The eighth London Preachers Conference took place at Chartridge Lodge in Chesham, with 55 delegates meeting in late February: two days of thinking about local church expository preaching, alongside brothers from a range of churches but with the same convictions.
If you’re the main teaching leader of a church, how many hours a year do you think you spend preparing to teach and preach? For myself, I reckon it’s in the region of 600 hours and that’s just the main teaching forum of the whole gathered church. Those hours are sometimes painful, always a struggle, but often a joy. Our churches need us to serve them in this way.
There’s something else our churches need us to be doing though: they need us to step outside our normal routine and look at it from the outside. We need to be improving. Perhaps you have a plan for that already; maybe you read a book a year about preaching. If so, great. But my guess is that many of us don’t. Hence the London Preachers Conference.
The venue was ideal, the food excellent, the snow outside a treat, but what happened?
Equipping
The conference aimed to sharpen our preaching. How do you do your sermon preparation and why? Is it a tried and trusted method, or does it need a rethink? This year David Jackman took us back to the basics of expository preaching. Many will have heard this content before, for others it would have been the first time, but what struck home was the relevance to every level. David’s proposal for carving up the week for sermon prep gives, at the very least, a basic standard against which to compare one’s own practice. Four study blocks (ideally on consecutive days): 1. Exegesis of plain meaning; 2. Exposition and point of transformation (aim); 3. Structure, strategy and application; 4. Writing up.
As well as the upfront teaching, equipping came through preaching groups where three other preachers listened to a recent full sermon which we’ve delivered in our churches.
Modelling
We thought about what it looks like to do expository preaching well. This year Robin Weekes, of Emmanuel Wimbledon, spoke from Matthew 16-18 and challenged our churches to be built on Christ. After each exposition Robin took a few minutes to help us understand some of the thinking behind his decisions.
Fellowship
This was central to the conference, which is why we’re so glad that it happened when it did (the lockdown hit three weeks later). The preaching groups enable us to share and pray for one another in our different ministry situations. This was the highlight for me; hearing what God is doing in very different contexts and opening ourselves up to each other for prayer and support.
So, is your car running without an MOT? How long can it do so without someone getting hurt? We can all get into our own ruts. If you’re London-based, come next year, be brave and share with others to receive their constructive, and loving, critique. Put the details in your diary now (see below). It’s just 48 hours, so there’s still time for other things in your week, and it’s local to London. No prep needed. And if money is tight, there are bursaries.
The London Preachers Conference is for those who preach regularly in a London church and is one of the three main London Gospel Partnership events in the year.
