__________________________
Bill
Hybels is Senior Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington,
IL.
I’m
an expository preacher in an age when expository preaching is viewed by most
architects of the church as no longer relevant. If you look at the church-growth
movement and the seeker-sensitive models, expository preaching is not even in
the vocabulary. I do not say for a minute these guys are all wrong; I listen
to some of them on tape, because many of them have a tremendous heart for God
and a love for reaching this culture. But I fear the long-term absence of the
value that’s involved in the expository preaching and teaching of the Word of
God.
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I’ve
been doing this no for thirty years, and I do not see any waning in the power
of expository preaching. What I see is a lot of guys I know who started out
with that passion, now giving into the cultural pressure of being relevant and
cute and very topical, to the point where sometimes there’s not enough Bible
in the message to know it’s a sermon.
I
really believe with all my heart that if those of us who are committed to the
application-centered preaching of the Word of God — if we will just hang in
there, then people will come back. They’ll realize they can’t live with anything
other than the bread of God’s Word.
The
challenge for people who do what I do is to make sure we are committed to it
enough to withstand the pressure that’s put on us by the culture — by the religious
culture even — to change and move in a different direction.
__________________________
David
Jeremiah is Senior Pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, CA.
I
led at one of our sister institutions a doctor of ministry class about four
years ago. I had seventeen different denominational groups in there and I began
the first lecture by saying how important this is, this is what we really need.
I was trying to say that expository preaching is that form of preaching in which
the text guides both the shape of the message and the content of the message.
Most people say expository preaching actually is one in which the direct content
ought to come out of the immediate context that you are looking at rather than
sort of looking up verses all over the Bible.
I'm
arguing not only the content but the very shape of the message should in some
way be determined by the teaching passage that we have there in front of us.
I'm trying to get this across at a one‑hour lecture and we broke for lunch.