To Preach or Not To Preach: The Church's Urgent Question

I just finished reading a republish of a book: To Preach or not to Preach. In evangelical circles, one could hardly think of calling into question “preaching.” Its the very air we breathe. We sit in church on Sunday and listen to orators or go to “revivals” and hear day after day of hellfire and brimestone preaching thinking it to be proper justified and effective.

Then a book like To Preach comes along and credibly calls all that into question. Is church preaching biblical? Does it establish spiritual formation or give room for the priesthood of all believers? Or does it arrest “church” to a continual evangelistic appeal, where we bring non-believers to the meeting and let a special person work on them, while we go through life warming pews and throwing money? When we take preaching out of its biblical purpose, an outreach outside the body, there is little room to develop spiritual ministry. I find more people indulged in functions of a sunday show than learning about their giftings and sharpening them chiefly because of “the sermon” has become something it was never biblically designed for…

This book is hardly post-modern hack job. It features more than 500 endnotes from J.I. Packer to Augustine. The author originally published the book in England back in the 1990s. However, it saw little audience outside England. Now the book has been reissued with added new material: Norrington Responds To His Critics, another 20+ pages… The book is also available in eBook form…