'The preacher was rubbish...'

A visitor - a young man - stepped into an Essex church one Sunday morning. He was a seeker and he’d been to several of the churches in town recently, looking for answers. The church was in an obscure neighbourhood, in a back street. The general consensus was that the folks who went there were a bit weird. They were given a wide berth by people who went to the local churches.  The man sat down at the back of the freezing chapel. By the time the service was due to start, there were still only a handful of people there. There was no organ or music group, just singing. At the start of the service there was a commotion as apparently minister had been detained and was unable to lead the service; eventually a wiry little man volunteered to speak. He really wasn’t a clever fellow, barely able to read the text and speaking in broad Essex.  His ‘message’ consisted mostly of repeating his text because he had very little else to say. By ten minutes in he had run out of things to say. As if things weren’t bad enough, the speaker then decided to single out the visitor from the whole congregation and said to him, ‘Young man, you look really miserable! – and you will always feel miserable if you don’t obey my text.’

No doubt the rest of the congregation thought to themselves, ‘Why didn’t God send this visitor on a different week when the pastor was here? He is an excellent preacher!’ Perhaps they rued the decision not to cancel the service altogether. The preacher’s efforts were really so dreadful - it was bound to have put this visitor off.

And yet it did not put the newcomer off. In fact the man’s simple appeal to his text of ‘Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth…’ struck right to the heart of this man and he trusted Christ there and then in that service. The newcomer’s name was Charles Spurgeon, who went on to become one of the greatest preachers of the gospel this country has ever know and through whose ministry God brought tens of thousands to faith in himself. You can read Spurgeon’s own record of the man’s simple message and how it spoke to his need here. http://www.banneroftruth.co.uk/pages/articles/article_detail.php?1385

Next time you are tempted to write a preacher off, bear this story in mind. Whether just chewing over the morning’s sermon at the Sunday dinner table, discussing the latest conference speaker or considering a candidate for a new minister, we would do well to examine the criteria we judge by. So often we still think as the world does.  We want our preachers to be eloquent speakers with engaging personalities, able to move people’s emotions, educated,  conversant with contemporary culture and  masters of theological matters, but this story reminds us that the work of conversion is all of God and the effectiveness of a preacher's ministry is not determined by his gifts but by the working of the Spirit of God.