Before you read anything I write - this really is more important:
Cards on the Table
This is a newsletter post about preaching. Obviously, my target audience here is other pastors. But I hope it will be instructive for any believer as they consider the practice in their own church (especially if you are in leadership and have the structural/institutional ability to effectively encourage faithfulness). For members of our congregation, Remsen Bible, hopefully this serves as an encouragement that - right or wrong - there is a method to what I am doing week-by-week.
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I about to recommend my pattern. To which I must say—well, I wouldn’t follow this pattern if I didn’t think it was right. But, follow me only insofar as I follow Christ. And the apostles’ preaching. And, to some extent, your own gifts and preferences.
I’m done caveating.
Consecutive Exposition
The meat of the preaching ministry in our church is consecutive exposition. I love to preach the Bible, and I think this is generally the most faithful way to approach preaching God’s word. Why do I love consecutive exposition?
Here are a couple of personal reasons:
* personal growth. As believers in Jesus Christ, we grow in relationship to Christ largely, though not exclusively, through growing in our knowledge of his word. And being regularly immersed in the same portion of Scripture, the same book of the Bible, over the course of weeks and months (maybe years) gives you a depth of knowledge that you won’t gain from bouncing around all of the time. It’s how the texts were written - each thought building upon the last - and we do well to absorb them in the same manner. As I prep to preach, then, I am marinating in that text. And so, I grow.
* simplicity of planning. I think any pastor benefits from forward planning, but I feel this acutely as a bi-vocational pastor. When I am working consecutively through a book, I never have to wonder what to preach next week. I take this a step further, by planning how those sermons will break down. I try to chart all the way through the next year or so. Every 4ish months, I sit down and look at my Service Information Spreadsheet (I keep the file name prosaic so I can remember it), think through where I’ll be going in the next year, and make adjustments as needed.
Would this hypothetically be possible with other styles of preaching? Sure. But it’s a lot easier when working consecutively through a particular book. Further, I feel confident that even if my mood changes, or my thoughts on certain subjects change, Genesis 14 is still going to be there on November 10th, and so I will still be able to find the point of the text and write a sermon from it.
Those are a couple of personal reasons for consecutive exposition—it helps me grow, and it helps me plan. Here are more important reasons for the congregation:
* the whole counsel of God. The apostle Paul communicated to the Ephesian elders that he had not shrunk from proclaiming to them the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27). Now, he did this in a pretty short time frame (three-ish years). So, in some sense, he must mean that he got the whole point of the Bible across to them in that time. He clearly didn’t do line-by-line exposition of all 39 OT books in three years. Nonetheless, if a local church pastor is going to commit to teaching the whole counsel of God, he would do well to establish a practice of consecutive exposition. This is because such a pattern means you don’t get to skip the hard, confusing, or potentially offensive passages. Even if you take for your text a fairly long passage, you are putting yourself in a position where people will notice if you are skipping hard or offensive bits. That’s a helpful check on the natural tendency many of us have to duck away from hard issues. The whole of God’s word is profitable for teaching, reproof, and training in righteousness. So put yourself in a position where you have to cover the hard stuff.
* Providence. An overlooked advantage of consecutive exposition is the providential ordering of events. Some will advance the “inflexibility” of this method of teaching as a way of criticizing it pastorally. Don’t we need to be sensitive to the current moment, preach to what people are thinking about right now, or otherwise let outside factors shape the content of our preaching?
I’d submit that such “sensitivity” to the moment actually misses how universally relevant the word of God is. To use a very simple and recent example from my preaching calendar: I didn’t preach an advent series in 2024. Instead, I kept trucking through the book of Genesis. So on December 15th, we were in the first part of Genesis 18, considering Sarah’s laughter at the promises of God. That might not seem like a very Christmas-y theme, and therefore tone-deaf to the moment. However, as I prepped the sermon, it occurred to me that a useful contrast for Sarah would be Mary in Luke 1. So, in seeking to illuminate the meaning of Genesis 18, I was also able to help the congregation think usefully about an important aspect of the Christmas story. Examples like this could be multiplied, but the point is simple: God always has something to say from every part of his word. Therefore, we don’t need to panic about “will this be relevant?” You can just preach the next passage and trust that God is going to say something helpful and eternally relevant to his people from that text.
* grasping the movement. Consecutive exposition also forces me to think biblically-theologically. I’m always asking “how does this passage fit into the broader context of the book it’s in, and the Bible as a whole?” This is a very important tool for helping our congregations understand the whole Bible. Now, bad expositions can extract the text from its context and treat the passage at hand as if it exists in isolation, but I think this is less of a temptation if I am constantly in the headspace of a particular book. Incidentally, I believe this type of thinking is spurred more consistently when I am reading widely in the Bible, while focusing my intense study on one place (Genesis, for instance).
* topically. Finally, before I start talking about topical preaching, I think it is important to bring this up: consecutive exposition often brings up important topics which I would otherwise duck, or perhaps more likely, simply would not occur to me. God’s word truly is comprehensive in the way it touches human life, and when we work our way systematically through the text, we will encounter topics which often surprise us, and will surely surprise our congregations.
So, that is my partial argument for the superiority of consecutive exposition as the regular preaching diet for your local church. But: there’s a difference between saying something ought to be the main staple in your diet, and saying it’s the only thing you should ever eat. Because I think there is a good argument to be made for intelligently deployed topical preaching as well.
there’s a difference between saying something ought to be the main staple in your diet, and saying it’s the only thing you should ever eat
The Dangers of Topical Preaching
I grew up in a church where consecutive exposition was the norm, and have run in those circles my entire adult life. We tend to make fun of topical preachers. But I don’t want to simply ridicule. Rather, I want to recognize the real perils that lie on the topical side of the road:
* It’s easy for the topical preacher to have his priorities shaped by a vapid and secular calendar. If I were going to line up some sacred cows for slaughter here, I’d point out that Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, and Valentine’s Day are not Biblical holidays. “Back to School” is certainly a time of year, but is it so spiritually significant that we ought to structure our preaching calendars around it? It’s ironic that many pastors who would mock liturgical churches for following an “unbiblical” traditional church calendar (which is designed to reflect the life of Christ and cultivate attention to that life), will then willingly let their churches and preaching be shaped by unbiblical and even, sometimes, anti-biblical holidays. To make this point more concise: the topical preacher is in greater danger of being driven by his culture, not the Bible.
the topical preacher is in greater danger of being driven by his culture, not the Bible
* Further, topical preaching is often dependent upon the cleverness and current learning of the preacher: which means it will be both narrow (his interests/hobby horses) and shallow (limited by his knowledge - or perhaps, in a large church, the abilities of his research team). The plain fact of the matter is that to consistently come up with new topics and ideas that are both interesting and well-executed in terms of content and style is far beyond the capacity of your average preacher. Most guys can’t pull it off in a way that is well-done, whether in regard to research or delivery or both.
* Most of my growth as a preacher, in terms of my biblical knowledge, comes through exposition, and sitting with unfamiliar texts, or familiar texts that I didn’t know as well as I thought I knew. As a pastor, my congregation’s growth is largely (though not completely) tied to my own growth. If I learn less in topical preaching, then to make that my regular practice means I’m putting our whole congregation on the hamster wheel of my current state of knowledge. That seems like a foolish method of feeding God’s sheep. We’ll all starve.
The Usefulness of Topical Preaching
Having flagged those dangers, I still want to advocate for a measure of topical preaching in the church. Here’s why, pastor, you should preach topically: your people need you to.
That’s a very broad-to-the-point-of-being-completely-useless statement, so let me flesh it out a bit.
* The first category of topics which I would say pastors need to address are those which arise from the text. It is not unusual for a topic to arise in the course of exposition - it’s there in the text, but is not the focus of the text, and therefore the sermon shouldn’t be about it. Sometimes you can give it a glancing blow, a sentence or a paragraph, and be on your way. But at other times, those topics may demand a longer look.
To give an example of this, in late 2023 I began preaching through the book of Genesis. As I came to the end of Genesis one and was examining the creation of man and woman in the image of God, it became clear that this was a topic which our church needed to sit with for a while. While, in my estimation, the main point of that passage was the charge and role that God gives to humanity in bearing his image as (essentially) his vice-regents on earth, the implications of the imago Dei are multitudinous, and include some of the most important social and political issues of our day. What should Christians think about abortion, IVF and fertility treatments, transgender rights, suicide, etc.? Rooting our thinking in who we are as God’s image bearers is incredibly important, and so it was worth pausing the expository series to sit down with, what I called, Implications of Image.
That’s an example, but far from the only one available. You might be later in Genesis, say chapter 15, and decide you need to give more intentional instruction on soteriology. Or you might be preaching through 1 Thessalonians and decide to spend more time on eschatology than the text itself demands. You get the point -there are simply times when, pastorally, you realize you need to “double-click” on something present but not central in the text you’re working through. And so you pull out the topical sermon or series from your ministerial toolbelt.
* The other time I see topical preaching as being of particular import is when your church’s collective mind to be shaped by the scriptures on a particular subject, to an extent that it currently is not. This might be because of simple deficit of teaching on that subject (depending on your church, this might be ecclesiology or eschatology, or any other word ending in -ology). Or, it could be because cultural pressure is so intense in a particular area that you see a need to build up a biblical understanding to counter and correct what people are receiving.
Pastors are often confused or frustrated that while they have deeply formed thoughts and beliefs on important subjects of the day, their people do not share those beliefs, or do so only loosely. How can our people listen to us preach the word week-by-week or year-by-year and still not understand what the Bible says about divorce, or homosexual practice, or childrearing? Well, because you might have touched on those subjects for a few sentences or maybe a whole sermon back in 2014 when you did a series on Ephesians or Genesis, but that was 10 years ago, a third of your congregation were kids back then, a third didn’t come to your church back then, and the rest have forgotten what you said.
We forget that our preaching is shaping our people, but it is doing so much more slowly than it shapes us. You spent 18 hours on that sermon. They spent 33 minutes with it, and the baby was crying.
You spent 18 hours on that sermon. They spent 33 minutes with it, and the baby was crying.
That doesn’t mean preaching futile - far from it! - but it does mean you need to temper your expectations about how long-lasting any statement or any one sermon is. You need to think in longer terms of time, and certain subjects need addressed with some degree of frequency, or at times, intensity.
An example of this in the life of our church was my recent series on A Healthy Marriage. I’ve preached on marriage before, in the early chapters of Genesis (not too long ago) and in Colossians (several years ago). But while those messages were seeking to expose and express the particular meanings of particular texts, I felt it was important for our church to receive a fairly comprehensive overview of what the Bible said about marriage. So I put together a six part series emphasizing roles within marriage, addressing God’s intentions for sexuality, looking at the need for clear and honest communication, and culminating in a meditation on Paul’s argument that marriage is ultimately meant to be a living picture of the gospel. Putting that all together in the space of six weeks wasn’t going to happen by only preaching through books of the Bible. Our church needed a topical series on that particular topic.
A Reality
How do you know when such things are necessary? Well, brother, this calls for wisdom. Pastoral wisdom. And though you may lack it on your own, ask God who gives generously and without reproach, and he’ll be glad to give it: he loves the church more than you do. These are his lambs you’re feeding, after all.
Making such a call isn’t - or at least, shouldn’t - be an act of hubris. Rather, it should simply flow from observing the souls God has entrusted to your care, spending much time in his word, and seeking to feed his sheep to the very best of your ability. Again, I think the main diet ought to be exposition. But a good shepherd is going to recognize when some supplemental feed would be helpful.
Quickly addressing a Particular Objection
But what about Sunday School, you ask? Or Bible studies? Or other classes? Couldn’t you address these topics better in those scenarios, without giving up your firm commitment to only exposition? Yes and no.
Yes, you could address certain topics more thoroughly in a non-sermonic setting. You could field questions and engage in back and forth, and spend more extended time than even a topical series would allow. I’m all for that if it fits in the life of your church.
But, also, no. What the sermon has is the universality of its reach. Of course it will be rare for all of your people to be present, even on a Sunday morning. But you will have far more of them then than you will have at any other time. And so if you want the particular pastoral instruction that can be done with topical teaching to reach your whole church, sermons really are the way to go. Giving Sunday morning “air-time” to issues also indicates that you, as the minister of God’s word, consider this topic to be weighty enough to invest that 20-50 minutes instructing the congregation as a whole in it, not simply a group of self-selecting “whoever’s interested.”
Conclusion
This is far from a comprehensive look at the subject of preaching; expositional, topical, or otherwise. But I do hope it gives the reader food for thought. I will risk repeating myself here by saying that I think expositional preaching ought to be the main diet for the flock week-by-week. But I also think a pastor runs the risk of pastoral malpractice if he does not, at least on occasion, make room for topical instruction for the congregation. If I might refer back to the beginning where I encouraged you to follow my call here only insofar as I follow the apostles example, it is worth noting that much of Paul’s writing is topical in nature. He wasn’t afraid to take a list of questions from a church, or problems he observed, and move methodically through those issues, applying the wisdom of God’s word to the immediate needs of God’s people. Brothers, let us go and do likewise.
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