Challenging Times

What do you mean? Of course there are sermons in the Bible! What about the Sermon on the Mount, for a start?

Well, yes, except that the Bible doesn’t actually call it a sermon at all. At the beginning of Matthew 5, it says:

‘When he (Jesus) saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them…’

And at the end, it says,

‘When Jesus had finished saying all these things, the crowd were amazed at his teaching…’

In fact, when you think of a sermon as a particular kind of rhetorical act – a 35 minute monologue, from a pulpit, in a church building, on a Sunday, by a minister – you really can’t find this in the Bible at all. No pulpits. No buildings. Very few monologues, and (apparently) very few paid staff.

One of the most important word-groups that’s translated as ‘preach’ in the NT is ‘euangelizo‘ – evangelise (used about a hundred and thirty times). Literally, it means ‘announce good news.’ When the Roman Emperor won a military victory, the news of his triumph was evangelized around the empire. The emphasis is on the content of what is announced – it simply doesn’t have anything to do with making sermons.

Another important word-group is ‘kerusso‘ – ‘to herald’ (used about seventy times). Again, the emphasis is on what is announced, and again, it doesn’t have anything to do with making sermons.

As soon as we translate either of these words ‘preach,’ we import into them all kinds of additional baggage from the last seventeen hundred years about sermons and pulpits and so on.

I’m well aware that in saying this, I’m laying myself open to the charge of watering down the Gospel, or of not standing for the truth of the message. All I can say is that if you listen carefully to what I’m saying, and if you think about it biblically (rather than just traditionally), you will see that this is not the case.

What the Bible does talk about, much more than preaching, is teaching. Words in the ‘didasko‘ group are used more than a hundred and eighty times. Jesus teaches, the apostles teach, Barnabas and Saul teach, Timothy and Titus are to teach. The list of God’s gifts to the church includes teachers but not preachers.

This is vitally important, because teaching can take many different rhetorical forms, and the emphasis in teaching is on what the hearer has learned (and whether they have learned it) rather than on whether a particular kind of rhetorical act has taken place.

Not only is the monologue sermon not biblical. It isn’t even very effective. I can think of quite a few Christians who have sat for decades under some of the best Bible teaching in the country, and yet, quite frankly, they don’t show much sign of spiritual growth. A monologue may be good for conveying factual data, but it isn’t the best way to influence someone’s attitues and actions.

Education theory is catching up with this too. There aren’t many situations where people expect to sit through long monologue lectures any more. Most teaching is much more interactive, with time for interruptions, questions, disagreements, and discussion.

This certainly doesn’t mean that anything goes, and it doesn’t mean that the learner and the teacher are equal before the material. But interactivity does make it much easier for the teacher to understand what the learner is grasping or not grasping, to know when to speed up, when to slow down, when to go off at a tangent to answer an important question.

Our English translations of the Bible don’t always help us here. For example, in Acts 19, we’re told that in Ephesus Paul taught daily for two years in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. The original word is that he ‘dialogued’ daily. The NIV translates it as he ‘had discussions daily.’ This puts it in a rather different light.

Even with events that we think were sermons – like the Sermon on the Mount, or Paul’s long talk in Troas (Acts 20:7-12), we should almost certainly imagine them as being broken up by interruptions, questions, spontaneous discussions, people milling about, breaks for food, and so on.

Sermons? Not in the Bible! And if we are intentional about teaching people effectively, we need to get away from making sermons and start making disciples.

There’s a longer article about this here.