Although Coffin emphasized the heed for a teaching ministry in a biblically illiterate age, he knew that preaching was more than teaching. In his final lecture he says: "Preaching aims at a definite result. The teacher has as definite an objective, but he travels toward it at a more leisurely pace. Not every lecture is designed to alter its auditors; but preaching proposes to make men different. The preacher sets himself to do something in and with the persons who sit before him.... Both preacher and people should expect something to happen, and something momentous, because they face each other for half an hour, while he faces himself and them with the living God in Christ."4

In 1951, during his retirement, Coffin gave a third series of lectures on preaching, the George Craig Stewart Lectures, at Seabury Western Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. They were entitled Communion Through Preaching. He shows that both sermons and the Lord's Supper are means of grace and media through which God in Christ offers Himself in personal fellowship. He stresses once again that there is no substitute for biblical preaching, not only because of the danger of departing from the Gospel given once and for all in the self-revelation of God in the Scriptures, but also because through this literature God comes and meets His people. "A sketchy, superficial knowledge of the Bible is crippling to a preacher. By all means let him know his period -- its moods, its trends, its reaction to the epoch in which it finds itself. By all means let him know what is in man, but even more let him know the Word of God historically given in the Scriptures."5

Coffin was sharply critical of much modern preaching. He said that a talk on current events, or on some social evil, or on managing one's feelings, escaping one's worries, or overcoming fears is hardly the vehicle for the personal approach of God. God has an inconspicuous role in too many sermons. In Coffin's view the chief purpose of preaching is to supply an encounter between God and the souls of men. He recognized the value of the emphasis in recent years on the "life situations" of the congregation, but in his view this remained secondary to the offering to God of a sermon through which He can speak and reveal Himself to His children. This demands that every sermon should be grounded in Scripture and should bring the message of an ancient day to bear on current needs.

In his final lecture, Coffin says: "It is no pulpit convention which requires a text from Scripture. It is the effort to recapture for our messages today the supreme quality of revealing God. A preacher who does not zealously collect texts from the Scriptures in order to achieve in his time what the biblical authors have so conspicuously achieved does not belong in the apostolic succession."6

He recognized the peril that when we start with a biblical text we seem to be dealing with ancient history and not with that which is urgently contemporary. To avoid this peril the preacher should begin with a few sentences which portray our present plight, and then bring in a biblical situation where identical or similar circumstances dominate the scene. The text is thus lifted out of the remote past and made relevant for today. "Many preachers feel the biblical material hampering, so they dispense with it almost entirely at the outset and only introduce it incidentally later on. Hence the popularity of topical as opposed to textual sermons. The peril in this method is that we cut off our message from the historic self-revelation of God which the Church of the centuries has garnered in the Scriptures."7