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Effective Preaching: A Cluster of Conditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

J. Stewart Miller
Affiliation:
1 Midmar Avenue, Edinburgh EH10 6BS

Extract

It has often been alleged that the liturgically-minded incline to indifference toward preaching and it must be confessed that Christian history has demonstrated that this is a plaint not wholly without foundation. The church has had its enthusiasts whose ardour for correctness in worship both in general character and in minute detail has left them somewhat short of concern for what has traditionally been deemed a high point in the Reformed cultus, the preaching of the Word. There has been a school of thought — now virtually it is to be hoped extinct — which was apt to exalt ‘worship’ above ‘mere preaching’. It developed partly no doubt in welcome reaction to another school of thought equally reprehensible in its lack of balance which relegated all of the service that preceded the sermon to the category of ‘preliminaries’. Any polarisation of worship and preaching, however, must be deprecated, for every part of the Christian cult is ‘worship’, and the sermon is an integral part of the cult. ‘The Word of God’, says the Roman Catholic scholar, Ambrosius Verheul, ‘read in the Epistle and Gospel must become a real message from God to us, men of the present, in the concrete circumstances of the world in which we live. Therefore Bible-reading demands an explanation. The Bible-reading evokes preaching, the homily, connecting with the content of what has been read.’

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1983

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References

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