Preach Magazine Issue 1 - Creativity and innovation in preaching | Page 12

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FEATURE

Tim Ward:
The Proclamation
Trust

● as regards the content of the sermon,
creativity and innovation ought not
to be things that the preacher seeks –
except in one particular area;
● as regards the form of the sermon,
creativity and innovation are fine –
except, again, in one particular area.
Let’s think about each of these in turn.

THE CONTENT OF THE SERMON
A word closely linked to creativity
and innovation is ‘imagination’. Now
imagination is a God-given human
faculty, and used in the right way is a
wonderful thing. I happen to be coming
to the end of reading The Lord of the
Rings for the first time, and the power
and subtlety of Tolkein’s imagination is
a delight.

THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL
THEOLOGICAL REASON FOR
THE LACK OF INNOVATION
IN THE CORE CONTENT OF
PREACHING: GOD’S ACT OF
SALVATION AND REVELATION
IN CHRIST IS NOW COMPLETE

S

omeone recently asked me a
question about preaching. ‘It
must be difficult to come up with
a new sermon every Sunday,’ he
said. ‘How do you do it?’ At the time
we were running together, so my
answer was probably gasped out fairly
incoherently. What I tried to say to him
was something like this: ‘At the very
core of their task, preachers ought not
be creators and innovators. In fact,
that would be a bad thing to try to be.
God has given us a truthful and reliable
word in Scripture to preach, and the
preacher’s job is to open up that word
with as much faithfulness, clarity,
engagement and power as possible.’
Sitting here at my desk, feeling a little
more relaxed than I did at that moment
on our run, I can spell that answer out
a little more, in two ways, each with an
important qualification:

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However, Scripture’s few explicit
references to imagination are mostly
negative. That is because the Biblewriters have in mind the human
tendency to imagine what we would
like God to have said, rather than
what he has actually said. Through
Ezekiel, the Lord pronounces woe
to ‘those who prophesy out of their
own imaginations’ (Ezekiel 13:2, 17).
God describes Israel’s unfaithfulness
to him as their ‘pursuing their own
imaginations’ (Isaiah 65:2). As with
every human faculty, the fallenness of
the imagination can also be redeemed
and sanctified, so that it contemplates
the wonders of what the Lord has done,
although that will always exceed our
powers of imagination since he ‘is able
to do to immeasurably more than all
we ask or imagine’ (Ephesians 3:20).
Thus there is no real place for the
exercise of human imagination in
establishing the core message that the
preacher is to preach. That message
is to be found in Scripture, faithfully
and correctly handled. Crucial in this
are the ‘handover’ passages in the New
Testament, where we see the generation
of apostles handing the baton over to
the first generation of their successors.
Again and again what they say is not, ‘I
wonder what innovative message you
will come up with to preach?’ Instead

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