by Francis Martin, Telegraph
From wooden delivery to political grandstanding, have our preachers forgotten how to preach – and can they learn again?
Most of us have been there at some point, be it on a Sunday morning or at a friend’s wedding: sat on an unforgiving pew in a draughty church, listening to a sermon that leaves us cold.
Perhaps the preacher’s delivery, like the pew, was wooden and uninspiring. Perhaps the sermon made a tilt at humour which left everyone cringing. Or perhaps it seemed more like a political rallying cry than a reflection on the divine.
In a letter to The Telegraph in September, one reader claimed that he “cannot recall an inspirational sermon since the 1980s”.
Is the art of the inspirational sermon in crisis? The Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie, vicar of St Mary’s, Charlbury, is in no doubt that there’s a problem, and lays out some possible causes.
Firstly, he says, there’s a problem with the calibre of priests. “The clergy are stupider than they’ve ever been,” he says.
Priests “are now often less well read than their own congregations”, and for some priests “there’s almost a pride in preaching badly”, as if in defiance of intellectual snobbery.
Accessibility is no bad thing, according to Butler-Gallie, but it is often confused with content that is “just a bit naff”. He recalls a Christmas service in which the priest did a sermon on animal noises, despite there being no children present.
‘Some of the worst sermons I’ve heard have been by bishops’
The Rev Dr Colin Heber-Percy agrees that recruitment is part of the problem. “The Church needs to get its act together over who it ordains,” he says. Rather than ordaining and promoting the gifted communicators, the Church hierarchy seems to put more value on managerial skills, he suggests.