Preaching

If a hundred preachers could agree on advice to be given to other ministers, it would probably be worth weighing their wisdom on the subject. This is just what the Westminster Assembly offered in a "sub-directory" on preaching within the body's larger Directory for Worship . It is there that the...

After a cracking day at the Evangelical Library in London on "Reading John Owen" (opening, it has to be said, with Nigel Graham giving what may be one of the finest popular introductions to the life of Owen that it has been my privilege to hear - lively, careful, engaging, insightful), I want to do...

"We keep our preaching basic because we have so many new believers. If we give them too much doctrine, they won't be able to understand it." I can't remember how many times I've heard church planters and pastors say such things. Sadly, as their ministries begin to grow numerically, mature believers...

What Andy Stanley has forgotten is that conversion to Christianity involves a supernatural rebirth that requires the Word of God. Forgetting this essential truth has been the tendency of the seeker-sensitive church-growth movement. This vital truth is forgotten wherever sociology is given a higher...

While preparing talks for a forthcoming Reformation Conference, I happened across Heiko Oberman's outstanding 1961 Theology Today lecture, " Preaching and the Word in the Reformation ," in which he set down what he believed to have been the three most important aspects of the preaching among the...

Søren Kierkegaard is surely one of the most influential and misunderstood influences on modern Western thought and especially contemporary theology. This is a bit surprising for someone who wrote in Danish and styled himself neither a philosopher nor a theologian but a "religious poet." That is a...

Someone in the Jerusalem Chamber had asked if it was a pastor's duty to read the Scriptures publicly in the weekly worship services of the church. It was November 1643, and the Westminster Assembly was trying to build a biblical system of church government from the ground up. In the summer months...

Someone in the Jerusalem Chamber had asked if it was a pastor's duty to read the Scriptures publicly in the weekly worship services of the church. It was November 1643, and the Westminster Assembly was trying to build a biblical system of church government from the ground up. In the summer months...

The Westminster Assembly The assembly of divines that authored a famous confession of faith, catechisms, and much more, met in Westminster, now a suburb of London, in the middle of a bloody civil war that tore apart, England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The English parliament, for a variety of...