are not.

5) Carefully. We also need to read the Bible carefully, which is to say there is a place for hermeneutics and rules of interpretation....Reading the Bible carefully also entails reading the Bible canonically. In previous ages of the church, this was referred to as the "analogy of faith," which amounted to reading particular texts of the Bible in light of the whole Bible.

6) Christologically. The Bible is ultimately the story of Christ. All of it points to or away from him, like spokes from the hub of the wheel. All of the Bible eventually finds its end, its design, its purpose in Christ....It's not too much of a stretch to say that we understand a text fully when we connect it to Christ and his mission.

7) Obediently. Reading and interpreting are first-order activities that lead to the second-order activity of obedience and practice (James 2:22-26). Reading and interpreting the Bible is actually the easy part, compared to taking the Bible seriously enough to act upon it.

From Stephen Nichols and Eric Brandt in Ancient Word, Changing Worlds: The Doctrine of Scripture in a Modern Age

SMACAGOW 2010 talks online

Book review: The Reason for God

Those, like me, who find it hard to shy away from “heated discussions” will more than likely be keenly aware of the difference between winning the argument and pointing people to Jesus as Lord. Many times I’ve walked away from a conversation knowing very well that I’ve spent too much time arguing over questions about Christianity, and too little actually explaining the gospel, or for that matter even preparing the ground for the gospel to be proclaimed. It’s a problem, I feel, that is shared by many popular Christian apologetics books. There are some excellent books explaining the gospel, but my non-Christian friends often have so many questions to sort out before they would even begin to read those. On the other hand, the books that do start to answer these questions can be too limiting. They often present themselves as the the be all and end all in the argument over issue X, and are content to leave it at that. It's like my fiery conversations all over again, never pointing people to the next step.

The Reason for God however, is different. It deals with many of the same issues - “How can you say there’s only one way to God?”, “Can the Bible be trusted?”, “Hasn’t Science disproved Christianity?” - and yet there is a difference in the way Tim Keller treats these issues. As you read each chapter, you begin to realise that his focus isn’t on answering the question and winning the argument as such, but to convince the reader that the reasons for rejecting Christ are not as watertight as first thought. From that point, he then argues that faith in Christ is itself an intellectually honest and compelling way of looking at the world. What stops Tim Keller’s book from falling into the same trap as others is his honesty on the limitations of his method. Even when arguing for Christian faith, he is upfront in admitting that his arguments are “rationally avoidable”, ie. there is a way of explaining your way out of any of the arguments without resorting to stubbornness! As a result, his arguments focus as a means to encourage the reader to stop putting up barriers and to engage with the gospel of Jesus Christ, rather than to land the knock out blow in the argument itself.

For the Christian reader, there is much encouragement to be found in reading this book as an intellectual and compelling defence of the faith that we all share. More than that, it provides a useful corrective and exemplifies how to point to the gospel through our discussions for those, like me, who can get lost in the fog of arguments. For the non-Christian, although this may not be the book that helps them make the final connection that Jesus is Lord and King, it may help them reach a position that they would be prepared to begin investigating more closely the claims of Jesus Christ that they may never have thought reasonable before. A recommended read.

Mark Wilson, formerly of SMACC