Episode 2: Why a podcast about preaching?
Episode 2 of the "View from the Pulpit” podcast, hosted by Ben Smith, explains why it is essential for the church to recover a biblical understanding of the role and importance of preaching. In this episode, Ben Smith shares his own background and stories that illustrate how God has changed his understanding of what makes for biblically faithful preaching.
Show Notes: View from the Pulpit” Podcast, Episode 2 Why a Podcast about preaching?
Episode Theme: Recovering a love for, appreciation of, and devotion to preaching.
In this episode of “View from the Pulpit,” host Ben Smith shares his story of how God has transformed his understanding of preaching. Ben explains how he hopes to help the listeners grow in their understanding of God’s word and the ministry and role of preaching. He shares that he hopes this podcast will be used to recapture and recover the church’s love for, appreciation of, and devotion to preaching.
Key Highlights:
The Primacy of the Ministry of Preaching: Ben Smith explains that the primacy of the ministry of preaching is such that if you remove it, a church ceases to be a church, and every other ministry of the church flows from it.
Conviction over Education: While education is helpful, and theological education can be a great asset for a preacher, faithful preaching requires more than academics and education. Ben Smith shares a personal experience that revealed the necessity for those who preach to labor under the conviction that the Bible is the word of God.
Substance over performance: Everyone loves a good show and enjoys being entertained. There is a performative element to preaching, but faithful preaching must be much more than a performance. Ben Smith shares his personal experience of coming to appreciate biblically faithful preaching more than the performance of preaching.
Faithfulness over size: The hardest lesson for anyone who teaches or preaches is not to be enamored with the illusion of crowd size. Ben Smith explains how crowd size is not the only, most important, or most helpful metric in assessing the faithfulness of a preaching ministry.
Join Ben Smith for an insightful discussion of the importance of preaching and why a podcast devoted to the ministry of preaching will be helpful to the church.
Ben Smith is the pastor of Central Baptist Church, Waycross, GA.
For more information and resources from Pastor Ben Smith, visit www.BenSmithSr.org
For more information on Central Baptist Church, Waycross, GA, visit https://cbcwaycross.org/
Other podcasts by Ben Smith:
All For the Kingdom is a weekly podcast of pastor Ben’s preaching ministry. https://www.bensmithsr.org/bensmith-allforthekingdom
Sermon Shorts is a podcast of sermon clips that are 5 minutes or less. https://www.bensmithsr.org/shortspod
A special thanks to Jim Gibson for permission to use his recording of “Brethren We Have Met to Worship” for this podcast. Ben Smith shares his personal connection to Jim’s parents, James and Ella Gibson, and how their example and testimony of honoring the preaching of God’s word had a profound impact on his life.
You can find more information about Jim Gibson’s music and many other recordings at https://www.hickorycovemusic.com/.
Music by Jim Gibson. “Brethren We have Met to Worship.” Songs of the South III, @2003 Hickory Cove Music.
I chose the hymn Brethren, We Have Met to Worship because the lyrics emphasize the importance of preaching for the salvation of the lost and the ministry to the church,
Brethren, We Have Met to Worship, by George Askins
1 Brethren, we have met to worship
And adore the Lord our God;
Will you pray with all your power,
While we try to preach the Word?
All is vain unless the Spirit
Of the Holy One comes down;
Brethren, pray, and holy manna
Will be showered all around.
2 Brethren, see poor sinners round you
Slumb'ring on the brink of woe;
Death is coming, hell is moving,
Can you bear to let them go?
See our fathers and our mothers,
And our children sinking down;
Brethren, pray and holy manna
Will be showered all around.
3 Sisters, will you join and help us?
Moses' sister aided him;
Will you help the trembling mourners
Who are struggling hard with sin?
Tell them all about the Savior,
Tell them that He will be found;
Sisters, pray, and holy manna
Will be showered all around.
4 Let us love our God supremely,
Let us love each other, too;
Let us love and pray for sinners,
Till our God makes all things new.
Then He'll call us home to heaven,
At His table we'll sit down;
Christ will gird Himself, and serve us
With sweet manna all around.
Transcript
“Welcome to the first episode of View from the Pulpit, a podcast about preaching, but not a podcast just for preachers.
So here's my question. Have you given much thought to preaching? Or have you ever thought deeply about what makes for good preaching?
Now, if you're like me and grew up in the church, your first answer to these questions is, yes, of course, I have. For that matter, most church members would instinctively say yes.
But have you really considered the place of preaching in the church?
Now, for Christians, preaching is as familiar as singing Amazing Grace. The most significant amount of time during our Sunday services is given to preaching. We have preaching at our funerals and at our weddings. And though the style of preaching can vary from scholastic to bombastic, every Christian from every type of church can recognize preaching.
Sometimes, though, the familiarity of something can create a lack of curiosity and even a lack of understanding. And that's what I think we have in the church today with preaching.
Preaching is ever-present but seldom studied by anyone other than the preacher.
If you were to ask church members the question, what is the most important ministry of the church? You would certainly get various answers, including things like evangelism, community connections, youth and children programs, and music. And with each of these answers comes an implicit assumption that the program or ministry mentioned is responsible in some way for the church's health and growth, and viability. What I've noticed is that seldom listed first, if ever, is the ministry of preaching. And when preaching is referenced, it is often in connection with how the pastor delivers his sermon or how it is received. So, in connection to some performative dynamic of preaching, rather than the substance of preaching.
But here's where I am. I am convinced that the ministry of preaching and the gathering of the saints on the Lord's Day for worship is not a valuable part of the ministries of the church but the very core, the very fundamental central ministry of the church. The primacy of the ministry of preaching is such that if you remove it, if a church ceases to have preaching, even if it continues every other ministry, it ceases to be a church. A church must have biblically faithful preaching. And every other thing that the church does, every other ministry that it has, flows out of and from the ministry of preaching.
03:12
My name is Ben Smith, and I pastor a church in rural south Georgia. And I've been pastoring and preaching for about 20, well, more than 20 years now. And I want to talk about preaching. And I want to talk about preaching because I believe that a recovery of the ministry of preaching is not only good for the church, but essential to the health of the church.
Now, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s. And during my childhood and youth, my world revolved around the church more than any other institution, including school, sports, and other entertainments. The singular constant in my life was Sunday worship, and with that came preaching. When I was home, my family attended my church, my home church, for Sunday services in the morning and in the evening. When I visited my grandparents and other family members, I attended church with them. Even when my family traveled for vacations, our plans included a church to worship with on the Lord's Day. And as a result of all of that faithful church attendance, I've heard a lot of preaching over the years. But frankly, I've not always appreciated what it is. I've not always understood its importance or had the ability to distinguish between what is faithful and unfaithful biblical preaching.
There are some lessons I have learned through the years on what makes for good preaching. Actually, I think a better way to say that is that the Lord has changed over the years is what I honor and celebrate as faithful preaching. So allow me to tell you a couple of stories, three in fact, to illustrate what I mean.
05:08
The first is a story about education versus biblical conviction.
The earliest lesson I learned about preaching is to honor conviction over education. I grew up under the ministries of well-educated pastors who delivered crafted, well-written sermons each week. In contrast to my home church, when I visited my extended family members' churches, I experienced preaching that was very different. Some of these pastors had no formal education, and their preaching style was in keeping with the vernacular of their working-class peers. Their language was not refined or sometimes not even grammatically correct. And being bi-vocational, their sermons reflected the limited time they had to study and prepare to preach.” “It was never said explicitly that these pastors were less than the well-educated who preached from larger, more honored pulpits. But nonetheless, I recognized that there was a difference in the honor and respect given. I grew to assume that these less-educated men meant well but that deference should be given to the more refined and educated pastors in matters of interpretation and biblical theology.
However, in those days, a conflict arose in our church's denomination over the authority and divine inspiration of the Bible. It became a heated battle for control over the direction of the denomination. These were days before I entered the ministry, so I was only a spectator to the denominational political battles.”
“However, I witnessed that the bi-vocational pastors who had little education or theological training demonstrated a higher view of scripture, a more biblically faithful view of the authority of scripture, and the centrality of preaching than the better-educated pastors did.
By the time I entered ministry, I deeply appreciated the hundreds of humble pastors who would not be silenced, and would not retreat from the conviction that the Bible is God's divinely inspired and errant word. They may not have been able to read from the Hebrew or parse the Greek, but they recognized the dangerous threat of those who were teaching that Genesis was a myth and that the New Testament miracles could be explained away. And I came to appreciate that there was something more important about being convicted of the Bible's truth than the educational degrees that you can hang on the wall.
07:38
And then secondly, I learned to honor substance over performance.
Having grown up in a very formal church, I was fascinated when I first was exposed to energetic, flamboyant, and entertaining preaching. At first, I equated the more energetic performances with being better preaching. Because I was entertained, I was more engaged. Because my attention was captured, I found it easier to listen. And because some of these preachers employed extravagant and novel illustrations, I remembered what was said longer, or at least I remembered the illustrations longer.
My first impression was to think that these attention-grabbing efforts were synonymous with good preaching. And to be fair, the preachers I was listening to at the time were phenomenally gifted communicators. However, after the excitement of discovering something new subsided, I began to realize that their communication skills, even though their communication skills were exceptional, some of these men had loose and even errant theology.
For all the personal enjoyment of their preaching performances, I came to realize that preaching must be more than just performance. I came to appreciate biblically faithful preaching more than the performance of preaching. I came to love the what more than the how. That is, what is preached than how it is delivered.
09:11
And then, thirdly, this gets to an issue of pride; I learned to celebrate faithfulness over the size of a crowd.
The hardest lesson is the illusion of crowd size. As a child, and certainly as a young pastor, the metric most commonly used to determine the success of a ministry is the crowd size. Celebrated pastors were the ones who grew churches to great attendance numbers. Preachers who were lauded as models to emulate were ones who pastored large churches.
Now, I need to be careful here, because I do not want to communicate that large crowds are bad. God has certainly used men to preach faithfully to large crowds and grow large churches. I'm simply saying that crowd size is not the only, and it's certainly not the most important or most helpful metric in assessing the faithfulness of a preaching ministry. Faithfulness of the preacher is a judgment of God that is independent from the celebration of the crowds.”
10:17
“I share these stories to illustrate that God has been teaching and transforming me and my understanding of preaching. I know that as a high school student, I could not have articulated a biblically faithful understanding of the role or importance of preaching in the church. And frankly, I'm not confident that, as a young preacher, I had a solid understanding of the role or importance of preaching in the church. But I am thankful that God has grown and developed my understanding of His Word and of preaching. I'm so thankful that God has continually deepened my love for His Word and the ministry of preaching. And so I want to help you grow in your understanding of God's Word and the ministry and role of preaching in the church.
“So my hope and prayer for this podcast is that it will be used to recapture and recover the church's love for, appreciation of, and devotion to preaching.
Here on the View from the Pulpit, I will have conversations with pastors and church members about the role of preaching in the church, the labor of preparing to preach, the effectiveness of how one preaches, and much more. You will hear from pastors who preach to thousands every Sunday and pastors whose congregations are less than a hundred. You'll hear the struggles that come with preaching, the joys of proclaiming God's word, and long-form conversations about how God is working to recover the ministry of preaching in the church.
I hope this will be helpful. I pray it will be God-honoring.
I know this. So, I have already recorded several interviews for future episodes. Each one of them has been unique.”
“Each one of them has been tremendously encouraging, and each one of them has been personally, to me, convicting. And so I cannot wait for you to hear them. And I would ask you if you would to help me promote this show by subscribing to the show and, leaving a review, and sharing it with a friend.
In whatever podcast app you use, be sure to subscribe or follow whatever nomenclature your app uses so that you'll be notified each time a new episode is published. Now, I personally like to use Apple Podcasts, but the show will be available in many other platforms, including Spotify. When you rate and review the podcast, it helps with promotion and pushing the podcast up in the particular platform that you use.”
I do think the greatest form of promotion is still personal connection, so I would encourage you to post a link on social media and text a friend, those sort of things. Whatever you do to help get the word out, I would very much appreciate it.
13:02
And I want to give a very special word of thanks to Jim Gibson, who's recording of Brethren We Have Met To Worship is the music for this podcast.
Now, Jim and I have never met in person that I know of, but he has a connection to a testimony that profoundly impacted my youth. Jim's mom and dad were members of my childhood church, and every Sunday, they would sit together near the front of the church. During the sermon, Jim's mom, Ella, who I knew as Mrs. Gibson, would write down every word the pastor said, while his dad, James, whom I knew as Mr. Gibson, would read along.”
“When World War II started, Mr. Gibson joined the Army Air Corps as a pilot trainee. It was during his training that he suffered severe damage to his hearing, and it would leave him with profound hearing loss for the rest of his life. He could not hear the preacher preach, so his sweet wife would transcribe every word, and he would read along.
They did this for as long as I could remember as a child, Sunday after Sunday, and as a result, they were a quiet and simple and living testimony to the importance of hearing the word preached, even if you have to read it.
I wanted to use a recording of Brethren We Have Met to Worship for the podcast. When I found a recording by Jim Gibson, I wondered if he might be related to the Mr. and Mrs. Gibson that I grew up knowing. When I reached out to him and asked permission to use his recording, it made it all the more special to make the connection with his parents.
You can find more information about Jim, his music, and his many other recordings at hickorycovemusic.com. That's all one word: hickorycovemusic.com.
15:08
The first interview will publish this coming Monday on, March the 10th, and I can't wait for you to hear it. Until then, preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season.
God bless.
Thank you for listening to View from the Pulpit. For more information, go to my website at bensmithsr.org. That's bensmithsr.org.
You can follow me on X at x.com/bensmithsr. I look forward to meeting you next week for another conversation on View from the Pulpit.”
