In recent weeks I have become more and more aware of a trend that I find increasingly disturbing. It is the reluctance and unwillingness of young preachers to commit themselves to more than one sermon a week. A church secretary shared with me how he was finding it more and more difficult to find pulpit supply for a Sunday, because men he approached were unable unwilling to preach at two services. A well-known conference speaker shared a conversation he had had with another conference speaker and they commented on the fact that the speakers at these events tended to be older. The reason given was that young men are not willing to preach more than once, and so can’t take on, for example, a conference over a few days.
While I know there are exceptions, I find this trend truly alarming! What is going on with the new generation of preachers? What is happening to them, perhaps in their training and preparation, that makes them unwilling to commit to preaching more than once a week? One young man I heard of said that if he was expected to preach twice on a Sunday, and teach once mid-week at a Bible study, he would burn out in six months. Well, my response to that is, first, how do you know that would happen, and, second, if that is the case then perhaps you are not cut out for, or called to, ministry.
All through the years I spent in pastoral ministry, my expectation – even desire – was to preach twice almost every Sunday of the year, apart from holidays, of course, and take a mid-week Bible study. For some years I did that on top of lecturing at Bible College. That’s not a boast it’s simply what I considered, and still consider, to be the norm. That is the bread and butter of pastoral ministry.
I want to suggest there are at least two reasons behind this trend. First, the way preachers are being prepared. One of the encouraging developments in recent years is the apprenticeship schemes that a number of churches, particularly larger ones, are providing to give young men the opportunity to be trained and mentored in a local church setting. It’s a great model, but what is happening – and I know this first-hand – is that because they are usually in a large church setting they are only getting to preach once or twice a month perhaps, and are sometimes actually being told by their mentors not to preach more often and not to preach more than once on a Sunday when invited to do so, because that would be unrealistic and unsustainable.
In other words, men are not being properly prepared for the real world where the vast majority of churches are too small to support more than one Pastor and where the expectation will be that the Pastor will preach twice on a Sunday, most Sundays of the year.
But secondly, and perhaps most worryingly of all, so many of these younger men that I have spoken to or heard of simply don’t have a passion or burden for preaching. It is just something that is part of pastoral life and ministry.
I remember when I was beginning to preach – some 50 years ago now – and then training for ministry, I relished every opportunity to open up the Scriptures to a congregation, large or small, and couldn’t wait until the next opportunity came around. If a church that was considering me as their Pastor had said that they only expected me to preach once a week, I would have turned them down.
Even now, having just stood down from pastoral ministry but doing itinerant preaching, I look at blank spaces in my diary with some sadness, to be honest. All of this is not because I like the sound of my own voice or have a view of myself that delights in the prominence that being a preacher gives; it’s because, like Jeremiah of old, there is a perpetual fire burning in my bones.
If I say, “I will not mention him,
(Jeremiah 20:9)
or speak any more in his name,”
there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.
If God calls someone to be preacher, he puts this fire in their bones, this burden on their heart. Oh, certainly, there is a sense of nervousness and trepidation every time I prepare to preach or enter the pulpit; but there is also this sense of compulsion and constraint. I have a passion and burden to preach, because God made me a preacher. I would maintain that if a man does not have that he is not called to preach. and if God does not call you to be a preacher, then whatever you do, don’t be a preacher.