I am coming up for five years into my role as Training Director of the School of Preachers Trust.
For most of that time I have posted a weekly blog. These have contained my thoughts about life and preaching, and how they merge in my thinking and practice. These blogs have navigated the adjustments required in preaching-to-camera doing the Covid lockdown, wrestled with the challenges of how to be culturally and emotionally intelligent in the ways that preachers engage their congregations, and reflected on the nuts and bolts of preaching.
This is my first blog of 2025. (I have been allowed by the School of Preachers trustees to have a quiet January, which included some welcome winter sun). It comes after a busy year helping a church in Mid-Sussex, where I have preached more in one place than I have since “retiring” as the pastor of Lancing Tab in February 2020.
It was good to be reminded of what it is like to sustain freshness in one place. It is an ongoing conversation between the preacher, Scripture, the congregation and our culture.
The extra twist has been preaching for most of the year on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Again and again, I have been struck by how contemporary this letter is. I have enjoyed thinking about how to transpose Paul’s words to first century Corinth to a twenty-first century audience. It has been a constant challenge but an exciting one.
This letter addresses issues of authority, Christian identity, integrity, morality and how to sustain life together as a congregation. Paul begins his letter making it plain that true Christianity is cruciform, by which I mean that true Christianity is not expressed by self-assertiveness and self-promotion, but by the humble self-giving that is rooted in the cross of Jesus. Paul writes:
“For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2)
True Christianity is cross-shaped. The language that Jesus used to describe this was to “deny yourself and take up your cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
Yet I find it interesting that Paul devotes the penultimate chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians to a massive 58 verse exposition of the resurrection. It reminds us that when Paul speaks about only knowing Christ and him crucified he is including in that idea the whole sweep of the gospel story, including the resurrection of Jesus and his glorious return.
Preachers can preach the good news because they know the ending. The crucufied Jesus is alive from the dead and he will bring everything in heaven and earth to a glorious conclusion. All our work, prayers and preaching have significance and fruit because they flow out of the gracious rest we enjoy because Christ is risen indeed.
This means that all our ministry, when it is done for Jesus, is more than the sum of its parts. That is why we can take comfort from the final words of 1 Corinthians 15:
“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Preacher: Rest in that!
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
תגובות