Preaching: What do you see as the role in preaching in breakout churches?

Rainer: In my previous projects I have found that the role of preaching is the number one correlated factor related to the evangelistic growth of the church, the conversion growth of the church. In Breakout Churches, when you’re dealing with 13 churches you cannot make as broad a statement, that this does lead to this. But I did a previous study with 576 churches so I do have that same type of information, and preaching was critical in these churches. The time that pastors spent in sermon preparation, the over-all assessment by his weekly congregants on the impact of the preaching, the priority that was given to the preaching role by the laity and pastors alike; in other words, laity understood that if their pastor was going to have the time to do the type of preaching that he needed to do then they need to take up the role of ministry as they’re supposed to do. It is hard to overstate how important the centrality of preaching was in these breakout churches. It is just so powerful that it stares you right in the face.

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I’ll give you a parenthetical on this that’s not related to this interview at all. One of my great concerns about some of the emerging churches is that the centrality of preaching and the role of preaching has become minimized. I have other concerns for some of the emergent churches but not all of them. There are some good emerging churches that have made preaching the major emphasis that it should be. But none of these “breakout churches” were emergent so I’m getting off track a little bit.

Preaching: As you think about the research you’ve done over the years, are there some characteristics relating to preaching that tend to be found in churches where there is strong evangelistic growth?

Rainer: Yes, with the strong conversionary growth there is a correlation with expositional preaching — I’ve go to be careful with that in the sense that I have yet to find any one pastor who does nothing but expository sermons. I can listen to the tapes of john Macarthur and find doctrinal sermons and thematic sermons in addition to expositional sermons. There is a relationship in that in what I call the effective evangelical churches,  the dominant preaching style is expository preaching but these pastors also do other types of sermons. I’m careful with seminary students who think that they may be committing a mortal sin if they do a narrative, doctrinal, or thematic sermon. But the dominant type of preaching was expository.

Another issue that’s closely related in the overall preaching question was the amount of time that pastors of these churches spend in sermon preparation, and I lumped it together with prayer. I kind of used an Acts 6:4 paradigm. But if you add up the amount of time that pastors spend in prayer and what I call the ministry of the Word — which primarily would include sermon preparation – it’s five times the same amount of time of pastors of comparison churches — evangelistic churches versus the comparative churches.