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From Preaching to Communicating

Vision, policies, and plans are more or less useless unless they are known to all who may be concerned with them. Lord Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army, made it a rule that the plan of the campaign should be made known to every soldier.

Preaching will forever remain at the core of the church's program. Along with teaching, preaching is one of the chief sources of spiritual power. Any attempt to reduce its importance is, in my opinion, a dead-end street.

The message of preaching forever remains the same, but the form changes to successfully reach the hearers, just as the Bible itself has been retranslated in our time to great advantage. I was once given a framed page from the Geneva Bible of 1560—and I can't read it. It is the Word of God, all right, but its form is such that modern people cannot easily understand it.

One of the most significant developments in the church today, as I see it, is that old-style "preaching" is going out, and "communication" is coming in. Those preachers ...

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May/June
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