The minister as a preacher

"How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?" (Rom. 10:14, NIV).

C. Raymond Holmes, D.Min., is professor of preaching and worship at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University.

Twenty-eight years ago a seminary professor said to me, "As preaching goes, so goes the church." His statement began what has become for me a love affair with the homiletic task. With great excitement and determination I began to explore the preaching tradition and discovered that I was part of a long line of preachers that extended back through Moody and Jonathan Ed wards, Wesley, Calvin, and Luther, to the apostle Paul, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and the prophets of the Old Testament, and ultimately to God, whose voice at Creation set the world on its course and at Sinai gave mankind its inner direction. I discovered that revival and reformation, spiritual life in the church, was contingent upon the proclamation of the biblical word.

At that point I made two important decisions: first, that in my ministry I would give preaching top priority, and second, that I would devote maximum time and energy to the study and practice of homiletics. I have not been sorry for my decisions and would gladly, and without hesitation, repeat them. In fact, there have been stages in my ministerial life when I have reaffirmed those decisions.

You see, I believe in preaching.

I am convinced of the power of preaching because of what it has done for me both as a listener and as a preacher. Without preaching, the people would hear no thunder from Sinai, no grace from the cross, no care from the heavenly sanctuary, no hope for the future. In order to have power in the pulpit, we must believe. We must first of all believe in Christ and in the biblical message—Paul calls it "the mystery." And then we must believe in our call to the ministry and in preaching itself, which belongs to "the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor. 5:18).

Believe in the gospel

To the Corinthians Paul testified: "It is written: 'I believed; therefore I have spoken. ' With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak" (2 Cor. 4:13, NIV). This verse is set in the con text of a stirring passage in which Paul speaks of ministry in a very personal way in relation to the gospel, the call to ministry, and the preaching of the gospel. Both the structure of his preaching and his conception of his role as preacher are derived from his encounter with Christ, his knowledge of Christ, and his faith in Christ. His preaching, therefore, was historical, redemptive, and personal. On such preaching the faith and work of the church stands or falls.

I think the best biblical example of the relationship between message, preacher, preaching, and results is the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones. When he preached the message God gave him to those dead bones, they received the gift of life! Not because he preached but because he preached the given message.

We can't make something out of nothing in the pulpit or anywhere else. God can make something out of nothing. But we cannot. We must begin with a given. It's not that we must get hold of the truth, it's that the truth must get hold of us. It must shake us loose from our proud intellectualism, our opinions.

If you and I are certain of the biblical message, we will not be popular with the modern mind that seems to relish questions more than answers. Strong faith is suspect today. It is called fanatical, ignorant, unsophisticated, uninformed, by those who think they possess some esoteric knowledge no one else has. We will be more acceptable to the modern if we believe less and doubt more. But that won't save a single soul!

Recently an Adventist intellectual asked me, "Are you really so positive about our message and the future of our church?" I was so startled by the question that I couldn't answer right away. But, yes! Yes, I am! Does that make me out of step? If so, I will march alone but I don't think I'll have to. Not to believe in the biblical message or in preaching is like being in a pillow fight armed with only an empty pillowcase—except that this business we are in is no pillow fight.

Too often we allow our doubts to go unchallenged. How about meeting them head-on? How about wrestling with them like Jacob wrestled with God at the Jabbok. How about believing our beliefs and doubting our doubts?

If we don't believe, we have no business preaching. If we are not moved by the message, few of our hearers will be. But if we believe, we must preach! If the biblical message has grabbed us and gripped us and shaken us, there's a strong likelihood that through us it will also capture our hearers. If we believe, we will preach with passion; that's when we our selves are surprised by the thoughts that the Holy Spirit gives us. We must come to know in the heart what we have known with the mind. Until the truth has warmed the preacher's heart, it can heat no other cold heart.

To preach well and with power, we must prepare our sermons both carefully and prayerfully. And we, the preachers, must be prepared to preach. We prepare the sermons. The Holy Spirit prepares us. As Sangster put it, the greatest preaching happens not when we speak well, but when we have been "spoken through."

Study of the Word is important; it deepens us. But woe is you and woe is me and woe is the church, to say nothing of the world if our study serves only to sharpen our shrewdness, without deepening our spirituality. As important as study of the Word is, it is prayer over the Word that heats us up. Do you know what prayer does for preaching? It gets us down to specifics. Down to honesty. Down to our people. To brevity. It rids us of pride and pomposity. It puts us in touch with the mind of God. It empties us so the Spirit can fill us. It drives from us our own power so that God can give us His.

It is conviction that converts. It's dangerous to sit under preachers who are convicted. They don't take the noncommittal approach: "Under certain circumstances this may possibly be true." Rather, they insist, "This is what God says." If we can not know what is the truth and speak it as the truth, no one will pay any attention to what we have to say.

Believe in preaching

It doesn't take much reading in the letters of Paul to realize that he believed not only in the gospel but also in what he was called to be and to do. He believed in preaching. For him the call to preach was part of the call to be a Christian, to be an apostle. It was bound up with his faith in Christ. He always spoke of Christ, of the gospel, and of preaching in relation to each other. For him they were inseparable realities.

But we are the ones in the spotlight now. It's our turn. Paul fulfilled his ministry. Now we must fulfill ours. What does the call to be preachers mean to us?

Paul faced resistance to Christ and the gospel. He faced skepticism and irreligion. He faced forms of secularism and materialism. Separated by almost two millennia from Paul's experience, we face a challenge that has its similarities and yet is very different. In addition to the difficulties Paul faced, we must deal with a scientific mentality that finds it exceedingly hard to acquire faith.

Because of these challenges, some preachers have lost faith in preaching. They believe that preaching is an old-fashioned, outmoded means of communication relegated to the trash heap of history. But is it really so? Does Jesus no longer speak through preaching?

Paul told the Romans that they couldn't believe, they couldn't call on the Lord or hear Christ speak, without a preacher (see Rom. 10:1-15). The fact that some people refuse to listen or listen with indifference does not mean that Jesus has ceased to speak through preaching. There is evidence that lives are still changed by the proclamation of the Word of God. Nations have been changed by preachers like Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. The preaching of the Reformation, of the Wesleyan revivals, altered history. The preaching of Whitefield, Spurgeon, Moody, Sunday, and Graham profoundly stirred great cities like London and New York. A hundred years ago all of northern Finland and parts of Sweden were transformed by the preaching of an itinerant farmer.

Let's not forget that God made His Son a preacher. One of the first things Mark tells us about Him is that He "came into Galilee, preaching" (Mark 1:14). The Christian church has had preachers ever since. What God has put together preacher, message, method let us not put asunder. We will have no power to preach if we don't believe in preaching. And if we believe in it, we will work hard at it. We will work hard at it in relation to our theological, pastoral, and evangelistic tasks. If we believe in preaching, we will not assume we can learn nothing more about it.

Furthermore, we will suffer for the sake of our preaching, as did Paul and others. Surrender to ministry is proved by a willingness to suffer whatever is required to carry it out.

Our church supports our belief in preaching, ranking the preaching of the Word as of first priority among the four basic areas of ministry for which we are held accountable preaching, shepherding, training, and evangelizing. In 1894 Ellen White wrote, "The preaching of the gospel is God's appointed way for converting the souls of men."1 In 1898 she wrote, "The preaching of the Word is not to be undervalued."2 And in 1901, "The preaching of the gospel is the Lord's great method of saving souls." 3

Obviously her views on preaching were developmental, resulting from experience and reflection. She observed and analyzed practically and theologically what she was doing in public proclamation. In this she serves as an inspiring example for all Seventh-day Adventist preachers. She believed in preaching and modeled that belief for us all. The power of her influence as a preacher on this church is without question.

Today our need is not for a new theology. We need renewed preachers! Preachers who know Jesus Christ and who have dedicated their lives to preaching the biblical message!

You and I are the recipients of a great homiletic tradition. Let's thank God for it, accept it, and preach with all the soul and passion and faith that is in us.

1. Manuscript 38, 1894.

2. Manuscript 107, 1898.

3. Letter 11, 1901.


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C. Raymond Holmes, D.Min., is professor of preaching and worship at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University.

September 1990

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