Meet your new mentor

I recently blew the dust off an old book called Preaching and Preachers. In it, I was confronted with several borderline blasphemous ideas about contemporary speeches and speechwriting. 

Author David Martyn-Lloyd Jones, a long-dead minister at Westminster Chapel, shares his compelling philosophy about writing and delivering sermons, and draws on the ideas of great preachers over hundreds of years.

He and they worry about the “terrible danger of professionalism” in the craft of sermon writing and delivery. Storytelling from the pulpit, they contend, is “sheer carnality.” Other speechwriting pieties such as the need for a “call to action,” the importance of “authenticity” and the value of audience analysis also come in for criticism—along with my commentary—in the PSA’s latest white paper, A Provocation from the Pulpit: Dead Preachers Challenge Living Speechwriters.

Download it for free; read it at your own risk. —DM