First off – this has nothing to do with the errors of a certain football team of which I refuse to speak of on this blog!

Simon Manchester of St Thomas church in North Sydney writes the Pastor’s Brief in the November issue of the Briefing. His article is entitled, ‘Preaching with Biblical Confidence‘ and in it, amongst other things, he lists four common errors in modern preaching which I thought would be good to reflect on and make some comments. Error #1 – ‘Clever beats substance’:

There is a strange idea around at the moment that clever beats substance. Put more crudely, this view seems to think that the Bible is pretty dull and hard to sell, but with some marketing, we can sneak it past people’s guard. This loss of proper confidence in the Bible confuses the power of the clever gimmick with the substance of the powerful Word. But once a preacher has grasped the way God works (by his word) and the impact of his message (in the Word), it lights up everything he says, and people learn quickly who to trust. 20 minutes of straw followed by five minutes of wheat at the end is a strange way to feed your listeners. Somewhere the preacher has to think (and say), “Here is the book that will explain your life and the God behind everything. Now listen!” It’s embarrassing to treat Scripture as weak or dull.

I’ve listened to a few MP3 talks by Simon Manchester and he is very far from dull and boring – he packages the central thought of the text really well and so I’m pretty sure he’s not going against packaging your sermons well and being ‘clever’ in that way. I think he’s more concerned about packaging the text out of a sermon.

I was wondering how I might be guilty of this in my own preaching and I thought about the way that I like to discuss epistemology in my preaching. For me epistemology is one of the key issues evangelical Christians face today and so invariably I’ll have something to say about it in one of my sermons. The danger is that I often feel that if I don’t make a convincing enough argument about Christian epistemology then the sermon will lose its power. This article reminded me that the power is not in how well I craft my epistemological arguments (as important as they are) but rather in the text and the faithful presentation thereof.