Preaching and Preachers

What to AvoidBut towards the middle of the last century people began to regardthemselves as now educated and intellectual and felt that they musthave 'subjects'. It was a part of that great change which took placetowards the middle of the last century which is known as Victorianism.It was to be found quite as much in the U.S.A. as in Britain and elsewhere.I have already referred to it in connection with the type ofbuilding and form of service. I commend, as being most important, astudy of the subtle change that took place somewhere round about themiddle of the last century. Prior to that the old idea was that ofmeeting together to worship God and to listen to the exposition ofScripture. Moreover, the people waited for the coming of the HolySpirit upon the preacher and upon the whole service. But gradually agreat change took place from that to a more man-centred type ofservice. We have seen how it worked out in evangelism. The interestin 'subjects' was a definite feature of this change. We were no longersimple people, and what was needed now was an 'address' or a lecturerather than to come under the power of the preaching of the Word.As people of understanding we wanted 'food for thought' or intellectualstimulus, and the affective element was neglected. We wereinterested in subjects, and the announcing of subjects encouraged thispseudo-intellectualism.But it also encourages a too-theoretical approach to the Truth. Wehave seen how bad this is for the preacher himself; and ifit is bad forhim, it is very much worse for the people.Another objection to it is that it has the tendency to isolate subjectsfrom their context in the Scriptures; indeed ultimately it regards theScriptures as but a collection of statements about particular subjects.So one atomises the Scripture and forgets the whole; and, surely, thewhole is more important than the parts. This announcing of subjectsis a bad practice therefore because it extracts these subjects andtends to isolate them from their context; tends, indeed, even toisolate them from one another. So one loses the sense of the wholenessof the biblical message and becomes interested in particular subjectsand questions.