Preaching like...Peter Roebuck

How do you train preachers?

Preaching is not a technique or a method, though of course it makes use of techniques and methods. To think you have taught preaching because you have given students a workable outline of how to go about preparing a sermon is utterly mistaken.

Teaching preaching is like teaching a creative writing class. You will have tips and suggestions - but what is really needed is for the person to find their own voice, and to be capable of real insight and wisdom. The getting of wisdom takes an array of skills, to be sure, but it takes personal courage; and the development of one's own voice requires an ear for the language.

The reason that a preacher needs to find his/her own voice is because sermons (as Alan Lukabyo says) must be true, clear, and real. Giving real sermons is much more complicated and intuitive than giving merely true and clear ones. And it takes the development of a whole person in a Godward direction.

An analogy: in the Sydney Morning Herald there are two cricket writers with clear tasks. Chloe Saltau is the reporter. Her job is to give a descriptive account of the day's play, informing the reader of its significant events and scores. She has to integrate information from the teams as well as what she sees before here eyes, but though she is involved in a level of interpretation, she is not venturing her own opinions in doing so. Her style is very unembellished and direct. She may have played the game for years, but in a sense that is irrelevant to her work. Salthau could go and become the crime reporter and still do the same kind of writing. She does what she is supposed to do very well.

Peter Roebuck on the other hand provides a world class level of analysis and insight into the game. He himself was a first class player for many years; and he has coached cricket all over the world. He is deeply imbued in the very spirit of the game - a man formed by its challenges and attracted to its joys. He brings to his articles (which are some of the best loved in the whole newspaper, of any kind) a level of insight and wisdom that he achieves by integrating at a very deep level his insights developed over his years of study of the game. He can opine believably about Zimbabwe because he has been there and he knows Zimbabwean cricketers. He is fascinated by the characters who play the game and what the game brings out of them, or what the game does to them. He ventures opinions about cricket that are sometimes controversial, and sometimes he gets it wrong by his own admission - such as when he called for Ricky Ponting to resign in early 2008. He takes that risk, the risk of giving his opinion - and I assume it did not make him popular in the Aussie dressing room - because that is the nature of his task.

My point? Preachers are to be more like Roebuck than Salthau.

(Which is why Moore College is by far the best college for the preparation of preachers in Sydney, btw ;-) )