Preaching, Not Preening

“If we love them, our objective will not be to impress them with our learning but to help them with theirs . . .J.C. Ryle, formerly Bishop of Liverpool, has asserted that one of the secrets of the evangelistic revival in eighteenth century England was that its leaders preached simply. ‘To attain this’ he wrote,’they were not ashamed to crucify their style, and to sacrifice their reputation for learning . . . . They carried out the maxim of Augustine: ‘A wooden key is not so beautiful as a golden one, but if it can open the door when the golden one cannot, it is far more useful’. In order to enforce this truth Bishop Ryle quotes several other Christian leaders. Luther said, ‘No one can be a good preacher to the people who is not willing to preach in a manner that seems childish and vulgar to some’. Again, ‘To make easy things hard,’ said James Ussher, seventeenth century Archbishop of Armagh, ‘is every man’s work; but to make hard things easy is the work of a great preacher’. John Wesley wrote in his preface to a volume of sermons, ‘I design plain truth for plain people . . . I labour to avoid all words which are not easy to be understood . . .’ And William Grimshaw deliberately preached his sermons in the village church of Haworth in what he used to term ‘market language’. (John Stott, The Preacher’s Portrait, pp. 91-92).