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I was at the end of the queue. By that I mean I was part of the last group of doctoral students C. K. Barrett (May 4, 1917 to August 26, 2011) was to have before retirement. It was 1977 and Professor Barrett wrote me a note in the spring of that year saying he liked my diversity of languages and my proposed thesis topic (“Women in the New Testament”), and I resolved to go to Durham, not the one I was familiar with in my home state of North Carolina. Barrett was, after all, the foremost Methodist New Testament scholar in the world. Being a fellow Methodist and desiring to be a New Testament scholar, I turned down the opportunity to go to Oxford and headed to a town I had never visited and had no mental image of—Durham, England. My life was never to be the same again. I had just graduated from seminary, and Ann and I had gotten married during the summer. We shipped off steamer trunk after steamer trunk of books and belongings to England from the Boston Harbor, and got on a plane bound for London. Little did we know how much this journey would change our lives, and how much the Barretts—Kingsley and Margaret—would have to do with it.

In a “what goes around comes around” set of circumstances, C. K. Barrett’s books, dozens of boxes of them, have just arrived at Asbury via ship and truck from England, thanks to the very gracious gift of Kingsley’s only daughter, Penelope, who will share some things in the Foreword that follows. I believe Kingsley would have been very pleased with this outcome, as he and Margaret enjoyed their times here at Asbury Seminary, a Methodist school. In fact, Kingsley preached not only at Asbury but at the nearby Methodist Church as well in 1988 and again ten years later. He loved the opportunity to preach wherever he went.

When you go to study with a Methodist, they put you right to work. Almost as soon as I arrived in Durham in September 1977, Kingsley put me in touch with Mrs. Guy and the district superintendents in the Durham and Darlington circuits and soon I was preaching. All that seminary training in homiletics was not going to waste after all. Everywhere I went the name Professor Barrett was spoken of with the sort of respect and reverence few preachers ever achieve. He had been there before me, and not just once or twice, but many times all over the Northeast. Like his Durham forebear and fellow NT scholar, J. B. Lightfoot, he had spread the Good News to the miners and their kin in pit village after pit village. I quickly learned that Kingsley cast a long shadow, and his name always brought a smile to the parishoners’ faces. But I was an unknown quantity to the peoples of these various chapels.

I remember an Easter Sunday when I got off the bus from Durham to a small village and the Methodist chapel steward ran down the hill to meet me. Almost out of breath, he said: “Sir, I must ask you something before we go to the chapel, if you don’t mind.” I told him to go ahead. He said “you do believe in the resurrection don’t you?” Apparently the previous Easter some visiting preacher had showed up that didn’t, and didn’t really share an Easter message. I reassured the man I most certainly did believe in the resurrection, but he had a right to ask because most of these little chapels faced musical chairs in the pulpit—a different preacher most every week, based on the circuit rota or “plan.” The relief on his face was evident—“That’s alright then,” he said, knowing that I was a student of Kingsley Barrett and trusting his judgment. I hope you will trust my judgment when I say this volume, and the subsequent volumes, are full of insight and light, for there is a sort of luminescence to good preaching, and the Barretts certainly knew how to deliver God’s Word in effective fashion.

What follows in this particular volume and in volume two of this series unveils an entirely different side of C. K. Barrett, a side one might never have known about if all you know is his famous commentaries and monographs on the New Testament. Herein can be found a goodly selection of Kingsley’s sermons preached largely in small and medium sized Methodist churches in the Northeast of England, though often elsewhere in England and in some cases around the world. Here the exegesis bursts into flame and illumines the Word, the man, and the congregation. This first volume presents one hundred sermons of CKB (as he was fondly called, and as at times he even dubbed himself in these sermons) on the Gospels and Acts.

I was fortunate enough to hear a few of these sermons both in Durham England and in the United States, and I can tell you they are powerful and still have life, even on the printed page. But that is not all. Kingsley Barrett was the child of a Methodist preacher, who was a well-known evangelist and revival preacher in his day. Fred Barrett was not the scholar his son was, but on close inspection, you can most definitely see the impact of the father on the son when it came to preaching. In one of the sermons in this volume you will find that Kingsley called his father “one of the greatest preachers I have ever heard.” This is high praise from someone who both heard and preached many remarkable sermons. But there is a further reason to include as many Barrett sermons from both these men as we can in this series. One thing that is sorely lacking in Methodist preaching these days, especially in the United States, is in-depth engagement with both the biblical text and the Wesleyan tradition and theology. You will find that these sermons demonstrate what such preaching can look like.

The typical Methodist service in England was called the hymn sandwich—a hymn and a prayer, a hymn and a lesson, a hymn and an offering, a hymn and a sermon, and another hymn. Methodism, though it was not born in song, was nonetheless carried along in song as the revival got going in the eighteenth century, and the hymns of Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts were the mainstays. They still are for much of Methodism. I mention this for the very good reason that it explains why the Barretts so frequently cite hymn verses in their sermons. Besides the Bible, hymns were the other well-known texts of the Methodist congregations who sang them over and over again, and knew them often by heart. Neither Barrett shied away from preaching the more theologically rich and complex portions of the Scriptures. In fact they were drawn to such texts. Indeed, I would say that what most characterizes these sermons is deep and practical reflection on major theological themes in these texts. It is the mark of a great preacher that he rises to the level of the text itself, and nowhere is CKB more profound, more insightful, more compelling than when he is preaching about Christ and him crucified. His sermons on the Cross and Resurrection are especially compelling.

All of these sermons are found in little notebooks that could easily fit in one’s jacket pocket. They are all written out in a small meticulous cursive hand, word for word. Interestingly, Kingsley’s handwriting is slanted from left to right, and his father’s just the opposite. Kingsley’s sermon usually take up twelve or so handwritten pages in these little notebooks, but a few go up to eighteen pages, and one even to twenty pages. I remember, because he told me, that he would go over the text of the sermon on a Saturday night before heading to one chapel or another on Sunday, sometimes as many as three different ones on a Sunday morning, afternoon, and evening. I say this because the print of these sermons is so small that they surely did not serve as a text from which Professor Barrett would read from the pulpit, but perhaps they served as a reminder from time to time. Having seen him preach, I doubt he needed much prompting from the manuscript. Equally interesting is the fact that CKB seems to have made very few revisions to the original sermon text at later dates, even when he was preaching the sermon decades later and for the twentieth or thirtieth or fortieth time (yes, there are a few sermons he preached some forty times all over the Northeast of England).

Just occasionally one will see in pencil an added line or a crossed out paragraph in some of these sermons. And there are a few sermons that are “rewritten,” by which Kingsley means he has updated a sermon he had previously preached on some text. All of this suggests he didn’t much change his opinion of what the text said, or how it should be preached whether it was preached in the 1930s or in 2009. These one hundred sermons were preached an amazing 1737 times over the course of Kingsley’s seventy-five years of preaching. Interestingly, the most preached sermons from this volume tended to be those that dealt with Jesus’ parables.

We are thus fortunate that both Barretts wrote their whole sermons out in long hand complete with headings and careful organization, as if they planned for the text to see the light of day at some juncture, or at least just in case somebody else, like me, did someday put them into print. In these sermons you will find profound reflections coupled with some of Kingsley’s famous wry wit, and not a small amount of personal reflections that show the openness and humility of the man. In fact in personal interaction he was sometimes quite shy, but when he got behind a lectern or a pulpit one was in for a formidable discourse, or as he himself once said upon first hearing his old Cambridge teacher C. H. Dodd—“I realized immediately that I was in for some heavy weather!”

You will see at once that these are no ordinary sermons. For one thing, they are not your typical homiletical fare—neither expository sermons that take you line by line and word by word through a text in its original order, nor the usual multiple point sermon to which is added illustrations, which sadly, often have little to do with the point in the text, though many of these sermons do have three main points. Almost without fail, Kingsley would hone in on just a small number of verses in a sermon and milk them for all they were worth. I have included only two sermons that have longer and shorter versions (see e.g., “The Marriage Feast”), to give a sense of how a morning service might differ from an evening one somewhere, while using the same text. Evening services, especially with communion included, tended to be shorter.

From a rhetorical point of view, these sermons fall into the category of “amplification,” the taking of a major theme or idea in a passage and thinking logically through it and reflecting carefully on the pith or substance of the subject, spinning out its implications and applications. Some of the sermons like the one on “The Christian Viewpoint” reflect the fact that Kingsley was given a topic and asked to preach on it, but for the most part the texts in these sermons seem to have either been chosen by Kingsley or reflect an effort to preach on texts appropriate to the Church calendar, or to the occasion on which the sermon was given (e.g., chapel anniversaries, weddings, funerals etc.). But in every case what lies either on the surface of the sermon or just beneath is penetrating reflection on the meaning of the Biblical text. The Church he preached most frequently in was Bondgate Methodist in Darlington which he had served as pastor from 1943–45. But they kept asking him to come back for many decades thereafter and he graciously agreed.

What has dawned on me as I have worked through these many, many sermons preached in eight different decades is that the largest and most continual part of the ministry of Kingsley Barrett throughout his adult life was in preaching. This was true, before, during, and after his full-time academic career of lecturing and attending conferences and writing good books on the New Testament. Many of his doctoral students, like me, would only occasionally hear him preach, and had no idea how much time and effort he put into writing sermons and preaching hither and yon, from the smallest chapel, to the largest cathedral.

One anecdote must suffice at this juncture. The rumor went around his doctoral students in the late 1970s that he had turned down some major (and well-endowed) lectureship in America because when he looked in his date book, he was scheduled to preach in some little county Durham chapel populated by a few dozen faithful souls. As it turns out—this was no rumor, it was true. As he once said to me—“a promise is a promise, and he who is faithful in little will also be faithful in much.” And without question, this is one reason so many of his fellow Methodists all over England, and especially in the Northeast, loved him and his preaching. He was a person of real integrity, who kept his word.

Kingsley Barrett knew very well that good preachers stick to and preach the Biblical text, not themselves or their pet topics, whereas mediocre and poor ones are like those figures in the Old Testament—wandering Aramaeans who never quite arrive at the promised land. We will have occasion to say more about Fred Barrett and his sermons in the third volume in this series. In the meantime, I trust you will be challenged and encouraged as I was, as I worked through these sermons. They will indeed “tease the mind into active thought” (to borrow a phrase from Dodd), and at the same time nourish the soul.

These one hundred sermons on the Gospels and Acts should be seen as an ἀρραβών, an “earnest” as CKB would say, a large part of a payment, given in advance as a security that the whole will be paid afterwards. Put another way, there is much more to follow. Many of these sermons in this volume were preached an amazing number of times over the course of CKB’s preaching career, with little or no alteration, it would appear. They are battle-tested! Not only so, they reflect the constancy and faithfulness of the preacher who did not see the need to alter his views from the 1930s to 2009 on the unchanging Word of God. He had always believed it was true since his youth, and was sure that the truth can set you free.

BW3—ADVENT 2016