The interview that follows took place in late October while James I. Packer was in Philadelphia for a conference at New Life OPC in Jenkintown and a Reformation service nearby involving several congregations. The interview interacts with a chapter he contributed to a book recently put out by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, The Preacher and Preaching: Reviving the Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Samuel T. Logan.

NH: You have said that the Reformed tradition has been more fertile in producing reformed (small r) preachers over the centuries than has any other viewpoint of Christendom. Would you explain that?

PACKER: When I write things like that, I am thinking of people like the late 16th- and 17th-century Puritans with their counterparts in Scotland. I am thinking of people like George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards and the log college preachers in his day and early 18th-century America. I am thinking of people like Martyn Lloyd Jones in our own century. All these were men with tremendous force, tremendous strength of mind and very great clarity. Such reformed (or revived) preachers spoke with great seriousness and did everything legitimate to solicit a response.

I think that the Reformed faith produces maturer, bigger-scale Christian people than less adequate understandings of Christian truth do. And I think that when these people get into the pulpit and start preaching, it produces a grander scale type of preaching than you find in other traditions. People would travel long distances in Scotland to hear Robert Murray McCheyne and Alexander Whyte preach, because force and power were in their sermons and they made an impact. Among contemporaries is Albert Martin in New Jersey, who again is a very forceful preacher; and it's Reformed theology that makes him so.

NH: What specifically in Reformed theology motivates a man to preach?

PACKER: Well, he has a gospel which really is larger-scale than anybody else's. It diagnoses human need as being more desperate. We talk about total inability, we talk about total depravity, we talk about universal sinfulness – and we are right. Sovereign grace finds men lower morally and spiritually than does any other theology. And Reformed theology proclaims that God in sovereign grace stoops right down and lifts the sinner right up. That's a tremendously dramatic and thrilling thought! And it's a challenge to preachers to make it come across as a dramatic and thrilling thought.

We have a giant-size gospel. It ought to produce giant-size preachers. That means that if Reformed preachers (Reformed with a capital R) are not really the most powerful and arresting preachers in the whole Christian world, there is something wrong with their own message. See, I do believe that it is the message that makes the preacher.

NH: You also have expressed some concern that in the last couple of generations we have had inadequate preaching.

PACKER: I would say that the problem really has been that so many preachers have taken their eye off the goal. The preacher's business is under God to change people, to change people through the gospel. And I think that a lot of preachers have settled for a lot less. They have been content to give people true notions that they did not have before – or to reinforce reactions, say negative reactions to the unbelief of the world around them, that they did feel before. They have turned preaching, in other words, into a confirmation of what people already are without attempting to make preaching the means of renewal for the listeners – their conversion if they are not converted, their reinvigorating as Christians if they are. I do think, you see, that the preaching occasion is intended to be the situation in which people realize that God has drawn near to meet them, deal with them, talk to them – and they have to respond to him directly. And if a preacher does not seek to make every sermon an occasion of an encounter with God for his people, well, you know the old saying, “If you aim for nothing, you are sure to hit it.”

NH: What responsibilities do we have when we listen to a sermon?

PACKER: I think hearers in many of our churches have been lulled into the state of mind in which they look to the preacher simply to fill up a certain number of minutes in the worship service. He should be reasonably interesting, tell you his views about this and that and send you out feeling good.

We ought to drill people in the thought that preaching is a corporate activity in which the listener should be praying both for the messenger and for understanding of the message. He should be seeking to lay to heart, learn, memorize and get settled in his mind the things that the preacher is talking about.

In the past people were told to wait on the Lord and the preaching of the word, and so they would have great expectations when the sermon started. And the expectations would be precisely that God would draw near and meet with them and speak to them and show them things and change them for the better through the sermon. People used to ask each other the question, “And how did you get on under the preaching?” Nowadays we ask each other the question, “How did the preacher get on in his sermon?” We are spectators; we are detached observers.

NH: Why do you see preaching as the climax of congregational worship?

PACKER: Preaching is the occasion when we should be looking to God to draw nearest and speak strongest to his people's hearts. Then what we are supposed to do, so I believe, is to take with us the memory of what God has said to us, get off on our own and deal with him about it. I am much happier, frankly, with the idea of the response to the sermon being something that each person makes on his or her own.

NH: Are there legitimate ways to drive home the impact of the sermon?

PACKER: Yes, here I think we are very negligent. This thought first blossomed in my mind when I read what Richard Baxter did in the 17th century. As a Puritan he inherited and enforced the idea that after church over their Sunday dinner the family should “repeat the sermon,” that is to say, father should take them through the sermon that was preached to make sure that they've remembered it. The idea was that the sermon would be their spiritual fodder for the coming week.

But then Baxter went one step further than that. Every Thursday night he had an informal meeting in his own home where folk would come in, and he would make them go over the sermon. Then he would prompt them into responsive discussion by getting them to react to what they heard, asking them whether it gave them satisfaction as a statement of the point that he was making, asking them whether it seemed to them to ring true spiritually, talking to them about what response to it they thought appropriate, explaining what response to it he thought appropriate – getting them involved in feedback at all levels.

And I thought, “How wise!” If I were the preacher in a church, I would certainly want regular feedback sessions in which I would try to work over my sermons by drawing people's responses out of them as part of the business of following up the monolog. It will help me to preach better next time.

Teaching theory tells us that there is no impression without expression. Some sort of reflective response is needed to anchor in the mind what has been said. We are not educating people well these days in the church, and I think it's partly because we don't have enough expression going with what we try to do in the pulpit.

Even where there is a good preacher in the pulpit, one is amazed at how little of the Bible and Christian doctrine people really know. And how simplistic is their growth in the application of the gospel! We don't pull out of people enough expression to make sure the message got to their hearts.

NH: You have suggested that spontaneity in worship generally works against good preaching. This isn't some sort of Anglican hang-up, is it?

PACKER: The sort of thing that I was gunning at is the kind of spontaneity which makes a point of appearing unstilted and therefore clumsy – as if you cannot be really sincere unless you are a bit clumsy. I am thinking of styles of extempory prayer in which the sentences fall apart, and clearly the man has done no thinking about the words he is going to use. So that either he is repetitive using the same word or phrase over and over or else he is incoherent and has not got the verbal resources for expressing what he is trying to say.

But I am for spontaneity in this way: the preacher should convey the sense that he is realizing – and thrilled by – the meaning of what he is saying right now. When you are talking about divine things and the realities of a relationship with God, you are talking about the biggest things in the world!

I never write out sermon scripts completely, but I do dredge around to have a stock of language in place for expressing the thoughts that I want to express. My sermon notes have key phrases jotted down which I can use if that's the way that it comes. Then I've always got a way of saying it spontaneously. On balance I find this a much more fruitful and effective way of preparing than it would be for me to write it all out and then to try and conceal the fact that I was reciting it. (When you write this up, you could say that the theme of spontaneity in preaching really sparked something off in me – it generated some animated impression. Because that will be true.) A lot of the blameless orthodox preaching that I hear seems to me to be very deficient at just this point. The chaps don't come over as if they were realizing the sense of the message right now. And so nobody else realizes it.

NH: How can the average church member encourage the preacher?

PACKER: Oh, first by listening as in a learning situation and then telling the preacher afterwards what he has learned from the sermon. Second, by suggesting to the preacher what it was in his sermon that most significantly helped him, that is the listener, to realize the presence of God in his word and which therefore called for an honest response. Thirdly, I think the man in the pew ought to be willing to accept some instruction on what's involved in listening to sermons. Also there should be congregational prayer in the days or hours before the preaching so that the preacher knows that folk care about the impact of the sermon and are prepared to spend time praying for it. That will encourage him enormously.

There is one more point about encouragement, by the way. Let the member of the congregation not moan if the sermon goes on longer than he expected. When the word is preached – when the text is made to talk by a man who is able to realize and communicate the sense that he is realizing the glory of what he is talking about – you can go on a lot longer than twenty minutes, and it will still sound like twenty minutes. The sense that something is happening is the thing that will keep people feeling that they must keep up. You cannot switch off when God is coming through.

Every sermon should feel like twenty minutes. Preachers need to be humble about this. If your congregation tells you that fifteen minutes from you actually sounds like twenty minutes in their ears because you stumble a bit and fumble a bit, then you ought to be humble and not try to preach long sermons. I myself take great risks in this, I admit.