Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.
―Karl Barth
Double listening . . . is the faculty of listening to two voices at the same time, the voice of God through Scripture and the voices of men and women around us. These voices will often contradict one another, but our purpose in listening to them both is to discover how they relate to each other. Double listening is indispensable to Christian discipleship and Christian mission.
― John Stott
In the course of expounding a biblical text the Christian preacher should compare and contrast the Scripture’s message with the foundational beliefs of the culture, which are usually invisible to people inside it, in order to help people understand themselves more fully.
― Tim Keller
So to be very clear I am not comparing expository preaching verses Missional preaching or suggesting that one sermon should be expository and another missional. I am saying that all sermons in the secular west need to be both expository and missional. We need to be expository to ensure faithfulness to the Word of God and to deepen the foundations of a church that has for too long lived in the shallow end of truth. We need to be missional to disciple believers to live faithfully in an increasingly hostile culture and we need to be missional to expose the idols of the culture for those that are considering the claims of Christ.
I suspect that if you preach the Bible or in a context where you are teaching Scriptures you may find the expository part much easier to do than the missional part which is application. Although there are some well-known mistakes that can be made when preaching an expository sermon. We can explain the context, bring out the meaning for the original hearers but sometimes fail, especially if we are preaching from the Old Testament to make it a Christian message or rather a gospel message. We can do this because we don’t take the time to show how this Scripture points to Christ or how it connects to the big themes of Scripture. Or we may have lectured the text instead of preaching it. It may, if we have done it well, been very interesting, but hardly life-transforming. We have hit the mind of our listeners and totally missed their heart. Those are well-known challenges for any preacher learning to get to grips with consistent expository preaching.
But probably more likely the challenge for preachers who are committed to expository preaching and textual faithfulness is that we will just miss or skim or short change the work necessary to make the message sufficiently missional.
We could assume that all of our listeners are Christians, and therefore hope that they will ‘get it’. We may assume that just because our listeners are Christians that they have a gospel-shaped worldview. We shouldn’t assume that they can faithfully interpret the newspapers or more likely their social media feeds in light of the Bible. This would be wishful thinking. We are all far more culturally shaped Christians than we may be comfortable with and many good, honest believers have an imagination that is more shaped by Netflix, Spotify and Facebook than it is by Peter, Paul & John.
One of the challenges of preaching missionally, of speaking to the idols, concerns and beliefs of a culture is knowing how to discern it. When we’re preaching a text we have one text and then a slew of commentaries that connect to it – when we try and work out how that text speaks to our culture – where exactly do you turn? Most of us are not a Tim Keller or a John Stott and don’t have their prodigious ability to consume, understand, evaluate, critique and then communicate culture and we’re unlikely to have that level of keen insight. But I would argue that neither Tim nor John always had it either but that they committed themselves to learning the values of the places they were and then over time understanding it better.
I am not suggesting that we should listen to God and to our fellow human beings in the same way or with the same degree of deference. We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.
― John Stott
Both John Stott who was in London and Keller who was in New York wanted Christians to be equipped to engage the world around them, to understand its hopes and fears, to be better able to speak a word of hope to it and that non-Christians would hear the better story, the truer story, and see how God sees them and their world and calls them to Christ.
So quickly two dangers to avoid and then six tips taken from Tim Keller’s book on preaching, on preaching missionally. the first ditch to avoid is condemning culture. It is not that there is nothing to condemn but that we condemn unevenly and sometimes unfairly. It is if you like the danger of the right. We call out the woke and the weird but it is unlikely that we will win people with an approach that is marked by condemnation.
The opposite danger, is the current danger of the left which is to confirm culture. Again unevenly and often unwisely. Here a preachers seek to relative the Christian story, to find ways of approving of the way people already are and allowing the message to conform, to fit a world-shaped mould.
The path of missional preaching is to neither ALWAYS condemn or confirm but to graciously critique. Paul in Athens is a famous example of using the cultural landscape to critique and then offer Christ as the true and better.
OK so here are Tim Keller’s six tips for doing missional preaching well.
- Use accessible vocabulary.
- Employ culturally respected authorities.
- Demonstrate an understanding of doubts and objections.
- Affirm in order to challenge baseline cultural narratives.
- Make gospel offers that push on the culture’s pressure points.
- Call for gospel motivation.
When the preacher solves Christians’ problems with the gospel—not by calling them to try harder but by pointing them to deeper faith in Christ’s salvation—then believers are being edified and nonbelievers are hearing the gospel, all at the same time.
― Tim Keller
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