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Years ago, as a young preacher, I became frustrated with a widening gap that I was discerning in the practice of preaching. The culture was changing and everybody could perceive it, but preachers found two distinct ways of responding to it. Many preachers, concerned about their dwindling audiences began to dig deeper, struggling mightily to parse an extra verb and to pound the pulpit just a little extra harder. These people tended to have something to say but fewer and fewer people to say it to. Then there were the other preachers who in the name of relevance found creative ways to communicate their sermons on "How to improve your marriage" or the "Three Keys to Integrity in Business." These preachers were able to draw a crowd, but they didn’t necessarily have much to say. John Stott anticipated this problem more than twenty years ago and he has something to say to it. Stott has taken the classic "bridge" model of preaching and offered a careful presentation of what it might look like if preachers could speak deeply from the Scriptures in a way that listeners perceive to be creative and relevant. This is a worthy challenge.
Excerpt: The contrast I have been drawing between the two main theological groupings in today’s churches seems to me to be one of the greatest tragedies of our time. On the one hand, conservatives are biblical but not contemporary, while on the other liberals and radicals are contemporary but not biblical. Why must we polarize in this naive way, however? Each side has a legitimate concern, the one to conserve God’s revelation, the other to relate meaningfully to real people in the real world. Why can we not combine each other’s concerns? Is it not possible for liberals to learn from conservatives the necessity of conserving the fundamentals of historic, biblical Christianity, and for conservatives to learn from liberals the necessity of relating these radically and relevantly to the real world? Meanwhile, each group stays on its favorite side of the cultural chasm, and almost nobody seems to be building bridges. Yet we preachers are supposed to be in the business of communication. A lecture has been wittily defined as the transfer of information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s, without it passing through the mind of either; but sermons should not be equally dismal examples of non-communication. We should be praying that God will raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who are determined to bridge the chasm; who struggle to relate God’s unchanging Word to our ever-changing world; who refuse to sacrifice truth to relevance or relevance to truth; but who resolve instead in equal measure to be faithful to Scripture and pertinent to today (144).