In broaching the whole matter of the failures of the Christian pulpit at the present time you have hit upon one of the most serious problems we face in the church.

You wish me to list ten serious failures of the Christian pulpit. I think I have to say at once in that connection that my list will have in view quite different situations. By that I mean to say that there are serious failings among those committed to the Reformed faith, and there are also serious failings among those of a broader evangelical commitment. Hence, whatever I say about the former will in the nature of the case apply to a narrower circle than what I have to suggest about the latter. I shall attempt to make that distinction as I go along.

(1) I would say—first of all—that, from my own observation, the pre-eminent failing in the evangelical pulpit is a misunderstanding of the nature of preaching. Whatever else may be alleged against the Barthian school, at least this has to be said in its favour: Karl Barth and those who ranked themselves with him had a clear conception of the sermon as ‘event.’ I know, of course, that this idea of the sermon as ‘event’ was related to the Barthian view of the Word of God; but I would insist that the idea itself is to be found plainly in Calvin and in many others in t he Augustinian and Reformed tradition. What is it that happens when the Word of God is preached? That is the question. Is the sermon also—as the Second Helvetic Confession declares—the Word of God? If it is, then in what sense is this the case? Here Romans 10.14, 15 must be cited as of great importance. Prof. John Murray, in his commentary, speaks on this point with no uncertain voice. If we regard the sermon as the vehicle through which the Lord Jesus Christ himself speaks—if, that is to say, we hold that preaching in the biblical sense of the word is the principal means by which God addresses himself to sinners—this conviction cannot help but exercise a transforming influence on what we who are ministers do in the pulpit, and on how we do it. It does not seem to me that many evangelical ministers, whether Reformed or not, have any firm understanding of the truth in this area.

(2) Something else that has troubled me a great deal is what I may perhaps be permitted to call a want of ministerial earnestness. There are, it is true, serious preachers about; but their number is too few. And I think that problem is one which characterizes many who stand in the Reformed tradition. Ministers should be able to say, with Richard Baxter, ‘I preached as never sure to preach again, An«t as a dying man to dying men.’

The reasons for this lack of ministerial earnestness need to be explored. I have a few ideas on the subject. Perhaps part of the problem is due to certain conclusions drawn from the doctrine of the covenant about the spiritual position of those in the congregation to which a man preaches. Another factor here is possibly a failure to hold in tension the biblical teachings on divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Still another factor is the influence of the age in which we live with its general want of seriousness and with its tendency to undervalue the awful consequences of sin and impenitence.

(3) I have also been disturbed by contemporary trends in communication. In his excellent volume Preaching and Preachers, Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has some comments on this point. I recognize, of course, that men should use different styles in different situations and that what is appropriate in one setting may be quite inappropriate in another. One speaks differently, for example, over the radio from what is the case in a worship service on the Lord‘s Day. However, the idea that a minister should never raise his voice—that, in fact, it is improper and undignified to raise one’s voice—has tended to reduce the intensity of the sermon experience. It would be quite wrong to insist that every man must preach in the same way and that all ministers should adopt the same vehement style. But it is equally wrong to teach that enthusiasm, vehemence, and the employment of whatever rhetorical skills are available are foreign to the Christian minister. There is a sense, I think, in which the so-called ‘conversational style’ has brought death to the pulpit.

(4) It seems to me that there is a problem among many of the younger Reformed ministers at the point of the redemptive–historical approach to the Scriptures. I have read Sidney Greidanus’s Sola Scriptura and some of the other books on the subject, but I have yet to find in any of them a way of bringing together the redemptive–historical conception of Scripture and warm, pointed, applicatory preaching. I do not, it should be said, question the validity of the insights of the redemptive-historical method. But to warn off ministers from the exemplary and the moralistic methods of a former time and of other schools is not as yet to have shown them how to be personal and applicatory without doing injustice to the scope and intent of the Word of God. We need some solid, helpful work here, and we need it soon. If the redemptive-historical interpretative principle robs men of power in the pulpit there is something radically wrong with it. And I fear that it has done just this in not a few instances.

(5) My observation is that in terms of their preaching many ministers might as well not have gone to seminary—and this is true in the Reformed churches as well as in those of a broader background and tradition. We stress the value of Hebrew and Greek, of careful and painstaking exegesis, of reverent interpretation of the biblical text, with the end before us of making as certain as possible that what is said is based on the Scriptures. But as soon as men complete their seminary training and are under the necessity of writing sermons—often several sermons per week—they cast about for help in ways that are sometimes startling and unsettling. And the result is that all the discipline and instruction of the seminary classroom are lost to view in the actual work of preaching from week to week. We may expect this in quarters where the approach taken to the exegesis of the Bible is not so responsible as we claim it to be. But what are we to say when the same sort of thing crops up in case after case within the Reformed churches themselves? One can pick up example after example of allegory, of spiritualization, of moralism, of an ignoring of the real teaching of the text, in pulpit after pulpit. Why is this so? I have already indicated that perhaps a part of the reason for it is to be found in the pressure of having to prepare many sermons. And it has to be conceded that a minister can be very busy with other work than preparation for the pulpit. But mere busyness can never excuse a minister of the gospel where the most important thing he is called to do is concerned. Moreover, careless handling of the Scriptures breeds incredulity among the hearers. It certainly does in me.

(6) I have often thought in recent years that a great failing in the evangelical pulpit is the inability of many ministers to speak of anything beyond that which bears upon the individual and his/her family and their relationship to God in Christ. The individualism and the exclusively soteriological orientation of much evangelical preaching are apparent on every side. My comment has to be qualified, of course. We need to concede that evangelicals in the past couple of decades have been interested in the broader application of the gospel. And one does now hear a good deal of political preaching, mostly of a very right-wing variety. However, there also the same accusation applies, though in a different way and to a somewhat different degree. The perimeters of what the gospel means for individuals are drawn in such a way as to teach that what matters is one‘s own relationship to Christ and one’s responsibilities in a few, usually very restricted, areas beyond that. The corrective to this misconception is found in the Bible and in the Reformed theological tradition. One thinks here of the great breadth of Calvin’s vision; of the Puritan concern to apply the gospel down the line in every sphere; of Abraham Kuyper’s noble grasp of the implications of Christian responsibility. But attention needs to be given to making these things known afresh. Preaching should certainly be directed to persons and should speak of personal salvation; but with the same intensity and with the same dynamic it should also speak of many other things.

(7) My next observation is related to the one preceding, but it is rather on the other side. I would say that in many Reformed churches preaching is insufficiently direct. Perhaps the problem is that too many ministers regard their congregations as consisting of those, and those only, who have already come to know what it means to be a Christian and a disciple of Jesus Christ. There is a failure here of ministerial boldness and directions. The gospel should be preached regularly to every congregation. Covenant children must be told what their own covenant position means for them, what its implications are. They have to know that they dare not take their position for granted. Those born in Christian families are to come to Christ. My own great homiletics teacher, Dr. Henry Bast, used to tell us that we were to assume nothing with respect to the spiritual situation in our congregations. And the longer I live and the more I preach the greater is the degree of my agreement with him.

(8) It seems to me that many ministers—particularly the younger ministers who love and are committed to the Reformed faith—tend to despise the form of the sermon. It may be that this fact results from so high a view of the divine sovereignty as to imply that whatever God intends to accomplish through the preaching will come to pass no matter what the form of the sermon may be. I believe that indifference to form and style is disastrous and intolerable. While I do not much like to speak of the sermon as an ‘art form,’ at the same time I think that we are justified in speaking of that side of sermon preparation. Surely, if preaching is vital and dynamic and if our object is to persuade men, then we must preach in the most effective way possible. Not everyone will have the same skill in this respect, but all ministers must work very hard to write clear, interesting, gripping, well–organized, and persuasive sermons. A sub–point here is the question of sermon illustrations. I find it very difficult to come upon good illustrations; but I believe that apt and illuminating illustrations are almost indispensable to powerful preaching. These need not be anecdotal in form. And they should not detract from the central thrust of the sermon itself. But the faculty of imagination, so essential to all effective communication, ought to be cultivated by ministers, too. Perhaps the best sermon illustrators I have ever heard were Dr. Harry J. Hager, of the Reformed Church in America; Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, of the Presbyterian Church; and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, also of the Reformed Church in America. One need not be in agreement with a preacher to learn from him and to appreciate his special skills. I am coming increasingly to think that one of the worst things of which a preacher can be guilty is dullness! We are presently confronted with fierce competition from television, radio, and the like. But I myself believe that biblical preaching has very little to fear from any of these and that it can hold its own if it does what it is supposed to do.

(9) Related to the above is the observation that an increasing proportion of evangelical ministers lack the broad liberal arts training that used to be a prerequisite for admission to the seminary. In the old view a minister was to be a man of broad general culture, who knew the arts, history, philosophy, who read many books (though his one great book was the Bible), and who therefore had the whole spectrum of culture and society at his disposal in preaching the gospel. The great preachers of the past certainly displayed such an education; and even the written sermons we have from them exhibit a kind of background many of the ministers of our generation do not have. Men now come to the seminary from Bible colleges, or from a background of science or engineering. Some of them have never had good courses in history, in English grammar, in philosophy, in literature. And as a consequence they are not in touch with culture and the social order. It is also true that virtually every younger minister, and seminary student, is seriously disadvantaged so far as his education is concerned. The general decay in education is reflected in the quality of the men entering the ministry. Sermons are rendered irrelevant, unattractive, and ineffectual on this account. How are we to remedy such a situation? We need to think about this. I hardly need to say that we cannot begin to reeducate every minister of whom all this is true; but surely we can do something to help him. But what? How can a man be put in touch with all the things he should know and experience in order to preach pointedly and effectively?

(10) One of the great problems many men face in the ministry is the gap between their own understanding of what they are called to do—namely, to preach—and what their congregations expect of them. We say, congregations and ministers alike, that ministers are chiefly to be preachers of the ever lasting gospel; but as a matter of fact, most congregations are largely indifferent to preaching. Perhaps my own experience has tended to magnify this consideration, and it is possible that others, in more conservative denominations, may have a different perspective. However, I believe that most congregations are satisfied with mediocrity in the pulpit, provided the minister is inoffensive and does not trespass too much on their time. A cursory survey of the situation in many congregations would, I am confident, tend to confirm this. Excellence in the pulpit is not a primary demand of vast numbers of professing Christians. Listen to what is said on the radio, for example—said by men of considerable reputation and influence; or observe what is done in churches throughout the country. The conclusion is that the biblical idea of preaching is not that that is to be picked up in a very broad circle. In a sense we do not adequately prepare our students in the seminary for the true state of affairs in the church at large. We train men to think of themselves primarily as preachers, only to have them sorely and sometimes bitterly disillusioned by what they find to be the case in the congregations to which they are called. This gap needs to be bridged. And ministers must be helped if that bridging is to take place.

(11) One of the sad features of the times is the marked absence of what I may call the prophetic element in preaching. No doubt this idea is related to what I have already said about the sermon as event; however, it does at the same time represent a different aspect of the truth. And bound up with it is the whole matter of the authority of preaching. I grow weary as I think about the number of times, for example, when I have heard a minister begin his sermon by saying that there was something he wanted to ‘share’ with us from the Word of God. I believe t hat the word ‘share’ in this context is singularly inappropriate. It is, in fact, what I have called ‘one of the despicable platitudes that have entered the ministerial vocabulary in the twentieth century.’ The minister must come from God, bearing God’s message, speaking God’s Word, standing in a sense even in God’s place, addressing us with that which in no way rests on his own authority. The minister is a herald, and his sermon is that Word which he speaks in behalf of the One who sent him. That, after all, is the meaning. of the word ‘to preach.’ The relational, psychologizing, soul-baring so-called preaching of the present time is in no way reflective of the biblical concept of the sermon.

(12) The final area of weakness which I want to list here is that of the connection between character and sermon: that is to say, between the minister and what he is before God, on the one hand, and his preaching, on the other. The older books on homiletics establish this link very distinctly. For example, Robert L. Dabney, in his Lectures on Sacred Rhetoric, has a chapter on the ‘Preacher’s Character with Hearers.’ That, I think, is a very important emphasis, and one of which we do not hear nearly enough now. The minister is to be a holy man, and he is to speak from a heart that beats in the awful apprehension of the presence of God. The stress of our time is on the fact that the minister is a Christian among Christians; and that, of course, is quite true. But he is also a man of God, called to give his whole life and all his time to the service of God. A great part of his power, therefore, is in the credibility lent to his ministry by his holy, godly character and by his ability to say, as the Apostle Paul did, ‘Brethren, be followers together of me’ (Phil 3:17).

I suppose that the list could be expanded; but I have already gone beyond the number of ten; and perhaps I have said enough.

This article by Dr. John R. De Witt of the Reformed Theological Seminary at Jackson. Miss., was a letter, written in answer to a request of Samuel T. Logan, Jr. of Westminster Theological Seminary at Philadelphia., Pa., for a statement of his views on this important subject. It appeared in The Banner of Truth of March, 1981.