Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Council Estate Christians 18: Good vs Bad Expository Preaching

I previously wrote a defense for expository preaching.

I would however like to clarify that this expository preaching does still need to be good.

I don't agree with people who think expository preaching is no good for council estates - BUT I do think that some expository preaching needs to be better, and I wonder if some people who are down on expository preaching, have heard bad examples?

Particular areas in which I feel expository preaching could improve for council estates is:

1. More verse by verse teaching
2. More anchoring in the text (showing points directly from the Bible text itself)
3. More down to earth, real life applications
4. Less waffling

The 1st 2 are mainly methodological, and can easily be adopted.
The last 2 depend on how much time a pastor has to prepare. I know that the less time I have to work on a sermon, the worse I do with these points.

So lets pray that we'd be better preachers, and see better preachers.

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Council Estate Christians 17: Reading books 2

I wrote a while back about reading books here.

Today on Al Mohler's blog I read an interesting post on the stress relieving effect of reading. You can find it here. The info is from the University of Sussex, but I know that Al Mohler is one of the most prolific readers around (N.B BLATANT NAME DROP HERE! Me and Dayper went to his personal library last year and can testify to this!).

My question is this:
If Christians keep on assuming that council estate Christians cannot read, and if they never encourage council estate Christians to read - then will we end up living more stressful lives than we would if people encouraged us to read?