Explosive Preaching, by Ron Boyd-MacMillanPreaching is a funny old thing. It is a fairly unique communication method in contemporary society – in very few settings other than churches do people turn up week after week to listen uninterrupted to someone else speaking.
As someone who preaches regularly, preaching is a massively important part of my life. It takes up hours of my time in thinking and planning and preparing, and it is an area in which I feel acutely aware of the need for continued improvement. Part of that improvement must involve the study of preaching, including the reading of books on the subject, so to all my fellow preachers out there I would commend this book.
Boyd-MacMillan (and as that’s a lot to type it’ll be BM from here on) divides his book into four sections, so I’ll review it under those headings. Each of the sections is presented as a letter from one preacher to another, somewhat like the advice of the older devil to his junior in the Screwtape Letters, but hopefully with more godly intent!
1. The Crisis in Preaching – the Problems
This part of the book offers a survey of the state of contemporary preaching, some of the pitfalls we should avoid, and why we should value preaching. Its all good, workmanlike stuff, but I don’t have many sentences underlined here, which is a sure sign I wasn’t feeling too gripped. I do like this paragraph though, near the end of the section, and something I did underline:
“What other form of speech has these five effects: to delight God, to astonish angels, to discourage devils, to encourage saints, and to restore sinners? I’ve done my time preaching to virtually empty halls and churches, and it is a great fillip to remember that three of the five audiences of a sermon are unseen.”
2. Great Preaching – the Elements
This is a helpful section. BM takes seven chapters with seven ‘tests’ of good preaching: Do I have a central focus? Does my sermon enable the hearer to experience the truth I am preaching? Am I preaching the divine insight from the Bible? Am I preaching the greatness of God and addressing the universal questions of life? Do I really love those to whom I am speaking? Why the preacher should sound different to the Dalai Lama!
I like this:
“Words are actions! When it comes to the gospel, we do not speak, then act. Speaking the gospel is an action. The utterance of the good news is the good news! God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” In the same way, when we proclaim the gospel, then the gospel event is underway!”
3. The History of Preaching – the Forms
This is an incredibly helpful summary of the historical sweep of preaching. BM skewers some pet hates of his, which are also pet hates of mine, such as a false distinction between preaching and teaching, “Folks, just drop it. What use is this distinction? In practice, it isn’t there. Jesus was called ‘teacher’ far more often than a ‘preacher.’ The fact is, when you preach, you teach; when you teach, you preach. Think Siamese twins, and to operate to separate them causes death to one or to both.”
I also appreciate BM’s defence of the monolog:
“A good gospel monolog is an urgent need today because people are so busy: always talking, always rushing, always acting. Their real need is to sit down in silence to listen to an interesting talk that has content, that moves them, and makes them think.”
This section is incredibly helpful as a self-diagnostic tool, to answer the question, ‘What kind of preacher am I?’ BM surveys famous preachers from Augustine to Billy Graham, and getting a greater appreciation of how they operated is very helpful in analyzing one’s own preaching.
4. The Preachers Life – the Issues
The shortest section of the book, and a bit of a catch-all, with some things that are truly inspiring and some practical pointers. I like BM’s encouragement to be appropriately ambitious in what our preaching can achieve, and I like his dissection of why the use of PowerPoint in preaching is a bad idea (it is you know!), while not being hostile to the use of images to aid preaching.
The book ends with a quite staggering account of BM’s involvement in training house church leaders in China, which consisted of, “Taking twenty people away to a house in the country for a year, with one change of clothes, no books, a few notebooks, a bible, a daily bowl of rice and a few vegetables.” Over the course of this year the trainees had to write and memorize 100 one-hour long sermons: one on every book of the Bible, 33 on the life and work of Jesus, and one (which could be as long as they liked) “for the end of time” – a sermon imagined for the wedding priest of the Lamb, telling the whole salvation story.
All that certainly made my hours of sweating over the scriptures look somewhat half-baked…
In summary then, this is definitely one to get. Ironically, for a book with a lot of emphasis on making our preaching engaging, I thought it could have been slightly shorter, but BM is a witty and insightful writer, and what he writes will help you preach.
