Frank Viola and George Barna popularized the charge calling the sermon a “pagan” invention by the church fathers who adopted Greek rhetoric as the form of their sermons. They wrote, “the stunning reality is that today’s sermon has no root in Scripture. Rather, it was borrowed from pagan culture, nursed and adopted into the Christian faith” (Viola and Barna, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of our Christian Practices, Tyndale House, 2008, p.86).

Applying the Bible to people today is the toughest task I face in preaching. Listeners want to know what a book written so long ago has to say to them now. It is not hard for the preacher to be relevant. That is the easy part. All I have to do is preach what people want to hear.  No! The hard task is showing listeners that the Bible is relevant to their lives. The challenge is connecting the text with the application so that the Bible speaks, not me! The temptation for every preacher is to mishandle the text in our desire to be relevant. Sermons mislead more often in application than information making it our most significant challenge.

 “Well, if your church doesn’t grow,” a former pastor’s wife said to Barbara Hughes, “Kent is going to feel like a failure.” Barbara had been talking with a woman whose husband had left the pastorate to sell life insurance. She knew that success in ministry is generally measured by growth in numbers. Kent and Barbara were struggling with a declining church, and Kent felt like a failure. They tell their story in Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome. I remember sitting in a classroom years ago listening to Kent and Barbara and thinking how helpful it was to me as a new pastor. Barbara told the woman, “I don’t know why, but you are wrong, and I’m not going to rest until I find out why!” 

How do you stay fresh as a pastor? I have been asked that question many times over the years. As pastors, we spend much of our time preparing to preach. We carefully exegete the passage. The author’s intent, historical/cultural context and textual analysis play important roles in our exegesis. The danger is that sermon prep becomes an academic exercise – a technical skill we develop or a professional task we perform. Professional sermon creators preach shallow messages because our sermons come from shallow hearts. Preachers can substitute technical skills for spiritual depth leading to superficial sermons. How do we prep our souls to preach soul refreshing sermons?

Conrad Mbewe captured my attention with his book on pastoral preaching published in 2017. I have been reflecting much on the uniqueness of pastoral preaching as distinct from evangelistic/missional and national/universal church preaching. Many leaders write books on missional preaching today. How do we reach our culture for Christ? Many of our most popular models for preaching are people who preach to the body of Christ as a whole. Their preaching is generic because their audience is general. We can gain much benefit from these resources, but I think we need more emphasis on pastoral preaching. Mbewe’s book is an excellent step in that direction, written by a local church pastor with a local church vision.