Men for Ministry

Taking The Table - Jim McBratney

2010-03-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

Leading Worship - Tom Mclaughlin

2010-03-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

Northern Region Conference

2009-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

- Saturday 10 Oct 2009 -

Guest Speaker: Pastor Victor Maxwell

2009-09-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

MEN FOR MINISTRY CONFERENCE
SATURDAY, 28 FEBRUARY AT 10AM IN BAPTIST CENTRE, MOIRA

SPEAKERS: DR GARETH CROSSLEY + PASTOR DEREK HUTCHINSON

Dr Gareth Crossley has been a minister of the gospel for over 40 years, serving 24 years in the pastorate of West Park Church, Wolverhampton. Training men for church leadership (full-time gospel ministry, eldership etc.) has been a major part of his work. His most recent book "Growing Church Leaders" was published this year. He is currently involved in training church leaders in the UK, Kenya, India and the Middle East.

Pastor Derek Hutchinson is a native of Londonderry. He trained initially as an economist. However in 1976 he felt the call of God to the ministry and entered the Irish Baptist College where he completed a BD degree. Following this in 1979 he became assistant in the Hamilton Road church in Bangor before moving to become the first pastor of the newly formed Ballycrochan Baptist Church in 1983. Here he remianed until he felt the call of God to Letterkenny in 1993. It was in 2005 that he again moved to Larkhill, Scotland where he remains to this time.

Men for Ministry Interview Series: Phil Arthur

2009-09-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

Could you tell us a little about your family background?

I was brought up in the North East of England in the heartland of the Durham coalfield. I was born in 1952 in Sunderland, which was then proud to call itself the biggest ship-building town in the world. There were still something like half a dozen working shipyards along the banks of the River Wear at that time. I was only a few months old however when my parents moved a few miles South to my father’s birth-place, a small colliery town known as Seaham Harbour. He spent most of his working life at the Vane Tempest colliery. Like the other Seaham pits, this had, before nationalisation, belonged to the Londonderry Coal Company. Ulster folk may not know this, but Durham coal made the fortunes of successive Marquesses of Londonderry. There I stayed until my parents moved to Sunderland when I was ready to start my schooling, perhaps sensing that the educational opportunities for the first-born son would be greater in the large port. It turned out to be a wise decision on their part as in due course, although like most working class boys, I grew up on a council estate, I went to a good school and was able to pass the dreaded “eleven plus” and finally went to Bede Grammar School for Boys, named after our regional saint.

I could not say that I had a Christian upbringing. Although Mam and Dad attended at Brethren Meeting at the time of the wedding and for some moths thereafter, the move to Sunderland broke the pattern of their church attendance. I was too young to be fully aware of such things at the time, but their second son, my brother Stephen, was born with severe brain damage and I think this stark providence and the trials that came with it also proved difficult for them. I can recall a moral and decent upbringing. My father was hard-working, decent and courageous and would rather have starved than stolen. He was pathologically incapable of telling a lie. In his eyes, it was something that Englishmen just did not do. He was also steeped in the camaraderie of his mining heritage, loved the dialect of his boyhood and was a great Dad. I was sometimes sent to Sunday School at a local Mission Hall and like English kids of my generation benefitted from the fact that school RE syllabuses actually taught us huge swathes of both Old and New Testaments. Nevertheless, I did not attend an actual Church service of any description until I was eleven years old.

When and How Did You Come to Faith in Christ?

At age eleven, as the only boy at the bus stop in our council estate waiting for the bust that would take me to grammar school each week day, the uniform made me mighty conspicuous. Was that why Mam and Dad got a council house exchange to an area nearer the town centre? I’ve often wondered. In short order I made new friends and got involved in both the Scout Troop and the choir at the local Parish Church. I enjoyed Scouting immensely. As a badly co-ordinated youngster who did not have good ball skills growing up in one of England’s football hotbeds it was a relief to find things that I could enjoy and outdoor sports became a passion. Singing as a boy soprano at Matins and Evensong every Sunday for roughly three years also meant that Thomas Cranmer’s superb prose in the Book of Common Prayer was so firmly embedded in my head that it has not entirely left me to this day, though nowadays I am just about the least Anglican Englishman you could find. The church in question was the kind that was called “Low Church”, Protestant without really being Evangelical. I remember the Vicar once getting tearful as he preached on the Saviour’s sufferings in Isaiah 53 but to be honest, I was bemused by this display of emotion.

A number of things came together when I was fourteen. One was that my voice broke. Aside from the loss of pocket money (nine shillings a quarter and half a crown for every wedding) there was not the same incentive to show up at the parish church apart from the monthly church parade for the Scout Troop. Secondly however, concerned at my parents non-attendance, old friends from their Brethren days had contacted an Evangelical Church in the town with a fine history, a certain Bethesda Free Church. I came home from Scouts one night to find one of the Elders paying a call on Mam and Dad and was persuaded to start attending the Saturday night youth club, a boisterous affair where they took over a local school and had the use of their badminton courts, gym, table tennis facilities followed by refreshments and an epilogue. It was not long before my mother and I were both attending the Sunday evening gospel service. In those days, the mid ‘60’s, this was often packed. To hear 300 voices sing “All hail the power of Jesu’s name” to “Diadem” was enough to make the hair stand on the back of your neck. After six months or so, as I also became steadily integrated into the youth group and incidentally felt increasingly convicted of sin under the preaching of the then pastor, Rev. David T. Jones, I “went forward” one evening when a visiting preacher, Jim Osman, from a nearby former mining community called Shiney Row was the preacher.

Loads of us “went forward” in those days. I look back with mixed feelings on the fact that I did so then (it was in February 1966). Sadly, I think that it confuses two great and linked inward realities, namely “repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21) with an outward act that was originally conceived of on the American frontier in the early 19^th century and which became fashionable in Britain from the mid 19^th century onwards. Is everyone who is “decisioned” actually converted? In retrospect, I think that I probably was but equally, I think that I had problems to do with assurance of salvation for some time because my focus was all on what I had done that night in 1966 instead of on what Christ had done for me at Calvary and it was only with the passage of some years that my faith became secure and settled. Reading Lloyd-Jones volume on Romans 5 titled “Assurance” was itself an enormous help to me in that area.

As I look back on evangelical life in the 1960’s, I recall two tendencies that troubled me at the time, though as a teenager I was not well placed to react to them. The first was a kind of nervous anti-intellectualism, a sort of defiant “know-nothingism”. I think on reflection that this stemmed from the loss of confidence that ensued within the Evangelical movement when Darwinism first emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. It impinged on me, a bright grammar school boy, admittedly from a decidedly blue collar background, as a mentality that was inherently distrustful of the idea of sending young people to college, a course of action that was bound to unravel their faith. I can remember the old timers misapplying scripture, “Philip son, the world by wisdom knew not God”. Secondly, these were the early days of charismatic renewal. Many of my contemporaries bought into the idea that you could only live a power packed life, a life that would count for God, if you experienced the second blessing and were endowed with the usual package of gifts, tongues, prophecies and the like. I remember being distinctly unsure of this agenda without quite knowing why. In the autumn of 1970 I went up to Queens’ College at Cambridge to read History and opted to read early modern History simply because, as I thought, it would introduce me to the period immediately before the modern History I had studied at A Level. Looking back, I see the hand of God in all this as it gave me three years prolonged exposure to the Reformation. Among other things it gave me heroes that I could respect. Luther and Calvin and others knew what an intellect was for: it was to be used to the utmost for the glory of God. It was also clear that the Christian leaders of the sixteenth century knew nothing of the second blessing theology that was being urged on the churches in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s yet their lives had counted for God. I found that an enormous relief!

When did you feel the call into full-time service?

By the late 1970’s and newly married (to Barbara in 1976) I was youth leader in a newly planted Reformed Baptist Church, Sunderland Free Church. I had just begun to cut my teeth as a preacher, filling in when the pastor was away on holiday and accepting occasional engagements in small local churches, mostly Independent Methodist Churches dotted around the colliery communities in the North East. I was also teaching history in a comprehensive school in a new town called Peterlee only a few miles south of Sunderland. I can honestly say that I loved my teaching career. I was working in a subject area that I had a natural affinity for and still do and was teaching youngsters from the Durham coalfield. I was among my own kind and was glad to be so. At the same time, little by little, I found that my services as an occasional preacher were in increasing demand and friends sometimes expressed the thought that I ought to be “in it full time”. At first however, I simply wanted to increase my effectiveness as an occasional preacher. At this time, before any of our sons were born (we have three, now all grown up), Barbara and I used to help out at the children’s camps run by the Evangelical Movement of Wales. One year while at a camp at their HQ at Bryntirion near Bridgend, I learned that the movement runs a four year ministers’ training course by correspondence with residential weeks in summer and at Easter. I was still thinking merely of sharpening my abilities as a lay preacher, wanting to avoid the well-known accusation “ten thousand, thousand are their texts but all their sermons one” so I was somewhat taken aback when I learned that the movement would only admit students who sensed a clear call to the full-time ministry. This drove me to prayer and careful consideration and it was another two years before I applied to join the course in 1981, completing it in 1985.

By this time I had moved on from the comprehensive school and was lecturing at a tertiary college, still in Peterlee. Had it been left up to me, I would have never considered moving outside the North East. In any case, by this time our church in Sunderland was without a pastor and it was important for me to stay there for a time to help provide stability. Nevertheless, I had come to the attention of a small, newly planted Reformed Baptist Church in the North West in the historic city of Lancaster, just south of the English Lake District. I was called to be their first pastor in 1988 and by God’s grace I have been there ever since. Without any conscious effort and certainly without any virtue on my part it has become a long pastorate. During that time we have planted a daughter church in Ulverston, a courageous venture for a church which is not itself all that large.

Please explain how you see the North of England spiritually.

Thinking firstly of geographical coverage of gospel witness, this is an extremely difficult question to answer. In the first place, it is a big region and this makes generalisation very difficult. There is no one “North”. As a son of County Durham, privileged to spend three years at a Cambridge that was then still a bastion of the English class system I found it remarkably tiresome that the products of the public school system immediately assumed that you would follow Rugby League and punctuate your speech with “Eeh bah gum!” It might be helpful, but even then, only up to a point, to think in terms of four regions: Yorkshire on one side of the Pennines and Lancashire and Cheshire on the other and then further North, the recently created county of Cumbria that roughly corresponds to the Lake district just south of the Scottish border on the West and over to the East, the old counties of Northumberland and Durham that make up the North East. The problem is that each of these mini regions is far from monochrome in terms of culture, dialect variation and fierce parochialism. The usual tribalism that goes with loyalty to one’s football team is another factor. Sunderland and Newcastle for instance are only twelve miles apart and the accents are almost indistinguishable to anyone except a local but the mutual antipathy goes right back to the fact that they took opposite sides in the Civil War. Having made that point, if I were to avoid any kind of denominational or party labels for the time being, the coverage of the whole North of England by churches that value systematic expository preaching is distinctly patchy. Some areas are very well served, such as the old Yorkshire woollen towns and Lancashire south of the Ribble whereas other areas are much less well covered, such as rural Northumberland and most of the Lake District.

If you had asked me this question ten years ago I would have noted two parallel tendencies. On the one hand I think you could have pointed to the near collapse of the mainline denominations at least in terms of their Evangelical credibility. This deserves a paper in its own right of course and each one differs from the others because of complex factors that have developed over a long period of time but to risk a very broad generalisation, bodies like the Church of England, United Reformed Church, Baptist Union and Methodist Church would each have an Evangelical wing that would vary in strength and size from one denomination to another. Equally they would all have a liberal wing too and this wing would often control the power structures of the denomination in question. Over against that, smaller groupings like the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches and the Grace Baptists are much more rigorous in their Evangelical identity and are often explicitly Reformed. These have often seen new churches planted over the last three decades and pastors called where no pastors could be supported before.

One new development and it has only emerged in the last decade or so, is the rise of a number of regional gospel partnerships. To be fair this is a nationwide phenomenon. A number of them exist in the South of England too. To the best of my knowledge, there are three in the North, one in the North East, one in Yorkshire and the other in my region, stretching all the way from Cheshire to the Scottish border and even taking in a number of churches in North Wales. These organisations are essentially alliances of local churches that cut across denominational lines and in theory at least it means that Anglican evangelicals frustrated by the compromises of liberals within their denomination over, inter alia, homosexual ordination, can join up with free churches in plans to train apprentices, plant churches and engage in other joint ventures. How far the North West partnership is typical of others throughout the country I cannot tell but it has already developed a distinctive ethos with its commitment to the Cornhill training course and the impression that it works hand in glove with UCCF. So far at least, all of its church planting schemes have taken place in university cities. A good proportion of its churches would have a commitment to a Reformed view of soteriology, though I am not convinced that this would be true of all of them and I am by no means convinced that all would have Reformed views of worship. So far, in the North West at least, a preponderance of churches that have signed up for the regional partnership are Anglican though I am given to understand that this is not the case in every region of the country or even of each part of Northern England.

It is probably too early to tell how things will shake down but the rise of the regional gospel partnerships is already forcing a rethink of the issue of Anglican and Free Church relationships after the disagreement that arose between Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott at the National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1966. Free Church participation in these partnerships means that in practice many churches in the constituency that up until recently believed that evangelical unity would be best served by insisting that evangelicals in mixed denominations should leave them have changed their stance, sometimes overtly so, sometimes without realising it. This may or may not be a positive development; only time will tell and opinions will vary across the spectrum. It is certainly a very significant one.

What do you think are the greatest struggles men in the ministry have to face today?

Of course we face many struggles on many levels and I wonder whether this is partly why there is something of a crisis in recruitment in the ministry at present. Even so, I am not sure that the “greatest” struggles are any different to the ones that our ancestors faced. Richard Baxter in 17^th century England or Thomas Boston in 18^th century Scotland did not have to face the telephone, answer thirty e-mails or worry about such things as post-modernism or whether the emerging church is the new, accessible face of authentic Christianity or a sell-out to the spirit of the age. They did understand however that a minister’s worst enemies are what Isaac Watts called “my inward foes”. Given that one sin can undo a ministry I wish I feared Satan and temptation far more than I actually do. Human nature is complex and I wish that I feared my own slippery heart far more than I actually do. If the Bible actually tells the truth about the human heart, namely that it “is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer 17:9), so much so that no one can fathom it, then I will never entirely be able to trust my own motives this side of heaven. I wish that I had quelled self-love and the innate tendency for self-promotion and self-seeking, even self-worship far more than I have. Given that I serve someone who loved me and gave himself for me, I wish that my service for him was more consistent, more hard-working and more characterised by the spirit of joyful sacrifice. As I get older I find that I can do less. That is simply a natural consequence of the ageing process. Well, over against that, there is something within me that wants to react as Spurgeon once did to some doctor’s advice: “They tell me that I shall wear out my constitution. If I had ten constitutions I would gladly wear them all out for Jesus Christ.” My longing is that since I cannot now accomplish as much in a week or a month as I could ten years ago, the Lord might grant me to do what little I can with more of his blessing upon it.

What would you regard as encouraging/discouraging developments in the ethos of churches today?

This is difficult. I could end up sounding like a stereotypical grumpy old man, which would not help anybody, though if it helps my middle-aged street-cred I confess to preferring Townend to Kendrick for the most part. One development that has been apparent in the last couple of decades has been the way that the consumerism that has been a feature of life in Western society at large has affected patterns of evangelical church life. I am not convinced that many modern believers choose the church they attend by making a sober decision based on doctrinal principles: “what do these people believe and teach?” Rather, Christians behave like consumers in the sense that they choose the church on the same basis that they would choose a restaurant or a clothes shop. If it does not provide the service they expect or need, they take their custom elsewhere. They may be customers pursuing slightly different brands in different niche markets but when push comes to shove what often tells you all you need to know is the reasons they give for leaving one church and going to another: “there was nothing there for the kids”, “we didn’t like the worship” (which is often shorthand for “not enough music”) or even, more rarely, a doctrinal quirk of the pastor. In the world of the consumer, choice is sovereign and they vote with their feet.

In similar vein, I fear that pragmatism often wins out over principle when decisions are made about evangelism. The pragmatist is the person who asks himself “what will work, what will get the people in?” It is not necessarily inherently wrong to be asking ourselves such things provided we don’t forget to ask first, “what has God said?” When it comes to the whole issue of public worship this is now an uncomfortable pressure point. Forty years ago Baptist churches in general and indeed most Protestant Christians outside the Anglican tradition worshipped according to what was sometimes unkindly called “the hymn-prayer sandwich”. This had come down to us from Puritan times and was originally a consequence of their attachment to the regulative principle of worship, the belief that nothing ought to be used in the worship of God that does not have his explicit command. This rationale had been largely forgotten and by the time of my boyhood it was largely supposed that public worship was simply a matter of taste. Austere, traditional worship was for austere, traditionally minded people. Pentecostals and charismatics went for something freer because they had that kind of temperament. Personally, I am sorry that most of the discussions I hear about worship seem to centre on the idea of doing what it takes to keep the customer satisfied. Whether something is seeker-sensitive or user-friendly is no doubt important but might be missing an even more important question. Before we ask what the service did for the person in the pew (or the plastic stackable chair) ought we not to ask what it did for the Almighty?

Men for Ministry Interview Series: Dr. Gareth Crossley

2009-09-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

Could you please tell us a little about your own family background?

I was born in Morley, Yorkshire. My father was a train driver; my mother a tailoress. Neither were, or are yet, believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Leaving school at fifteen with one 'O' level, I served a five year apprenticeship in mechanical engineering.

When and how did you come to faith in Christ?

At seventeen I began attending a Methodist Church to befriend a young lady in the choir. At nineteen I questioned a number of people in the Methodist Church seeking to understand the true meaning of Christianity. Though lacking answers I was asked to speak at a midweek meeting and preached my first sermon before I was converted! After nine or ten months searching and enquiry I was pointed in the right direction and gave my life to the Lord.

When did you feel called to full-time service?

At twenty I began training as a local preacher with the Methodist Church. Because of the difficulties I had experienced in discovering the truth about the Lord Jesus, I offered my life to God in order to help others to find him. There was no distinct 'call' as others express it just a willingness to give my life in ministry if that was the Lord's will. On the completion of my five year apprenticeship, I took a twelve month appointment as a lay pastor in the Yorkshire Dales. This was subject to my application for the Methodist Ministry. Having failed all three written examinations for entry it was a surprise to be accepted for the ministry. It seemed evident to me that the Lord had opened the door and I willingly accepted this as his 'call.'

What quick advice would you give to those just beginning to preach in their local church?

Preach Christ, keep to the major doctrines of the faith, love the people: prepare and preach for their benefit not for your own interest, look at the people, keep it simple, keep it short.

Have you any tips on how a person could be helped to evaluate their own preaching?

Self-evaluation is extremely difficult. Find an experienced preacher whom you respect for his gifts, skills and wisdom and ask him to tell you honestly after every sermon.

What reading materials would you personally recommend to those involved in ministry?

The Welwyn Series of commentaries published by Evangelical Press is a useful foundation. Spurgeon's "Commenting on Commentaries" is very helpful for evaluating good books of past generations (many are reprinted by Banner of Truth and other publishers). The book-room at Metropolitan Tabernacle is also a good source since they are careful to sell only sound literature. Ask ministers to recommend commentaries and borrow them before buying them.

Men for Ministry Interview Series: Geoff Thomas

2007-10-12T03:58:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Thomas is Pastor of Alred Place Baptist Church, Aberystwyth, where he has served the Lord for over forty years. His preaching and written ministry are deeply appreciated by many of God's people around the world, and he is no stranger to Northern Ireland, having spoken in a number of contexts over the years. We are very grateful that Pastor Thomas has taken the time be interviewed by 'Men for Ministry' , and we trust that his reflections on the life and work of the preacher will prove a rich blessing to all.

1. Please tell us about your background, and your own calling to serve God through preaching His Word.

I was born in 1938 in Merthyr Tydfil. My Baptist mother had been influenced by her mother’s brother who had been converted in the Welsh revival of 1904 and some time during the first World War through the meetings her uncle led she ‘gave her heart to the Lord Jesus.’ She maintained a sweet love for the Saviour all her life, accompanying all her chores with hymn-singing. She was tender, modest, self-effacing to a degree, wonderfully kind and loving. I am like a mouse before an elephant when measured by her graces. My Congregationalist father (a station-master) came from one of the most dynamic Congregationalist churches in the world a century ago, Bethania, Dowlais. A thousand strong congregation its membership then was overwhelmingly evangelical but its ministers steadily and secretly moved into humanism in the old familiar way, becoming Arminian, bolstering man’s free will as the pivot for every step in religion, abandoning the Old Testament in huge chunks, and soon after such a momentous step of defiance of Jesus’s convictions, they turned against the apostle Paul in the New Testament. So they gave up Jesus’ view of Scripture and Jesus’ greatest spokesman and they imagined they could still be loyal to this living person and not grieve him deeply. The brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God became for them the message of the Christian religion. My father’s sister married a Congregational minister, a follower of Fosdick, and my father’s twin brother became a minister. He did not preach on the apostle Paul for years.

I went with my mother to church (the lamb follows the ewe) and in 1951 we moved to Hengoed where the Tabernacle Baptist church had been erected a hundred yards from our house almost fifty years earlier. It had started as a split away from the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church across the other side of the valley in Maesycwmmer when the 1904 revival affected that church and bifurcated the congregation. It was made impossible for those had ‘entered into the blessing’ to remain in the church and so they resigned and set up Tabernacle half a mile away. Unfortunately they remained linked naively to the Baptist Union and so received into their pulpits the students and ministers who rejected the appallingly pessimistic evaluation of the human condition found in the Bible, one which could be relieved only by the incarnation, righteous life and atonement of the Son of God. Bland universalism and bourgeois ethics became the message of the day disguised under traditional hymns and God words. Such insipid views depended largely on ‘personalities’ to keep the wagons trundling on.

A young minister came to the church in the 1950s who began by earnestly preaching for a decision, but attending the Baptist College in Cardiff he lost his way and ended up an Anglo Catholic ‘Father’ in the Church of Wales. But while he was in his early days he preached for a response and I came to Christ under his ministry in 1954, was then baptized, joined the church and came to the Lord’s Table. The church though shrank and shrank, and last year it was disbanded and the building demolished.

I found fellowship wherever I could, summer camps, and then at university in the I.V.F. In 1958 I heard Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones preach, read Dr Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God, began to take the Banner of Truth magazine, read Whitefield’s Journals, Lloyd-Jones’ Studies in the Sermon on the Mount and J.C.Ryle’s Holiness. By different means – even the local library – God brought these things before me. His hand was upon me. I discovered a growing group of role models, the ‘sons’ of Dr. Lloyd-Jones, some of them my contemporaries at University, and others who were younger Welsh ministers They were a great group whom I lionized, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists. They all left their own mark on me, and so it was not surprising that I preached for the first time in 1959 and thenceforward Sunday after Sunday.

I studied Biblical Studies, Greek and Philosophy at Cardiff University and those evangelical books, magazines, gospel ministers and their preaching kept me. I read one cluster of men, Edward J. Young, Ned Stonehouse, John Murray, Cornelius Van Til and Edmund Clowney, and was aware that they were all teaching at Westminster Seminary. I jumped at the opportunity of attending that school, and it came to me through typical American generosity. I spent three years in Philadelphia and sailed back to Wales three days after graduation to marry the girl back home. It was only during the last months of my course at Seminary that I was assured of a call to preach, though I guess there was nothing else I ever wanted to do or was fit to do. It seemed a huge step to announce that I was going to be a preacher, but the counsels of Edmund P. Clowney, the most approachable, kindly and prayerful of teachers, were crucial in prodding me to come out with the inevitable decision. My wife’s background was almost identical to mine, Welsh Congregational and Baptist, with two of her uncles also ministers, and as liberal as mine had been. We were both brands plucked from the burnt over churches modernism had destroyed.

2. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones famously stated that “the work of preaching is the highest and greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called.” How does this statement match your own view of preaching, and what particular privileges do you feel attach themselves to teaching God’s Word?

There are other great callings; we believe in the priesthood of all believers, that all you do is to be done to the glory of God. For example motherhood is a glorious calling; what would I have become without Mam? But Dr. Lloyd-Jones is defending his own vocation at a juncture in history when preaching is being marginalized. The Established Church sees the sermon as one part of the service, and has elevated the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper to being the climax of worship. The charismatic movement has labeled the singing ‘worship’ and the sermon ‘teaching.’ Modernism has shrunk the sermon to a comment on current affairs and book reviews. Counselling has been elevated as a means of changing people.

Lloyd-Jones saw the sermon as a means of dynamic grace coming to convict, illuminate, educate and convert a sinner. A friend of mine, Easton Howes, during the 1950s and 60s was working in the Westminster City Hall and a Christian colleague would often invite him to a ‘Bible Study’ on a Friday night nearby, but Easton was always busy and anxious to get home, imagining eight or so people sitting around making comments on a passage as not being too scintillating. One night his friend’s persistence was rewarded and Easton went reluctantly along with him. He was taken to Buckingham Gate and into Westminster Chapel where he sat astounded in the midst of a thousand people and heard Dr. Lloyd-Jones preach on Romans. It was a life-transforming experience for him, and he brought his pastor the next week whose ministry was also affected pervasively.

Such changes for the eternal good of multitudes of men and women wrought by Dr. Lloyd-Jones’ ministry and then by thousands of others are the concrete proof of the claim the Doctor makes that “the work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called.” If one is to estimate the credibility of a claim to ‘conversion’ – whether C.S.Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Charles Moore, Charles Colson, Mother Teresa, Jonathan Aiken, Ann Widdecombe and so on - then one must ask what part did Bible preaching have in their conversion.

The preacher can minister to an entire congregation with all the differing needs of that gathering. The word of God opened up and applied to the hearers can come upon them from all 360 degrees. The lines at which it comes running to you make sinners utterly defenseless to resist. This wisdom comes unexpectedly, from whence they least expect such truths to be dealing with them, from passages that seemed, when first announced, remote to their own needs, but by them God worked and elevated and inspired and reassured and directed. Hope was rekindled; conviction was experienced; love was reborn. When I look back to my own peak Christian experiences then so many of them have been when I was under the word of God as it was preached to me and I melted, or again when it was I who was the spokesman and mouthpiece of God, and the congregation was still during the sermon, motionless after the service was over, knowing God was in this place. I have felt after such meetings that saving power was present though I might never hear of any specific individuals converted that day.

3. You have been ministering in Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth for forty-two years. What are the main lessons that you have learned about yourself, the Lord and the task of preaching during that period?

Sometimes I feel the main lessons I have learned about myself are those of my failures, not in terms of the techniques of good preaching, or the principles of hermeneutics and exegesis, or clarifying to people what a passage says and what they should do about it. I can do that fairly professionally, and I would not want to minimize that. Preeminently it is the moral and ethical demands of the ministry that are quite overwhelming. A minister must be without blame, and then one asks, by what standards? The answers the Bible presents take your breath away. Consider these words from Romans chapter twelve, Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honour one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God's people who are in need. Practise hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse . . . Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

That is just one of the ethically stringent passages of the Bible and it tells me how I am to live, day by day. What is required in the beginner Christian is utterly essential in the minister. Any failure in attention to any of those duties is going to reflect on your ministry and weaken the impact of your preaching. You must have known many men whose skills in communication were not strong. Their friends would acknowledge that they were not inspirational preachers, and yet people are converted under their ministry year after year. The basis for this is their Christ-like manner, their sheer consistency of life, their humility and accessibility to the people who listen to them. The more one progresses in grasping the message of the Book the more one is overwhelmed by its demands. Consider the whole sphere of mortification, of plucking out the right eye if it offends, of self denial and cross bearing if one would follow Christ. Consider the requirements of more love for God. Grace started as a trickle of affection for Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Has it ever become a mighty torrent of love for the Godhead? Why not? This is the chief commandment, to love God with all one’s heart and soul and mind and strength. The first of all commandments and as one goes on in the Christian life its sheer centrality and significance seems to become the only thing that matters. Think of it. We are failing in the thing that matters supremely.

Then consider the demands of the personal devotional life of the minister, of his growing deepening relationship with the person of Jesus Christ his Lord and Saviour, of fellowship with the Spirit and communion with God the Father. The apostles gave themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). I can understand the latter duty; that is also my duty all my life and wonderfully delightful it is, but they gave themselves first to prayer. How? How much? What was the relationship between the corporate and the individual seasons of prayer? Did they spend their whole mornings in prayer and the rest of the day teaching and evangelizing? How did they obey the apostolic precept to pray without ceasing? It was clearly important to them, and whereas the details I itch to know are wisely not provided by God the importance of prayer to them was paramount. I am overwhelmed with the feeling that I have never really prayed; that in fact I don’t believe in prayer; that much of my failure as a preacher at so many different levels is due to the pathetic nature of my praying. So at this juncture of my life failure is my companion, but it is not too late for a flame of sacred love to be kindled on the mean altar of my heart.

Or consider again the whole sphere of visitation, pastoral and evangelistic. Have I ever done this adequately? You just need to read d’Aubigne’s observations on John Calvin’s ministry in Geneva: “Observe him in his care of souls, in his visits to the sick, to the stranger, to the magistrates, and to the poor. He ascends to the garret; he is not contented with the city, he traverses the suburbs and recalls the dissolute to their duty. There is no minister whom he does not encourage; no prisoner and martyr whom he does not console. His whole life glorifies the Lord” (Mele D’Auubigne, Let Christ be Magnified, Banner of Truth, 2007, p.45). You read the life of M’Cheyne and you meet this same spirit. How these men were moved by love for others.

The other failures are the more predictable ones, of opening the whole 66 books of the Bible from the pulpit. My own conviction has been that every Christian during the years of his or her earthly pilgrimage should come under the preaching of every part of the Bible. That is the reason God has given it to us. So I have sought to preach on all the Bible, but there are enormously challenges with that view which John Calvin and C.H. Spurgeon seem to have overcome by their different approaches to preaching. The problem comes firstly from the sheer size and proportions of the Bible. There are 847 pages in the Old Testament but just 247 pages to the New Testament (in my version of the Bible). Over three times as much material is in the Old Testament as is in the New. Then there is the different situation faced by most of the Old Testament prophets compared to those the New Testament apostles faced as they took the gospel of Jesus Christ around the eastern Mediterranean basin. Consider the situation Jeremiah was facing; does it mirror the circumstances of my own congregation? The professing people of God then had heard Jeremiah for forty years and still loved their idols more then the prophet and his God. They were facing judgment, destruction and exile. That is not what my congregation is like, and so I hesitate about slowly and painstakingly taking the people through that book Sunday by Sunday for a year or two - or more. It would not be pastorally helpful. But I may not ignore Jeremiah, and so my solution has been to deal with the book for 25 minutes at a time before the time of prayer during our mid-week meeting, with loads of breaks through the year when missionaries come, and some elders lead the service. So steadily we have gone through Jeremiah’s counsels and learned from them over two or three years (with many a break let me repeat). So I am sure Jeremiah’s teaching has never resulted in a compression of spirit under those relentless themes of defiance exposed and idolatry rebuked. Wives are useful barometers and her response has always been positive to those studies in Jeremiah which have recently ended; she is no fawning sycophant where preaching is concerned.

I use Jeremiah as an illustration of the challenge of preaching consecutively through the Old Testament with few role models, extant or historical. Many Old Testament prophets faced similar incomprehension as Jeremiah, and even with the indispensable insights of Vos and the whole developing school of biblical theology their message is often not the message one automatically considers our little European gospel congregations need to be exposed to exhaustively, though hear the message of all the Bible they must. That is why has given it. Maybe if I were the Archbishop of Canterbury facing the follies of Anglicanism I might need to apply energetically and comprehensively Jeremiah and the prophets to those bishops, deans and canons. Or if I were the Pope I would have to declare Jeremiah’s truths exhaustively to that unreformed denomination which he, unfortunately, heads.

The historical books from Joshua to Esther are in length virtually the same size as the New Testament. They lend themselves to far bigger textual units in preaching. There are splendid helps in the commentaries that various evangelical publishing houses steadily provide, but when one turns to the New Testament one must linger over the letters and also the discourses of our Lord because of the compression of truth found in their very prepositions. Dr. Lloyd-Jones’ method of comprehensive thorough studying of Ephesians is a perfect model, and one must resist the attempts to belittle it in favour of glorified Bible studies, in other words, skating over the whole of Ephesians in ten studies, with four of you sharing out chunks of the letter like schoolboys dividing stolen apples.

But to do what I set out to do, preach through all the Bible, is inevitably to end in failure. All ministry ends in failure, of course. The plan and the noble attempt to accomplish it was simply mine; God’s plan for me was different. But I believe it was praiseworthy to try to preach through it all. I have painted myself into a corner, leaving myself the following books unpreached on, Numbers, Deuteronomy, many Psalms, Proverbs, Ezekiel and a few of the minor prophets. Think of it! What ranges of mountains to lead my people across! I will not succeed in preaching on all of those in the brief period that lies before me. No desperate devices, no token preaching on those books, will characterize my last years. I must speak on the one unfailingly fresh theme that brags about my Saviour as much as I am able, and so Luke’s gospel is my swansong I guess balanced by series of Old Testament passages, plus Romans, strangely working my way from the back in chunks of a few chapters at the time (reckoning that the apostolic ethic was needed in the congregation). But there is a romance about preaching; God’s plan is far wiser than mine. I am, even as I write this, waiting on God for some indication as to what I might preach after seven messages on Naaman the leper have been completed on the Sunday before me. A psalm? Habakkuk? The opening chapters of Proverbs look enticing and my son-in-law Gary Brady has done such sterling work on them. We all serve the same heavenly Father who guides all his servants who seek to preach his word.

4. In the Men for Ministry initiative we are blessed to be in contact with a number of men who are just setting out on the path of teaching God’s word. What would you advise them to do before, during and after the act of preaching?

i] Before preaching. Search out for some role models, men in the ministry you admire, whose ministry and life moves you to emulation. Learn from them. You will quickly discover they have feet of clay. They will be colder people, not as smart as you hoped to answer your questions, but they will have insights and advice. Get men in the past to serve this end also, such as Whitefield, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, M’Cheyne, Brainerd, Paton, Carey, Calvin and learn from them all. Lloyd-Jones’ Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, Pink’s Life of Elijah, Watson’s Beatitudes are the kind of books that model interesting popular systematic expository preaching. Even some of James Montgomery Boice’s sermons are useful examples of expository and pastorally responsible preaching, but they do not suit me too well. Go to websites like First Presbyterian, Jackson where you can hear and read the sermons of Derek Thomas and Ligon Duncan. You can also hear the sermons of Joel Beeke and Iain D.Campbell on their websites – find them via Google. This is an extraordinary phenomenon, that at the end of a Sunday in Europe I can hear the morning sermon as it was preached in Heritage Reformed in Grand Rapids. Go to my website and read my sermons.

When I was beginning my ministry the task of preparing two sermons a week was utterly daunting. I had such high standards and little ability and no experience of relentlessly preparing sermons for a congregation, especially two a week plus the mid-week preaching service. The task was overwhelming with many, many falls. How I wish I had had a resource of written sermons to turn to in order to help me. Saul’s armour did not fit David, but Jonathan’s did. Spurgeon’s sermons don’t fit anyone preaching in the world today, but his whole spirit as he approached the work of the pulpit and the congregation, his ideas, application, entreaties and corrections are invaluable. The sermons of T.T.Shields were not my size either, but they helped make Paul Tucker the fascinating preacher he became. I found Al Martin and Donald Macleod invaluable helps in preaching in the 1970s. I preached their sermons and envied their clear outlines and passion in delivery. Such men helped me to build on the Doctor and my Welsh role models to form me. I have also had Iain Murray as my most consistently helpful counsellor, and consider his friendship and advice the most single blessed support. If there is one man whose books I must read as they appear it has to be the writings of Iain Murray. So all that in answer to your first division - before preaching.

ii] During preaching covet an ability to relax the congregation enabling them to sit back and listen carefully and enjoyably to what is to be said to them. I’ve been very struck with that grace as manifest in such men as Ted Donnelly, John Blanchard and David Norman Jones of Tasmania. It comes from a trust in God; a cultivation of that dependence on his enabling to bless the preparation during the proclamation. They have managed to learn to speak humbly and directly to their audience; they are not bullies; they don’t shout, but neither are they perennial smilers (which is just as irritating). They speak interestingly of their theme. They have in their minds a grasp of where this sermon is going and they are determined to take the congregation to that destination. They use judicious illustration, and their humour is safe. I believe that Ted Donnelly is the most excellent sermon illustrator in the UK, and in the USA it has been John Reisinger. I have learned from both of them about illustrating, and from the Puritans from Bunyan and Watson’s illustrations which are quite compressed (and when Owen illustrates, on those rare occasions, those illustrations of his coruscate).

So the ability to settle a congregation down to listen to you during the sermon is the great gift to seek from God. It comes from loving familiarity with your theme, and a concern to communicate it to the people, and a determination to honour the Lord of the Word and the Word of the Lord.

iii] After the preaching? What would I advise? Ernest Reisinger shared this aphorism with me years ago, “It is a sin to preach and not to pray.” Afterwards would be a good time for a group of people to meet, when preaching is over, to pray for God’s blessing on what has been proclaimed, but it is virtually impossible as there are people to welcome, visit with, and also drive home. The preacher longs for men to gather around him after a sermon, especially when he has struggled and found it a barren spiritual exercise, to find then his friends upholding him in thanking God for something they have learned. Alas, it does not happen. After the sermon the preacher is invariably discouraged, especially the older he gets, because he has known some help in exalting Christ and preaching the good news, but there are few sinners present, and those that are there are the familiar people who have been coming for years and remain untouched. Where were the unbelievers? How the preacher needs warm praying after both good and bad sermons, but he is left on his own and he must say, “Sorry, Lord, that I did not do well again.”

5. When you pray for the spread of God’s Word and those who share it in Western Europe, what is the chief burden of your heart?

We long to see gospel churches where the whole counsel of God is loved and obeyed in every city in Eastern and Western Europe. We want such churches especially in every university town, credible New Testament congregations, with word-centred worship, godly leadership, families coming together and unbelievers drawn to hear the truth.

6. One of your lifelong passions has been the reading and promotion of Puritan literature. What can the Puritans teach us today about preaching?

You have to try them for yourself, and do it this way. Get J.I.Packer’s Among God’s Giants and read those essays on various of the Puritans, their stalwart lives, controversies, how they conceived of the ministry, their personal disciplines of godliness and their evangelism. Start with Packer and see what immersion in Puritanism has done for him, in his many helpful books. He has not become a sad archaic caricature of the seventeenth century in his style. He is amongst the most contemporary, bracing and searching of writers today.

Then try some Puritans. What a wealth you have to choose from. Start, of course, with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It is the Westminster Confession of Faith lived out in pastoral theology. Read the debates especially because in those exchanges you will meet the application of truth to the kind of people we are meeting. Then there are the Banner of Truth paperback modern language series of books written by John Owen. There is the paperback on the Holy Spirit, for example, and after you have read that you feel nothing else has ever needed to be written on the third person in the Godhead. The other versions of Owen’s books are just as helpful. Then there is Thomas Brooks, surely one of the most helpful and readable of writers; I took his Precious Remedies from Satan’s Devices and preached a brief series based on that book. I cannot think of a counsellor today who is addressing issues in the church as Brooks does. His newly reset book on personal prayer is called The Secret Key to Heaven and it is the most encouraging book on the disciplines of personal devotion. One lady in the church just gave back to me her read copy saying how helpful she had found it and would I pass it on to someone else who might read it and also find it rich.

What you will find in these books is a God-centredness which is absent from the prevailing ethos of “How to . . .” books that are everywhere today. The Puritans centre on Christ, as Thomas Goodwin said, “If I were to go to heaven and find that Christ was not there, I would leave immediately; for heaven without Christ would be hell to me.” Their books prick our consciences and show us the sinfulness of sin. They magnify the grace of God. They are so thorough in all they deal with; Baxter’s A Christian Directory is 900 pages of fine print divided up into ethics, economics, ecclesiastics and politics. There you will find such counsels as ten directions for helping husbands and wives to live together in quietness and joy. They present to us the sovereignty of God in a living application to all the providences of life, individually and in the church. Their books are full of the hope of heaven.

7. Do you feel there is a place for dedicated and direct evangelistic preaching in regular ministry, or should this be present in all expository ministry from Scripture?

Europe is utterly pagan, and the vestiges of an earlier grace are getting increasingly threadbare. Anti-Christian sentiment is gaining in vitriol. Who is ever going to hint at less evangelistic preaching? No Christian minister will do so, of all people. We will certainly discourage vain repetition of the same narrow understanding of what the gospel is, week by week, as the bleary-eyed young people boringly twiddle their thumbs at this familiar fare and look at their watches waiting for the closing hymn. That is not evangelistic preaching. Ask what are the reasons why people like those teenagers and their friends do not believe, and you will come to a list of a dozen reasons. There you have a dozen themes for your evangelism. Your task is to show the loveliness of Jesus Christ, and that again will give you a dozen messages. I asked Brian Edwards once what special services had he found useful in evangelism, baptismal services, Christmas and Easter messages, meals with a message? He shook his head, “The normal Sunday preaching has been the occasion when God has blessed his word.” Though I had never articulated that conviction I found it mirrored my own experience exactly. How hard it is to crank up a message to become a super-message for a big occasion. The anxiety, and over-effort, and intensity in preaching the sermon usually ruins any hope of it doing good.

Always have saving truth in every message for the stranger present. One particular church secretary would make the announcements on a Sunday and would welcome everyone, occasionally adding, “I see we have some strange faces here today.” We must pray that faces marked by years of vanity and pride will hear of a Saviour wherever in the Bible you are preaching from. Recently after the morning service a man told me that he was bringing to the evening service two men who had not been near a church for twenty years. In the past I have tended to preach the message I have prepared regardless of the arrival of strangers to grace. I came to regret than on some notable occasions when a gang of unbelieving young people suddenly turned up that I failed to preach the message of salvation simply and clearly to them. So on this occasion I radically changed my approach to the sermon and simply declared the gospel. I thought that I overdid it, that the majority of the congregation were very familiar with the way I preach ‘a simple gospel’. The two men listened and I enjoyed talking to them after the sermon. They told the man who had invited them that they thought I was getting at them, and I was. Maybe if I had preached what I had prepared I might have crept up on them from another angle, but I think I would have had other regrets in failing to address them directly. What a challenge preaching is.

As you preach through books and chapters my only plea is that when you come to one of those ‘big texts’ of Scripture that you slow down and give a whole sermon to it – the kind of preaching J.C.Ryle preached so clearly and helpfully in those sermons now gathered in Old Paths and Practical Christianity and especially his perennially blessed book Holiness. Think of Dr. Lloyd-Jones traveling all over the U.K. for a mid-week meeting and consider the themes of his preaching, the texts he preached on and the moving awakening power of his ministry to the nation. That is the kind of sermon I want to preach myself, those that draw men and women to the Lord of glory.

8. What piece of advice has most helped you in your ministry?

i] The climax of Christian worship is the declaration of the word of God. After we have sung his praise and prayed to him then he speaks to us and we are still.

ii] Do everything for double usefulness. The time is short; we are so few; there is much work to do, and so if you can put your sermons on a computer and then on your website they can reach a far greater audience than our small congregations. If you read a new book offer a review of it to a magazine you favour. Offer material from your church newsletter/magazine to magazines in this country and overseas. Bring modern technology to the service of the pulpit.

iii] Do not take your strengths for granted. You may be eloquent and make the assumption that you can stand before a hundred people and preach to them come wind come weather. Do not assume that. Work on your strengths; and hone all your skills; purify and make more Christocentric your mind, and tongue, and man-management skills, and ability to speak to children, and pastor.

iv] Work on one theme throughout your life, but steadily and thoroughly reading, exploring and taking notes, for example, the imputation of Adam’s sin, or the atonement, or the state of man, or the teaching of Jonathan Edwards on a certain theme. Spend time on this subject. You never know whether in the future the church will be divided over this theme and your contribution will not then be immensely helpful.

v] Don’t be a loner; attend the best conferences; put yourself under the best preachers. Talk with brethren in the afternoons, over the meals and at the end of the day in those places. Those occasions are the most profitable at such conferences, I find. The messages are a bonus.

9. What books would you regard as being beneficial and formative for young preachers?

Anything written by Iain Murray, Dr. Lloyd-Jones, J.C.Ryle, John Murray, J. Gresham Machen, J.I. Packer, the commentaries of John Stott, and J. Alec Motyer. From other periods in the history of the church you ought to read, D’Aubigne’s History of the Reformation, Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan, the life of Whitefield by Dallimore, the Journals of Whitefield, the life of Spurgeon in its two volumes, the history of Princeton Seminary in two volumes, and the life of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones by Iain Murray.

For devotional reading nothing can compare to J.C.Ryle’s Holiness, Dr Lloyd-Jones’s Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, and his Sermons on Ephesians chapter two. The book on the Sermon on the Mount will show you the beauty of a righteous life and make you want to live it, and it will also show you what consecutive biblical preaching can achieve.

As for books about preaching you cannot neglect that most superb paperback of Stuart Olyott, Preaching Pure and Simple. You will always be turning back to Dr. Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers. It is bracing, humbling and inspiring. I read John Stott’s book on preaching, I Believe in Preaching (as it was called in the UK), and it made me want to climb the pulpit steps immediately and preach the word. Little booklets by Al Martin on preaching, like his What’s Wrong with Preaching Today, is out of the top drawer, enormously humbling and thrilling. Other books by Dabney and Samuel Miller and Spurgeon’s Lectures to my Students are also helpful.

10. One of the blessings which many Christians have gained from your preaching has been your ability to present the complex and theological aspects of God’s Word in a way which is both lucid and profoundly practical. How can a preacher avoid becoming technical and over-complicated in his delivery of messages?

Is that right? Are you sure you are not muddling me up with someone else? I know I came back from three years at Westminster Seminary full of graduate theology. I had spent the previous six years of my life – those long years from 18 to 24 – with students, that narrow spectrum of age and communication and interest. It was not the most helpful approach to preaching popularly to my fellow countrymen. When I think of the men who never went to a theological college, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, John Blanchard, Iain Murray, and how such men ran faster than all of us in their constant study and assimilation of the theology, church history, dogmatics, biblical exegesis, then I am tempted to denigrate theological training, but I had John Murray and Cornelius Van Til. How can I demean such training?

So I thank God for Princeton under Alexander and Hodge and Machen. I thank God for the Free Church College under Chalmers. I think of the missionaries and pastors who studied in those institutions and the influence they had all over the world. In Mississippi today the P.C.A. presbytery for that state contains about 175 churches and 120 of them are now pastored by graduates of Reformed Seminary. The whole character and ethos of Presbyterianism has been affected by Reformed Seminary.

So I believe in Systematic Theology as a necessary and central discipline in theological training. Today there is Murray, Grudem and Frame whose books are lucid presentations of Christian doctrine. Reymond is also useful, as are many sections of Berkhof. I guess it was Donald Macleod in the seventies and eighties who taught me how to preach on the doctrinal and ethical passages of Scripture. The moral implications of Pauline theology, the attributes of God and the emotional life of our Lord were the sorts of themes which Donald could preach as no one else. I miss hearing his preaching year after year. He refined any ability you say you see in presenting “the complex and theological aspects of God’s word in a way that is both lucid and profoundly practical.” That is a wonderful complement; I wish it were true. I would think my preaching on the opening chapters of Ephesians and Philippians is my attempt to do that, as were also my recent sermons on Imputation. But I use anyone who can help me, recently Spurgeon on Naaman and I.D.Campbell on Imputation; I once saw a title of some sermons of Al Martin, “Achan and his sin” and the Lord buried that title in my mind for thirty years until this year when I preached five messages on that theme. I never heard Al Martin’s expositions, but he once preached a series on ‘The most fearful words any man could every hear,’ “Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” I heard Al Martin preach two sermons on that text in Sandfields, Port Talbot, one Saturday thirty-five years ago. That was the most superb preaching. I can still sense their authority. I seek for that myself, and for deep conviction and tender love for my hearers to preach convicting series of messages on hell regularly. That absence has been another failure. But whether we judge we have attained that higher degree of spirituality, we cannot but preach what Christ said about the eternal state of the impenitent and unbelieving. Our own feelings may never be the touchstone of what we choose to preach on and what we omit. His command to every preacher is to teach whatever the Lord has first spoken. Imagine pleading our own frail feelings as the excuse for not telling the world what will be its judgment!

Men for Ministry Interview Series: Mark Dever

2007-06-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

Mark Dever serves as the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. Since his ordination to the ministry in 1985, Dr. Dever has served on the pastoral staffs of four churches, the second being a church he planted in Massachusetts. Prior to moving to Washington in 1994, Dr. Dever taught for the faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University while serving two years as an associate pastor of Eden Baptist Church.

In an effort to build biblically faithful churches in America, Dr. Dever serves as the executive director for 9Marks (formerly The Center for Church Reform, CCR) in Washington, D.C. 9Marks encourages pastors of local churches look to the Bible for instruction on how to organize and lead their churches.

He very kindly agreed to be interviewed by Men for Ministry, and we trust you will gain insight, help, and inspiration from what he shares:

1. Could you briefly outline your own call to minister God's Word?

From my first weeks as a Christian I subjectively wondered if I should give my life to preaching God’s Word. Almost 20 years later, after getting a few degrees and being very active in churches, I finally decided to give myself to pastoral ministry when in 1994 I became the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

2. What role and function does the Holy Spirit fulfill in the proclamation of God's Word?

The role and function of the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential. He inspired the word, he supervised its inscripturation, he is providentially overseeing its preservation and transmission, and I trust by extension even translations. It is preached only with his aid, and our hearts are turned to believe it only by the Spirit’s work. The Scriptures that He gave by inspiration must be received by his illumination. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, the Bible is utterly useless.

3. One of the main blessings flowing from your own ministry has been your raising the profile and importance of Church health and polity. Do you feel a particular approach to preaching helps to promote the health of a local church?

Yes. Expositional preaching should bring modern individualistic ministers to a more corporate understanding of what it means to follow Christ. This is the understanding we see in Scripture and this is what we should preach.

4. What particular books/authors would you recommend to someone setting out in a ministry of preaching?

John Stott’s I Believe in Preaching, D. M. Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers, J.I. Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God, C.H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, Arnold Dallimore’s biography of George Whitfield, and Jonathan Edwards “Farewell Sermon.”

5. What do you perceive are the main challenges currently facing evangelicalism in the West?

The main challenges currently facing evangelicalism in the West that I can see are a practical rejection of the authority of God’s word even by those who theoretically submit to it; a rejection of the sovereignty of God in favor of the putative sovereignty of man; a caricature, misunderstanding, or rejection of the penal substitution of Christ for sinners; a shallow understanding of conversion as a mere shift of opinions; a worldliness in our evangelism which deceives people about the very nature of the gospel we are hoping to win them to; an individualism that de-centers the congregation from the life of a Christian; and a carelessness of churches in addressing members in unrepentant sin, which causes untold confusion about what it means to be a Christian.

6. Could you briefly outline your own strategies for approaching the study and proclamation of God's Word?

Read the text. Read it in the original if your background and training allows, read multiple translations of the text, note crucial areas of the text or questions you have about the text. Try to answer those questions yourself before you turn to commentators, make an exegetical outline, then make a homiletical outline as close to the exegetical outline as possible. Next, consult commentaries from different eras of history, work to apply the text by deliberately thinking through the applications of the text and how you will preach the gospel in it. Then create the notes or manuscript which you will use.

7. Tell us a little about the new 9 Marks blog 'Church Matters' and what we can hope to find there in coming days.

The new 9Marks blog is a discussion about what the Bible says about church life and implications of that rather than simply best practices (as good as those are in their place).

8. Finally, if you were stranded on a desert island and could bring only three books (in addition to the Bible) and one CD, what would they be?

My choice of CD would be There is a Happy Land which is a recording of the congregation of Capitol Hill Baptist Church singing. It is also a 2 CD set, does that count? (If you gave me a second CD I might go for Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto!) My three books would be, a recent World Almanac, Calvin’s Institutes, and I can’t go on answering this question…it is too cruel to consider…God in his kind providence has never put me in such a situation.

Audio Interview with Rev. David Earnshaw

2007-05-23T11:04:00.001-07:00

The May Assembly week of the Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland took place last week, and proved to be a time of rich blessing to all in attendance. The speaker for the week was Reverend David Earnshaw from Freshbrook Evangelical Church in Swindon. His ministry was marked by a deep sense of God, devotional warmth, and practical application which gave hearers a strong sense of how the teaching of God's Word interprets contemporary culture.

David Earnshaw also kindly agreed to be interviewed by Men for Ministry on issues surrounding preaching, and the needs within evangelicalism in the twenty first century. The interview is conducted by Pastor Andrew Roycroft, a member of the Men for Ministry committee, and lasts for approximately 30 minutes. To listen, please click here, and either allow the file to stream online, or download it as a podcast from the options at the bottom of the page. If you have any difficulties, or would prefer to have this audio resource sent to your postal address on audio CD/MP3 CD then please email us at the address on the sidebar of this site.

We trust that this will be a blessing to you as you listen to one of the Lord's servants share his own heart and experiences. Having been recorded in May in Northern Ireland the sound of hailstones can be heard falling in the background at around the halfway point!!

The Reformed Pastor - Free Audiobook

2007-05-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

The ChristianAudio website are offering Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor as an audiobook completely free of charge for the month of May. This is an excellent, and hugely challenging, resource on the work of ministry and is well worth a read/listen.

Follow this link to go to the Free Downloads page, click on the item and enter the promotional code, and you will be the proud owner of a rich audiobook resource.

Men for Ministry Online Forum Pt.1

2007-05-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

Penetrating Postmodernism
In his recent interview with Men for Ministry we asked Rev. Iain H. Murray his take on postmodernism and preaching. His answer was candid and clear - the first business of preaching is not to address intellectual problems but to reach the heart and conscience. There would be few who would counter such logic.

Having said that, however, there is also a great need for us to know the times in which we live, and to be able to converse with and contradict issues and ideologies which stand against the gospel. With this in mind, the next few posts on this blog will contain video material from Pastor John Piper, defining and dealing with the issue of postmodernism. In these videos Piper is explaining the content of last year's Desiring God conference, but in so doing provides us with some interesting insights into the nature of postmodernism.

Our hope is that as you view these videos you might learn more, and be able to penetrate more keenly, the mindsets of those whom we are called to minister to. We also hope that this issue may generate some discussion, and we invite your comments, questions, and conversations in relation to the importance of understanding our times in order to be able to preach. We'd love to hear from you, and be able to sharpen one another's dependence on God, and concern to preach with reverence and relevance to our world.

The Men for Ministry Interview: Iain H. Murray

2007-05-04T08:03:00.000-07:00

Iain H. Murray, born in Lancashire, England, in 1931 was educated in the Isle of Man and at the University of Durham. He entered the Christian ministry in 1955. He served as assistant to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel (1956-59) and subsequently at Grove Chapel, London (1961-69) and St. Giles Presbyterian Church, Sydney (1981-84). In intervening periods he has worked full-time with the Banner of Truth Trust, of which organisation he was the co-founder (with Jack Cullum) in 1957 and remains the Editorial Director.

The Rev. Murray has very kindly agreed to be interviewed by Men for Ministry, and here shares some of his thoughts about preaching, reading, the call to ministry, and the state of Bible teaching within the UK and US.

1.Could you tell us briefly about your own call to preach and teach God’s Word?

Strangely, I believed my destiny was to be a Christian minister before I was converted although no relatives were so engaged. But I did not speak of this to others – for my life was inconsistent – before I came to know Christ at the age of seventeen.

2. How do you believe men are called to a preaching ministry? Can you suggest any tests that an individual can apply to themselves regarding whether they are gifted in this area or not?

I believe God puts a concern upon men’s hearts, which is shown by their taking every opportunity to serve and speak for Christ; perhaps first to a Sunday School class (as Spurgeon) or in visiting an Old People’s Home. There must be desire for the work – a pull stronger than any other pull – and the subjective needs testing by the counsel of older Christians and a local church.

3. Would you mark any differences between evangelical attitudes to preaching in the UK and in the USA? If so, what are they?

There are a great many variations in the US, as there are here. I do not think I could generalise. In both countries there has been a danger that Calvinistic preaching has not been distinguished by evangelistic concern and passion. ‘Expository preaching’ has moved too far from the type of preaching we find in Spurgeon’s sermons; the danger is that it becomes like a weekly commentary on a passage (rather than a text) of Scripture.

4. Recently almost fifty men from our Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland attended a seminar dealing with the issues of ‘the primacy of preaching’ and ‘the passion for preaching’. What are your thoughts on these two issues as applied to the work of God in the UK presently?

I have partly covered this. I believe that true passion for preaching arises, by the Holy Spirit, through love of the people we are serving. It is more important to love people than to love preaching! That means that pastoral work should never be downgraded. Read Hobson’s work in Liverpool as an example of pastoral zeal.

5. Many of your books, particularly your celebrated two volume biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, continue to influence many preachers. Which books have most blessed and enriched your own preaching?

I find this hard to answer. I do believe that God directs books into our hands as we need them, and our need varies at different stages of our lives and ministries. As a young Christian I was much helped by Andrew Bonar’s Life of McCheyne; the latter’s sermons; Merle D’Aubigne on the Reformation ( thrilling stuff!); Jonathan Edwards, and several of the Puritans (notably Thomas Brooks and John Owen). Later, I came to prize Spurgeon. His ‘All-Round Ministry’ is a wonderful book for a young pastor, as is his ‘Comment and Commentaries’.

6. What effect has postmodernism had on preaching in recent years? How do you feel preachers can best respond to it?

I never did understand what postmodernism is! I doubt the helpfulness of such labels and think they are greatly overdone. The natural man is basically the same in every generation: that is why the scriptures are more relevant and up-to-date than any other document. The first business of preaching is not to address intellectual problems but to reach the heart and conscience. One of our great dangers is the constant preaching of salvation by faith in Christ to numbers who have never truly been smitten with a sense of sin. I try to deal with that subject in ‘The Old Evangelicalism’.

7. How can a preacher who is concerned with being theologically and exegetically precise in their preaching avoid the danger of becoming dry and academic in their presentation of God’s Word?

Keep visiting the sick and the dying; that will keep ‘scholarship’ in second place. And beware of being concerned about what people think of our preaching. The great aim of preaching must be to do good to our hearers, good for eternity.

8. If you could give a young preacher three essential pieces of advice as they embark on teaching God’s word, what would they be?

Guard you inner life; love people but keep a healthy distrust of human nature; make faith in God’s promises the daily duty

9. Your book ‘Evangelicalism Divided’ has been a seminal work in terms of gauging the spiritual climate of the evangelical world during the past fifty years. One common issue that a variety of critics have picked up on is your absence of reference to the ‘Proclamation Trust’. How would you assess their work and influence on pulpit ministry in the United Kingdom in recent decades?

Yes , I think there is weight in the comment of critics on this point. I should have made it clearer, I was not attempting a history of evangelicalism in the last 50 years. I think one reason why the Proclamation Trust has gained respect and support is that leaders, such as Dick Lucas, were not associated with the comprehensive/ecumenical policy that I criticised. I am sorry I cannot speak more of the Trust from experience. I think the practical advice and direction that the Proclamation Trust has given on preaching has been helpful to many; though I would have reservation lest the method advocated leads too much to a kind of running commentary on Scripture, which is not the same as preaching. There is danger in seeing preaching primarily as giving instruction; whereas, as Lloyd-Jones used to say, the primary need is to give our hearers stimulus, so they will eagerly want to read and learn themselves. Strong churches need more than just a weekly diet of teaching.

10. Could you tell us of a time when God particularly touched and challenged your heart through the preaching of another? (We know there will be many instances to choose from!)

A few weeks ago I was much uplifted and helped by listening to a man who was entirely unknown to me, and perhaps to the world at large. It reminded me forcibly that God has his men, and that those who faithfully preach Scripture, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, are certain to do good.

The Primacy and Passion of Preaching

2007-04-04T07:41:00.003-07:00

The following report is written by Pastor Kyle Warren of Lisnagleer Baptist Church, Co.Tyrone, who serves as a member of the Men for Ministry Committee:

On Saturday 3rd March over 50 men met in the Baptist Centre (Moira) for the inaugural Men for Ministry conference. The spectrum of those present ranged from those who have been involved in pastoral ministry for many years to those who were contemplating beginning to preach in their own local church.

After Pastor Jim Byers opened the meeting in prayer, Pastor Robert Murdock (Emmanuel) gave a very challenging address to those present on the topic of 'The Primacy of Preaching'. He spoke from 2Timothy 4:1-5 concerning Paul's charge to Timothy to recognize the importance and responsibility of preaching the Word of God. He reminded us that preachers today, just like Timothy, have been entrusted with a sacred duty. Preaching is the divinely ordained means of communicating God's message to the world and therefore preachers must acknowledge that they are spokesmen of the King of kings. Those who have the solemn but privileged responsibility of handling God's Word must never forget that it is the Saviour not the servant, the message not the messenger, that is important. Sadly today there is the tendency for some to waver in their worship from the preaching of God's Word and be influenced by modern trends, but all of us must grasp the need for the primacy of preaching in church life. Pastor Murdock spoke about the Scriptures and his own experiences with great passion, and all present were deeply enthused as we waited for Pastor David McMillan (Windsor) to then speak on the topic of 'The Passion for Preaching'.

We were not disappointed! He explained that a passion for preaching flows from a passion for the Word of God. Preachers also require a passion for people. Preaching is about reaching hearts and minds with the Word of God so that lives and actions conform to the will of God. Above all, a passion for preaching requires a passion to know Jesus Christ. Pastor McMillan ended by making reference to Ephesians 3:17 which tells us that Christ will make His home in our hearts as we trust Him more and more. A rich time of fellowship was had by all, and the men left instilled with a deeper hunger to know and proclaim the Word of God.

Another conference has been arranged for the autumn on Saturday 6th October 2007. It will be led by Pastor Edwin Ewart (Vice Principal, Irish Baptist College) and will take the form of an exegesis and exposition workshop. This may sound very complicated but is nothing to be scared of! Could I strongly encourage all those who have an interest in proclaming God's Word to make a note of this date in your diary. The training and fellowship are not to be missed!

Spring Conference Audio Resources

2007-04-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

On Saturday 3rd March, Men for Ministry hosted their Spring conference at the Baptist Centre, Hillsborough Road, Moira. A hugely encouraging turnout was combined with some powerful ministry from Pastor Robert Murdock (Emmanuel Baptist Church, Lisburn) and Pastor David McMillan (Windsor Baptist, Belfast) on 'The Primacy of Preaching' and 'The Passion for Preaching' respectively. All in attendance were richly blessed and personally challenged by what they heard. These messages are now available online for immediate listening, or download (for use on portable devices etc). Please follow this link and click either of the large audio icons to access each of the messages. The host for audio is Twango, and it is listed as ABC Audio. To download the files to your computer for later playback or transfer to a portable device right click 'Podcast' at the bottom of the audio page, and click 'Copy Link Location' from the menu. Simply paste this link into your iTunes or other audio player's podcast subscription page and the files should automatically download.

For full instructions on how to get a free copy of iTunes, step by step details on how to subscribe to a Podcast, or to report any difficulties in accessing or downloading these files, do not hesitate to contact us on the technical support email address listed in the sidebar.

We trust that these files will be used of God for wider usefulness and blessing among those who have an interest, concern and passion for preaching.

Men for Ministry Conference

2007-03-09T10:45:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday (3rd March) Men for Ministry hosted their first spring conference at the Baptist Centre in Moira. The event had been in planning for a considerable period, and much prayer had been offered that it might prove useful, edifying, and inspiring to those in attendance. These prayers were answered in a wonderful way, as almost fifty men attended to hear Pastor Robert Murdock (Emmanuel Baptist Church, Lisburn) address the topic of 'The Primacy of Preaching', and Pastor David McMillan (Windsor Baptist Church, Belfast) speak on 'The Passion for Preaching'. Both sessions were deeply appreciated by those in attendance, and will hopefully leave a lasting mark on many lives.

In the near future a full report on the day will be published here, along with MP3 files of both teaching sessions, which may be downloaded free of charge. Keep checking back as we are hoping to make these resources available soon.

Resourcing the Work of Men for Ministry

2007-02-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Men for Ministry blog. This site is designed to supplement and resource the work of the Men for Ministry conferences which run under the umbrella of the Northern Region of the Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland. We exist to help our churches discover, nurture and develop preaching gifts amongst men within local fellowships - gift which can subsequently be used for the broader benefit of churches within ABCinI. Our work chiefly consists of compiling a list, or database, of men who are fit to preach, and who come with the recommendation of their home church. We also run two conferences per year for the training, encouragement and inspiration of those included on the Men for Ministry list, and those who will potentially be included. Details of our spring conference will appear on this blog in the near future.

When visiting this site you can expect to find a variety of themes in our posts:

Information: these posts will outline upcoming events, as well as reports on those events by people who have attended.

Inspiration: we will be posting original articles to inspire those who preach, as well as introducing our readers to resources and documents which will be an encouragement in the work of ministry. Book reviews on the subject of preaching will also be a regular feature.

Education: these posts will deal with the more technical issues of exegesis and exposition, as well as recommendations of commentaries and reference works which form the preacher's tool box.

We trust you'll be blessed and encouraged by the content included here. Please feel free to leave a comment on this site, but do be advised that all comments will be moderated, and deleted if deemed ungracious, offensive, or unhelpfully divisive.

Happy reading!