I spend a lot of time thinking about preaching. I wonder what is happened to the kind of preaching that dragged you along through the mire of your own world until you were confronted with Christ. The kind of preaching Luther did and the kind of preaching that Paul did. The preaching that I hear, and that I read is long on history but small on prophecy. If we continue to do nothing more than recite past tense Bible to present tense people with no thought of a wider human world it is as someone once said, “a pulpit about the size of a Stainglass phone booth”. As we progress down this path we follow along the pattern that’s been going on for years. The therapeutic personalism on the one hand, Jesus is life coach – and the mundane kind of biblical positivism on the other – God will make all things better .
What is sadly lacking is a sense of the awesome presence of God brooding over our broken world, or any prophetic vision of God’s future breaking toward us, or any real apologetic grappling with the mind of this age. We seem to be afraid to take on the social issues of the day because we don’t want to be seen as “political”. Might as well just wrap ourselves up in duct tape. Everything in this world is political. Everything in this world is also theological because made it, redeemed it and will come to recreate it.
These are thoughts built upon and article written a long time ago by Geoge Buttrick called “Preaching 1989”. Nothing has changed
