Preacher/Politician?

It’s party conference season in the UK – Lib-Dems this week, Labour next, and the Tories the week after that. Only the most devoted political junkie can actively enjoy these events. For most of the rest of us they pass by with a mixture of indifference and embarrassment. For me, it is largely embarrassment.

Footage from the conferences seem largely to reveal an audience who do not contain many people I would willingly choose to be trapped in a lift with; and the speeches themselves are often toe-curling. It is difficult to hear anything beyond cliché and self-satisfaction. And the big speeches are now so tightly scripted and choreographed that the attempts at humour and the common touch feel patronizing and contrived.

I think my embarrassment is heightened by the fact that I am a preacher, and regularly stand up and speak in front of a crowd of people. My worst nightmare is to end up sounding like a politician at a party conference.

This Sunday is ‘Vision Sunday’ at Gateway, when I give some review of the past year, and try to paint a picture of what we are working towards over the next twelve months. The worst thing I could do on Sunday is make a politicians speech – but that is all too easy for a preacher to do, and I’ve heard enough preachers do it. Part of the problem is that politicians tend to borrow preachers language, because what politicians are attempting to persuade their hearers is that they offer the way to salvation. This means that most politicians are Pelagians, saying that if only everything was a little bit better, if only everything was done a little more as they liked it, then everyone would live in the promised land.

In order to not end up as a preacher who sounds like a politician aping a preacher, the preacher of the gospel mustn’t be a Pelagian!

The chasm-wide difference between the gospel preacher and the politician is the gospel. Rather than offering salvation through a particular program, the gospel preacher is charged with opening up and applying the Word of God. What we must preach is that apart from Christ there is no salvation, and that without him even the best programs – no matter how worthy – will never bring us to utopia. As preachers, we must have a vision, but that vision is founded in Christ, not in ourselves. And that means the message we preach is very different from a politicians speech.