The Future of Preaching. Geoffrey Stevenson

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      In the course of an eventful life, I seem to have become a snapper-up of ill-considered titles. Those who have invited me to preach or speak at some event or other often ask me how I’d like to be described. They are not easily fobbed off with my standard reply that I’d like to be simply ‘Leslie Griffiths’. They seem keen to impress their public with the full panoply of my honorifics. If they persist, I send them the whole list in alphabetical order and invite them to do whatever they like with them. One title is invariably missing from such a list, yet it’s the one I’d give up all the others for; indeed it’s the one I have chosen for my epitaph when that final day comes. On Welsh slate, affixed to the wall of the memorial garden at Wesley’s Chapel, and above the spot where my ashes will be interred, the announcement will be made to all passers-by that here lies ‘Leslie Griffiths, one of Mr Wesley’s preaches’.

      It is as a preacher that I most want to be remembered. Not as a teacher or lecturer, not a broadcaster or writer, but as a preacher. It is to this work that I was called, and I can think of no vocation more noble, no art more intricate, no cause more necessary than that of declaring the good news which God has made known to us through the person and ministry, the life and death, the resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.

      The pages that follow make a serious attempt to re-imagine the role of preaching for our day. A brilliant essay on the Bible asks us to move beyond seeing it merely as text towards understanding it as message. And that must surely be the supreme challenge in an age where the world’s agenda is relentlessly driven forward by breaking news, reality television, the cult of celebrity and the latest sales wheeze of those who want to sell us something. The Bible undergirds the work of every preacher, but no one should be left thinking of our holy book merely as a tidy arrangement СКАЧАТЬ