Review: The Archer and the Arrow

Many years ago, I remember attending a service at All Soul’s, Langham Place, where the preacher was Richard Bewes. I had been ordained about six years at the time, had heard many sermons and had preached even more. But I was aware that evening of being on the receiving end of something special.

“I don’t how he is achieving what he is doing,” I thought to myself, “but that’s how I want to do it.”

Those who have heard the preaching of Phillip Jensen may have felt the same, and will therefore be instinctively interested in this attempt by another preacher, Paul Grimmond, to explain how Phillip does what he does so well, namely the exposition of Scripture.

As soon as you put it like that, however, you can appreciate the difficulty of the task. I would find it hard enough to explain to others how I do something. How much more challenging for someone else to explain it!

Those who have heard Phillip preach and teach, moreover, will appreciate that this is not just a matter of picking up a few hints and tips about techniques of presentation and preparation. Indeed, Grimmond’s own introduction cautions against the idea that the book might contain “five simple steps to preaching like Phillip.”

It is best, therefore, to approach this book simply as a ‘primer on preaching’ — which happens to have Phillip Jensen’s name on the cover and some of his input in the contents. If you are new to preaching, however, or even if you have been preaching for some time, you will undoubtedly come away the better for having read it. Its focus is on the basics, but those basics are also the fundamentals, and like piano scales or times-tables, they are things we need to get right if we are to move on constructively, and they are things we may need to revisit if we have become rusty or lazy.

The book takes its title, and its structure, from an analogy: comparing the sermon to an arrow. The word of the gospel is the arrowhead, the exegesis of Scripture forms the shaft, which carries the head to the target, and the feathers represent the whole of our theology which guides our preaching and its application.

The analogy is helpful, but it is important also to understand what the authors mean by these ‘parts’ and how they see them contributing to the overall task of preaching.

The ‘gospel’ arrowhead, for example, is not simply the repetition of the point that Christ died on the cross for our sins and we need to repent and get right with God. Indeed, one of the most helpful parts of the book, in my view, was the explanation that the gospel is every aspect of revelation when it is understood and presented in relation to Jesus. Every sermon, therefore, ought to be a ‘gospel’ sermon, from whatever part of the Bible the preacher’s material is drawn.

It is encouraging, also, to see so much emphasis on theology — something which English evangelicals have for a long time treated as if it were almost a dirty word. (The same might be said, incidentally, of ‘good works’!)

Many of those who so admired Phillip on his first visits to these shores overlooked the fact that Sydney clergy were required to spend not just three but four years in full-time theological education before being ordained, and that these years were spent in the library and the study, not in ‘student ministry’ on the nearby university campus. One reason for the paucity of English evangelical preaching in the second half of the twentieth century is undoubtedly that so few preachers had an undergirding theology, or even much grasp of the biblical languages.

But the book is equally emphatic that preaching is no mere academic exercise. Rather, it is part of our spiritual struggle, and the primary quality it calls for from the preacher is not a love of study or exposition, but the love of God and of those whom God has called the preacher to serve through his preaching.

The Archer and the Arrow is not the last word on preaching. But it will benefit anyone who is just embarking on a preaching ministry and many who have been preaching for years. If this is you, then buy it or borrow it, and make sure that you apply it.

John Richardson
9 January 2011

The Archer and the Arrow: Preaching the Very Words of God, by Phillip D Jensen and Paul Grimmond (Kingsford: St Matthias Media, 2010), pb, 148 pp, no index

Purchase here.

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Evangelicals, priesthood and elitism

A lot of what I have written about ministry over the last few days has been ‘thinking out loud’ (for the last posting, see here) — and whilst I don’t think I’m at the end of the trail, I do think I’ve reached something of a personal milestone.

Some time ago, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali caused some controversy when he said that there are “virtually two religions” in the Church of England. He was referring, of course, to the long-standing divide between conservatives and liberals, and although this division is endlessly nuanced, in the end it is clearly present.

I have now reached the (interim!) conclusion, however, that we must overlay on top of this divide between “two religions” another divide between ‘two ministries’ — in short, two ‘priesthoods’.

On one side of the divide are those who view the Anglican priesthood as essentially ‘functional’. The priest is someone given public authority to do what any Christian can do, as it were ‘in the privacy of their home’. Ordination therefore confers on the priest nothing other than this authority, and any accompanying prayer for the grace of the Holy Spirit is simply that the priest may perform this function of priesthood properly and effectively — just as we might similarly pray for a newly-arrived teacher or a local mayor. For sake of simplicity, we will call this the ‘priest as presbyter’ model, bearing in mind that the English word ‘priest’ derives from the Greek presbuteros, or ‘elder’.

On the other side are those who take the view that the Anglican priesthood is essentially ‘personal’ (the technical term is ‘ontological’). In ordination, the person being ordained is, as it were, ‘made into’ a priest — he (or she) is no longer quite what they were as a layperson, and is not simply ‘authorized’ by ordination, but is changed and ‘empowered’ by it. The views on this ‘empowerment’ may vary, but the essential characteristic is that priest and laity are in some way separated in what they are, not just in what they do. We will call this simply the ‘priestly’ model, since for most people, the word ‘priest’ conjures up exactly this ‘set apart specialness’ of someone different from the layperson.

Now of course, there are nuances also to these distinctions. There are many jobs, for example, in which it is hard to separate the office from the person. A policeman, for example, is always a member of the police at all hours of the day or night, whether on duty or not. Again, a fortunate person may find themselves in a job for which they were, in a sense, ‘made’ — such as the skilled teacher or compassionate carer. The clergy are very fortunate in often being able to find their niche in this way.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the two views are clearly distinguishable. And the important thing is that they overlap the other distinction between liberal and conservative.

In particular, there are traditionalist priests and liberal priests — both sure of their ‘separateness’ and of the fundamental importance of their own ordination to their relationship with God, with the Church and with the world, but both (as Nazir-Ali observed) operating with entirely different theological assumptions at almost every other level. Importantly, this overlap also includes ‘evangelical priests’, who, for example, see themselves having a singular importance in relation to the sacraments, not simply a particular role.

One finds rather less overlap between traditionalist and liberal presbyters. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually encountered the latter. On the contrary, the insistence on using the actual term ‘presbyter’ is something I have only found in the most ‘straight’ of strait-laced evangelicals. However, there are undoubtedly liberal Anglican priests for whom what they do outside the framework of liturgy and church is a fundamental expression of their ‘priesthood’ — as theologically important to them as celebrating the sacraments.

To repeat: the key point is that the ‘priesthoods’ overlap, rather than simply distinguish, the theologies.

The recognition of these two ‘priesthood’ models is important, however, for two pressing reasons. The first is that it directly affects whom we will admit to the priesthood and on what basis. The second is that it directly affects what we expect this person to do, and therefore how we will train and equip them.

Now the problem as I see it at the moment is this: the Church of England desperately needs, and indeed is increasingly demanding of its ministers, a predominantly ‘functional’, ‘presbyteral’, approach to ministry. However, it is deeply committed to the personal, ‘priestly’, model of ministry. We are thus calling people on the basis of their ‘personal’ characteristics, and training them to function accordingly, whilst what we need is predominantly ‘functional’ ministers, completely unlike what has gone before, enabling others to share their ‘presbyterate’.

The final point I want to make at this stage, however, is that for all evangelicals our whole practice of ministry is infused with the ‘image’ of the personal priest. The result is that even whilst we may decry the ‘sacramentalism’ of the  ‘priestly’ model, we imbue the  ‘presbyterial’ model with an almost unconscious elitism! Later, when there is a bit more time, I want to post on the implications of this for Anglican ministry.

John Richardson
1 March 2010

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Is the Diocese of Chelmsford Christian?

I have just been having a quick read through the Dioceses’s Statement of Needs, which has been prepared as part of the process of looking for a new bishop. This process is something in which I’ve already taken a serious interest, following the failure to give sufficient notification to clergy and church members to encourage their contributions. A ‘public consultation’ at which just one person turns up has clearly failed to hit the right publicity buttons.

Nevertheless, we have been assured that everyone’s views, including those of more conservative and evangelical groupings, have been heard and represented. Reading through the Statement of Needs, however, far from being reassured I find myself convinced that something is seriously adrift, which even the extended consultation period could not rectify.

Some of the statistical material is bad enough. We are now in a situation where fewer than 2% of the population of East London and Essex attends an Anglican church (p8 —interestingly about the same percentage of the population as are Hindus). Perhaps not surprisingly, Chelmsford also has one of the smallest levels of church attendance per stipendiary minister —just 116 (p8). Furthermore, between 2004 and 2008, the Normal Sunday Attendance in the Diocese fell from 28,180 to 27,236 —over 3%. Just as seriously, the electoral roll figures declined by almost 10% in the same period.

Such problems, however, are not new. Neither need they be insuperable, provided the church applies itself to mission. The real difficulty I had, however, was discerning in this Statement a truly Christian understanding of that mission.

Take, as a starting point, this from the ‘vision statement’, reproduced on the front of the document:

Our Passion: Our Passion is Jesus — Proclaiming and living out God’s love for all people.

Our Aspiration: To be a Transforming Presence in every Community, Open and Welcoming to all, and Serving all.

The idea that Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love is, of course, entirely biblical: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this,” wrote the Apostle Paul: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). But it is hard to be sure that this is what the Statement of Needs has in mind when it talks about ‘proclaiming and living out God’s love’.

In particular, we may ask what precisely is understood by the notion of ‘transformation’ behind the ‘Aspiration’ to be “a Transforming Presence in every Community”. Who, or what is being transformed, in what way, and how, if at all, does this come back to God saving us from his wrath and reconciling his enemies to himself through the death of his son (Rom 5:9-10)? One may search through the entire document and find no mention of the words ‘salvation’, ‘saved’ or ‘saving’. Indeed, there is seemingly no mention of the cross or Christ’s death at all. (Nor, incidentally, is there any mention of ‘Bible’, and there are only two mentions of ‘Scripture’.)

There is, admittedly, a great deal about mission. But it is couched in terms which, whilst making much of ‘God’s mission in the world’, make it hard to see what is precisely the nature of that mission in relation to what Christ has done. Thus at one point we read,

The Scriptural record reveals to us that God’s mission in Christ creates a new human community as witness to God’s redeeming purpose for all creation. That new community — the church born and nurtured in the risen life of Jesus Christ — is called to be the servant of the mission of God. (p 22, ‘Deanery Vision’ template)

But what, exactly, is the ‘mission of God’ and what, precisely, are we supposed to be doing about it? That, it seems, is open to interpretation.

I am reminded of the diocesan gathering at which the words of Stuart Townend and Keith Getty’s In Christ Alone were arbitrarily (and illegally, in violation of copyright) altered from saying that on the cross “the wrath of God was satisfied” to “the word of God was satisfied”. The explanation offered when this was queried was that many clergy in the diocese would be unable to go along with the first version. Quite so.

Thus when it comes to mission, the diocesan Statement of Needs seems to have little to say about God’s work in reconciling the world to himself through the death of his son in the light of coming judgement (indeed, words like ‘reconcile’, ‘reconciling’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘judge’, ‘judging’, ‘judgement’ are also entirely absent), and focuses instead on the church joining, as it were, with God in transforming the world in which we now live, so that it will express in the present what its final state will be in the future. In expressing their own commitment, the Bishops of the diocese thus state,

Jesus ministry was centred on the now and not yet of the Kingdom of God. This included attention to the seemingly least important in the present age, eg children and the poor. A Kingdom focus will expand our horizons beyond the church to embrace all the institutions and people of our communities as the focus of God’s mission.

But what is that mission? They continue,

In keeping with the example of Jesus, our mission and ministry needs to be contextually relevant and self-giving as we seek to demonstrate what it means to be fully human and whole. We are called to serve our communities as they live through enormous cultural and social change. This applies on the grand scale of community regeneration as well as the pastoral care of individuals. We are called to find ways to live a holistic lifestyle in a complex mix of cultural expectations.

The tragedy is not only that this is unclear but that it is scarcely discernibly Christian. Somewhere in it there may be buried St Paul’s affirmation to the Corinthian Christians,

Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures ...

Perhaps —but one cannot help feeling it is buried very deeply indeed. Of course, a biblical gloss can be put on what is contained in the Statement of Needs. It would be an even more remarkable document if one could not. Yet it is precisely a gloss —it is not what the Statement itself sets out to declare with clarity and conviction. And here is the worry, for if the next Bishop is chosen to match the understanding set out in the Statement, then he himself will hardly need to be a man of clarity and conviction.

Revd John P Richardson
1 October 2009

 Bible quotations ©The Holy Bible New International Version 1996, c1984 Grand Rapids: Zondervan

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