Good Preaching...

I am truly perplexed when I think about the criteria for determining a good evangelical church. Perhaps strangest of all is this concept of "good preaching" (a concept which I have myself employed to evaluate the churches that I have attended). There is, perhaps, no single factor in church practice that receives such a strict level of scrutiny by parishoners as this concept, though when I think about exactly what "good preaching" is, I must admit that I find myself in a difficult situation.

Of course, the impulse to have pastors "preach the word" at Sunday service is completely understandable, given the evangelical belief in the Scriptures as the Supreme Authority for the Christian - the living, active speech of God to man. What is confusing is not this emphasis, but rather why we need (or desire) a preacher to preach this Word to us at all... as well as how we evaluate the "excellence" of his delivery.

If the Scriptures are the active, self-revealing speech of God, then it seems to me that no "exposition" is necessary in preaching - only the opportunity of the congregation to hear and to humbly receive. This, however, makes the role of the preaching pastor almost ridiculous. "Good preaching", under this definition, is nothing more than articulate reading, and the believer would do well to put CDs of recorded bible reading on infinite repeat wherever he or she goes.

If, on the other hand, the Scriptures are an impedingly natural text, containing treasures of Divine wisdom locked away in historical contexts, thematic devices, cultural euphemisms and oblique inter-textual connections, then our access to God through the one point of reliable contact we have with the Divine will is rather restrictively contingent on the active work of a uniquely brilliant and well-educated biblical scholar. Woe to the developmentally disabled person, whose spirituality is, by this creed, necessarily restricted by his mental and linguistic capacity.

Under both conceptions the idea of "good preaching" becomes problematic in my estimation. I cannot help but think that the usefulness of this factor in determining the relative worth of a particular church is, at best, highly suspect, if only for the reason that I am loath to accept that such a tenuous practice as preaching appears to be could, in fact, be a cornerstone of church practice. By the first example, preaching is mostly unnecessary. By the second, preaching is so exceedingly complicated that the human element becomes largely more pivotal than the Divine... and only a handful of preachers in the world (judging by the ubiquitous disagreement of modern theologians) could "get it right" anyway. Is this indeed what our church is founded upon? Has God left us all stranded and dependant upon our own resources to discover the key to His revelation to us (being mostly illiterate for the first 1600 years of Christianity, and woefully inaccurate in our biblical interpretation until the wisdom of the Protestant Reformation)?

To me, this seems unlikely...