A useful little article
can be read here.
Of course, this goes far beyond all our grumbling about this that and the other at church.
It addresses the Great Evangelical Cult of the Personality, too. When I was a student towards the end of the last century it was bad. Now it is SO MUCH WORSE. Spectacular and publicised scandals involving prominent evangelical heros have taught us nothing. Bof !
After reading Tony Payne's little post I thought "Yes, and it's not about me, stupid, either."
I may post up some of my reflections. Here's one, for a start.
Preaching is not about what I really want to say, it's about what the hearer needs to hear from God's word about Christ.
What I want to say doesn't matter a peanut. Utterly irrelevant. Couldn't matter less, - well, except in that it helps a great deal if I want to say what God's word says about Christ !
But I am not the important one in the equation. Get out of the way. Or, as so many have so helpfully said "It is impossible to say at one and the same time that Jesus Christ is great and that I am clever."
Here's another :
Discretion.
I don't mean keeping your trap shut. I mean being as unnoticable as it is possible to be. Paul says For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.
A good servant is discreet.
Have you ever been to a wedding or to a restaurant where the service was just great ? Your water jug always seems full. You are never surrounded by dirty plates - somehow they seem to vanish. You next course arrives while you're in mid-conversation and you aren't sure how it got there. You never have to look around to try to find the waiter, but you never really notice them either. That's good service.
I remember an office end-of-project meal once in the "Old Orleans", some time in the 1980s ! We had a good time together, and so did our waiter, Howard. He told us jokes. He came and sat down with us. We found this behaviour odd and unwelcome. Some of us were not at all amused. Some tried to explain simply, "Howard, you are forgetting that we have paid to eat here and you are paid to serve us..." Some were actually rude to him. But no, nothing worked, Howard was there to stay. That was not good service.
I have friends who have served the Queen at London and at Windsor. One had the task of tidying the Queen's sitting-room. You wait till she leaves the room then you rush in, sort the room out and rush out again. The goal is that the room becomes tidy with no hint of human intervention. Another friend's job was sometimes to hover in the sitting-room until a member of the Royal Family needed something - then rush off (imperceptibly) to fetch it, then again to disappear into the background.
Not us, eh ! We need to be noticed, recognised, mentioned in despatches, praised, thought highly of, fussed over.
And it's me I am talking to !
Bof ! Bunch of prima donnas, the lot of us !
Of course, this goes far beyond all our grumbling about this that and the other at church.
It addresses the Great Evangelical Cult of the Personality, too. When I was a student towards the end of the last century it was bad. Now it is SO MUCH WORSE. Spectacular and publicised scandals involving prominent evangelical heros have taught us nothing. Bof !
After reading Tony Payne's little post I thought "Yes, and it's not about me, stupid, either."
I may post up some of my reflections. Here's one, for a start.
Preaching is not about what I really want to say, it's about what the hearer needs to hear from God's word about Christ.
What I want to say doesn't matter a peanut. Utterly irrelevant. Couldn't matter less, - well, except in that it helps a great deal if I want to say what God's word says about Christ !
But I am not the important one in the equation. Get out of the way. Or, as so many have so helpfully said "It is impossible to say at one and the same time that Jesus Christ is great and that I am clever."
Here's another :
Discretion.
I don't mean keeping your trap shut. I mean being as unnoticable as it is possible to be. Paul says For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.
A good servant is discreet.
Have you ever been to a wedding or to a restaurant where the service was just great ? Your water jug always seems full. You are never surrounded by dirty plates - somehow they seem to vanish. You next course arrives while you're in mid-conversation and you aren't sure how it got there. You never have to look around to try to find the waiter, but you never really notice them either. That's good service.
I remember an office end-of-project meal once in the "Old Orleans", some time in the 1980s ! We had a good time together, and so did our waiter, Howard. He told us jokes. He came and sat down with us. We found this behaviour odd and unwelcome. Some of us were not at all amused. Some tried to explain simply, "Howard, you are forgetting that we have paid to eat here and you are paid to serve us..." Some were actually rude to him. But no, nothing worked, Howard was there to stay. That was not good service.
I have friends who have served the Queen at London and at Windsor. One had the task of tidying the Queen's sitting-room. You wait till she leaves the room then you rush in, sort the room out and rush out again. The goal is that the room becomes tidy with no hint of human intervention. Another friend's job was sometimes to hover in the sitting-room until a member of the Royal Family needed something - then rush off (imperceptibly) to fetch it, then again to disappear into the background.
Not us, eh ! We need to be noticed, recognised, mentioned in despatches, praised, thought highly of, fussed over.
And it's me I am talking to !
Bof ! Bunch of prima donnas, the lot of us !
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