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Foreword

leslie griffiths

In the course of an eventful life, I seem to have become a snapper-up of ill-considered titles. Those who have invited me to preach or speak at some event or other often ask me how I’d like to be described. They are not easily fobbed off with my standard reply that I’d like to be simply ‘Leslie Griffiths’. They seem keen to impress their public with the full panoply of my honorifics. If they persist, I send them the whole list in alphabetical order and invite them to do whatever they like with them. One title is invariably missing from such a list, yet it’s the one I’d give up all the others for; indeed it’s the one I have chosen for my epitaph when that final day comes. On Welsh slate, affixed to the wall of the memorial garden at Wesley’s Chapel, and above the spot where my ashes will be interred, the announcement will be made to all passers-by that here lies ‘Leslie Griffiths, one of Mr Wesley’s preaches’.

It is as a preacher that I most want to be remembered. Not as a teacher or lecturer, not a broadcaster or writer, but as a preacher. It is to this work that I was called, and I can think of no vocation more noble, no art more intricate, no cause more necessary than that of declaring the good news which God has made known to us through the person and ministry, the life and death, the resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The pages that follow make a serious attempt to re-imagine the role of preaching for our day. A brilliant essay on the Bible asks us to move beyond seeing it merely as text towards understanding it as message. And that must surely be the supreme challenge in an age where the world’s agenda is relentlessly driven forward by breaking news, reality television, the cult of celebrity and the latest sales wheeze of those who want to sell us something. The Bible undergirds the work of every preacher, but no one should be left thinking of our holy book merely as a tidy arrangement of pages held firmly within unyielding (or even floppy) covers. This book has done sterling service but it ceases to be useful if it comes to entomb the lively, life-giving story to which it bears witness. And if it becomes a kind of text book, pushing preaching remorselessly towards cerebral utterance, erudite exegesis and the careful language of lawyers, then we must surely work hard to release the message we preach from its bondage. And the internet (I never thought I’d be caught admitting this) is just the catalyzing force which might enable this to happen. It might just be for the twenty-first century what the printing press was to the sixteenth. It might be the tool which allows our story to take wings again.

Here are essays which view the art of preaching from a variety of standpoints – that of the listener, or of the herald commissioned to announce good news, or of the cultural context within which sermons are prepared and delivered. We are given pen pictures of the place of preaching in our varying church traditions. I especially liked the insight given of how the ‘Black church’ goes about it – all that interaction, those sighs and hallelujahs, the rhetorical ‘tricks of the trace’ and the heightened atmosphere where expectation features large, the sheer drama of it all.

I have already referred to the art of preaching, and that is an appropriate way of describing it. In the Middle Ages, the three strands of the ars preadicandi laid it upon the preacher to persuade, instruct and delight his hearers in equal measure. And there’s much in what follows that addresses one or more of these lines of thought, although I personally might have wanted a little more attention given to the way ‘delight’ might be created in the hearts of those listening to sermons.

I was sure there would be a reference within these pages to the classical definition of preaching given by Phillips Brooks in his 1877 Lectures on Preaching given at Yale. There invariably is, but I didn’t expect it to appear quite as late in the book as it does. ‘Truth through personality’ remains as good a starting point for understanding the essence of preaching as any. I’ve used it often enough myself. But how I wish someone would amplify that definition with just a little more reference to what Brooks wrote just a few sentences later. This how he went on:

The truth [proclaimed] must come really through the person, not merely over his lips, not merely into his understanding and out through his pen. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him.

The gender-exclusive language employed by Brooks is, of course, of its time but our insistence on a literary style more generous to all its readers cannot prevent us from sensing and agreeing with the thrust of his argument. Nor from recognizing the distinction he makes between two different kinds of preacher. He writes how

the Gospel has come over one of them and reaches us tinged and flavoured with his superficial characteristics, belittled with his littleness. The Gospel has come through the other, and we received it impressed and winged with all the earnestness and strength that there is in him.

Brooks brings his case to its conclusion with a graphic contrast. ‘In the first case’, he writes, ‘the [preacher] has been but a printing machine or a trumpet. In the other case he has been a true [human being] and a real messenger of God.’

I and, I suspect, all of us who attempt the noble art of preaching, can easily acknowledge that we have gone down each of these paths from time to time. Preaching has been both an exercise emanating from our thinking selves, an exhortation lacking depth or subtlety, and also something altogether more profound. When our words are conceived in the deepest parts of our being, when they resonate with everything we try to do in the rest of our lives, when they are marked with the ring of sincerity and truth, it is not difficult to recognize the way our words acquire an energy and strength which is not of our own making. The God-given-ness, God-blessedness, of the humble work of ordinary men and women who endeavour to say something meaningful about the extraordinary generosity of their Maker, the unfathomable love of their Heavenly Father, is surely as much a miracle as any ever recorded. Here is the bread from heaven that feeds us and our listeners now and evermore – humble scraps which somehow nourish multitudes.

Those of us who preach know how passionate an exercise it all is. Those who listen deserve only the best fare, food which offers a foretaste of the heavenly banquet itself. And those who have put their heads together, given some serious thought to the preacher’s task, and now offer their work to the public are to be commended for continuing the struggle to give preaching a future at least as significant and transformative as its past.

Leslie Griffiths, One of Mr Wesley’s Preachers