As long ago as 1848 Hugh Miller lamented that it had become the fashion in the Free Church to speak of preaching as “not the paramount but merely one of the subsidiary duties of the clergyman.”

The trend was evident in three different connections.

First, it governed attitudes to incumbent ministers. “‘He is not a man of much pulpit preparation’, it has become common to remark of some minister, at least liked if not admired, ‘but he is diligent in visiting and in looking after his schools; and preaching is in reality but a small part of a minister’s duty’.”

Secondly, it governed the attitude of vacant congregations. “The flock looking out for a pastor are apt enough to say, ‘Our last minister was an accomplished pulpit man, but what we at present want is a man sedulous in visiting; for preaching is in reality but a small part of a minister’s duty’.”

Thirdly, it governed the attitude to preaching of ministers themselves: “Ministers, especially ministers of but a few twelve months’ standing, have themselves in some cases caught up with the remark as if it embodied a self–evident truth; and while they dare tell, not without self-complacency, that their discourses cost them but little trouble, they add further, as if by way of apology, that they are, however, much occupied otherwise and that preaching is in reality but a small part of a minister’s duty. We have sometimes felt inclined to assure these latter personages in reply that they might a little improve the matter just by making preaching no part of their duty at all.”

Preaching does, of course, have a paramount place both in Scripture and in the Standards of the Free Church. According to the Shorter Catechism, for example, it is especially the preaching of the Word that the Spirit uses to convert sinners and to build them up in the faith (Answer 89). The commission given to the apostles was to go and teach the nations (Mt. 28:19). The Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost precisely to enable the church to proclaim the wonderful works of God (Acts 2:11). And Paul makes it abundantly clear t hat he regards preaching as his supreme task. He rejoices that God sent him not to baptise but to preach the Gospel (I Cor. 1:17); he affirms that it is through the foolishness of preaching that God saves (I Cor.1:21); and he indicates that the hall–mark of a faithful pastor is that he labours in the word and in teaching (I Tim. 5:17).

     

Practical Implications

Miller’s remarks are as valid today as they were when he wrote them. Both the pulpit and the pew should lay them to heart and give urgent heed to their practical implications.

For example, the primacy of preaching must govern our approach to the selection of candidates for the ministry. Not that preaching ability is the only consideration. Health, motives, education, personal relationships, piety and practical spiritual experience are obviously of enormous importance. But all is useless if the applicant cannot preach, because that is to be the major part of his life’s work. Yet in practice this is a question to which we pay little attention. Some are accepted as candidates for the ministry although they have never preached—this was certainly true in our own case. It might have been notorious enough that we could blether but no one had any right to believe that we could preach. It is true, of course, that by the time a student comes to be licensed considerable trial has been made of his preaching gifts. But surely this concern should be paramount from the beginning and only in very rare instances should presbyteries accept candidates who have no preaching experience at all.

It is even more important that our conviction as to the primacy of preaching should govern the curriculum we lay down for the training of ministers. Modern theological institutions have little interest in preparing men to be heralds of salvation. Their products are usually amalgams of psychiatrists, entertainers and social workers. Even thoroughly Reformed seminaries are placing too much emphasis on irrelevant academic study and modern counselling techniques, sometimes with incongruous results, as in the case of the preacher who solemnly announced to his Sunday evening congregation, “Our subject tonight is, The Problem of the Authorship of Second Peter.” We flatter ourselves that our approach is more biblical. But it is questionable whether our confidence is justified. Certainly, much more attention is paid to homiletics than was the case in the past and that is all to the good. But in other respects our curriculum has altered little since the Disruption and it now needs radical revision. Preachers are primarily expositors and the most important part of their training is that which deals with biblical interpretation. Yet the historical Free Church curriculum pays astonishingly little attention to this. The Disruption Fathers assumed that since the students already knew Greek they required no training in exegesis, and they did not even bother to appoint a professor in that department. We tend to make the same assumption that once the biblical languages are learned our object is accomplished. The result is that in a course of study lasting three or four years a student’s contact with the actual text of Scripture is minimal. In our own opinion the situation has for long been scandalous. In fact, it probably could not be paralleled in the most modernist theological institution in the country. A student preparing for the B.D. examinations at London University would certainly do far more by way of biblical interpretation than a student doing the normal course at the Free Church College. Our priorities are surely wrong. Three years’ exegesis without the original languages would be a far better preparation for preaching than three years’ languages without exegesis. The fault is not that of the present staff but of the system they have inherited and the need for a re-drafting of the curriculum is now urgent.

The Dignity and Authority of Preaching

Another consequence of the primacy of preaching is that the preacher must assert the independent dignity and authority of his own role within the life of the church. For too long the pew has dictated to the pulpit. In its extreme form this has given rise to the movement of demythologizing the Gospel. Bultmann and his co-adjutors have asked modern man what he finds credible; and in response to his answer they have eliminated from the message everything that savours of the supernatural. The result is an emasculated religion, credible enough, but so banal and mundane as to be worthless. We have, mercifully, been spared these calamities. But there have been others. For example, there has peen the demand for brevity. Our people have declared their impatience with long sermons and have laid down limits beyond which they are not prepared to listen. Some congregations have said 30 minutes, some 20 and some even less. There is, of course, no virtue in length for its own sake and we offer no defence of the tediousness, prolixity and long-windedness from which our own preaching has often suffered. It seems curious, however, that Christians are prepared to sit for hours in front of television screens imbibing the most supine drivel, yet find three-quarters of an hour of biblical exposition unendurable. Have such people ever tasted the goodness of the word of God? Preachers are ambassadors, plenipotentiaries invested with the authority of Christ. They have a message to deliver, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, and a right to claim as much of their people’s time as they need to deliver that message and drive home its lessons.

The pew has also demanded simplicity and again the prophets have yielded too readily. Certainly, lucidity is important. The preacher must choose his vocabulary with care, he must arrange his message logically and he must be at pains to show that the various points which he makes follow naturally from the words of his text. But simplicity is something else. It is a strait–jacket into which the Gospel simply will not fit. It means the banishment of doctrine from the pulpit, a non-theological evangelism and a generation of Christians who have no idea what they believe. To many of our people, such doctrines as the trinity, the incarnation and the atonement are closed books. The need is not for the exposition of simple themes, laced with anecdotes and seasoned with histrionics, but for the lucid exposition of the riches of revelation. Each Lord’s Day, congregations should be led to the point where they cry, “Oh! the depth!” And if they are not -if we have robbed the Gospel of the great elements of mystery and wonder and depth and paradox—then we have failed in our mission and cheated our people. Men may laugh. They may gnash their teeth. But the only message we have a right to preach is one so astonishing that angels desire to look into it and so profound that they have to stoop to do so.

The preacher must equally assert his independence and authority in rebuking sin. The Free Church is only too well known as a denouncing church and, no doubt, the reputation is deserved. The trouble is that the denunciations are not always well–directed. Too often they are aimed at those who are not within hearing and whom it therefore costs us nothing to offend. Our people are perfectly willing to lap up condemnations of Catholics, Modernists, politicians, trade-unionists and the permissive society, from all of which they feel comfortably distanced. What they do not welcome is exposure of their own particular sins: traditionalism, worldliness, niggardliness, luke–warmness, complacency and pettiness. The real test of a preacher is not the eloquence with which he denounces the Pope and the Duke of Edinburgh (neither of whom is likely to be in his congregation) but the faithfulness with which he rebukes the ungraciousness of his own elders, members and adherents. We magnify our office by telling our own people what they do not want to hear.

Keeping Other Commitments to a Minimum

It also follows from the primacy of preaching that ministers must keep their commitments in other spheres to a minimum. “No one ever did anything well,” said Dr. Johnson, “to which he did not give the whole bent of his mind.”

It is, of course, easy to claim that we have so much else to attend to that there is no time for proper pulpit preparation. For example, there is pastoral visitation, a part of our ministry which it would be foolish to belittle. In a church-extension context this is the only way to establish the vital initial contact. In normal pastoral work it is an indispensable ministry to the sick, t he lapsed and those who need individual counselling. On the other hand, our consciences surely bear witness that not all the time spent out of the study is given to visiting; nor is all our visiting rigorously pastoral. A man is no more a good pastor because he visits frequently than he is a good preacher because he preaches often. Furthermore, few of us can claim that we spend our forenoons in pastoral visitation. Indeed, there is no reason why every minister in the Church should not spend the hours from nine to one in his study. Nor should we overlook the fact that the pastoral responsibility does not belong to the minister alone. It is shared by all the other elders who are, by definition, co-pastors, and if men are not prepared to visit the sick and the lapsed and to counsel the weak they should not be elders in the first place.

The problem has another side. Suppose a minister gives his whole attention to visiting, what is the most he can expect? That the people will come to Church. But then suppose that in gratitude for his visit—to support “the poor body”—they do come to hear him preach, what will they hear, if he has given himself no time for adequate preparation and preaches a loose, rambling sermonette totally lacking in cohesion or interest? a discourse in which there is nothing new for the mind, nothing majestic for the emotions and nothing stimulating for the will? “No apology whatever ought to be sustained for imperfect pulpit preparation,” wrote Hugh Miller: “People neither ought nor will misspend their Sabbaths in dozing under sermons to which no effort of attention, however honestly made, enables them to listen.” It is pointless to visit with view to encouraging people to come to Church if, when they do come, they are not presented with a message which compels their attention and demands decision.

Another danger is that we can become enmeshed in the webs of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Committees appear to be doing things. One can see apparently tangible results and enjoy the illusion of power. Of course we need administration and there is no necessary conflict between the existence of committees and t he great principles of presbyterian church government. Certainly church–power must remain with the courts which the New Testament sanctions. But in our system it is these very courts which in their wisdom appoint committees to expedite their business. We can, however, have an excess of administration and some of our present committees are frankly useless (we are a member of some such ourselves). Some men are on too many committees; and some—notably ministerial clerks—are too deeply involved in particular committees. No minister of the Gospel has the right to allow anything to make serious inroads into the time available to him for pulpit preparation. Nor have we any right to leave the word of God and serve tables. The work of our committees is largely diaconal and we should leave as much of it as possible to lay-men.

What is true of ministerial involvement in church bureaucracy applies with even greater force to politics. Local government is no place for a minister. It leads to an endless series of embarrassments, compromises and temptations. It seems to say that we believe in the primacy of the seen and temporal over the unseen and eternal. It makes totally inadmissible demands on a preacher’s time. It is a flagrant defiance of the apostolic principle that we should not entangle ourselves in the affairs of this life.

Centrality in All Worship

One final implication of the primacy of preaching deserves mention: we must not displace it from its central position in every gathering of the worshipping church. In Catholic traditions the sacraments have frequently usurped the place of the sermon. In charismatic churches the exercise of spiritual gifts has done the same. Within modernism, churches emptied by insipid platitudes make a desperate attempt to win back congregations by providing brighter servicl?s; brighter not by bright preaching but by replacing preaching with dialogue, drama, film-shows and the like. We seem to be free from these distortions. This is not to say, however, that in the case of the Free Church the Devil has been inactive. He has come in as an angel of light and brought about a situation whereby in many areas prayer-meetings have replaced the preaching of the Word on Sunday evenings. Whatever the motives, the results have been calamitous. Every Sunday evening, hundreds, if not thousands, of Free Church people in Skye and Lewis meet with no minister to preside over them and, what is worse, no sermon to listen to; while, a few miles away, preachers proclaim the Gospel to empty pews. People –Christian people –who regularly travel 20 or 30 miles to work will not travel a mile to listen to a sermon. Itis not surprising that adherents brought up on such spiritual fare are spiritually and theologically illiterate. They have never heard expository preaching or the intelligent assertion, maintenance and defence of the Gospel. They know little of the great doctrines of Christianity and nothing at all of the dist inctive principles of their own Church. It is hardly surprising either, that many young people, unprepared to suffer the agony (for them) of standing through five long prayers have long since ceased to attend; or that when they move to the mainland their loyalty to the Church is far too shallow and far too uncomprehending to withstand the shock of exposure to the prevailing godlessness.

Donald Macleod is the editor of the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland. His address is Free Church College, The Mound, Edinburgh, EHl 2LS. This article appeared in the April, 1980 Monthly Record and is reprinted by permission.