“It’s like they got the exegesis spot on, then closed their eyes, fired an arrow randomly into the air, opened their eyes to see where it landed and said, ‘That looks like a good place to do application!’” - Theological College lecturer on student sermon application.
But are those of us who have graduated from theological college much better? For after all the students are just imitating what we have modelled.
Dean of Students at Sydney’s Moore Theological College Paul Grimmond has just completed a doctor of ministry project on improving application in evangelical preaching.
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“It’s like they got the exegesis spot on, then closed their eyes, fired an arrow randomly into the air, opened their eyes to see where it landed and said, ‘That looks like a good place to do application!’” - Theological College lecturer on student sermon application.
But are those of us who have graduated from theological college much better? For after all the students are just imitating what we have modelled.
Dean of Students at Sydney’s Moore Theological College Paul Grimmond has just completed a doctor of ministry project on improving application in evangelical preaching.
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
It is the pastor's heart, and Dominic Steele, thanks for joining us today. Improving our application with Paul Grimond. And we have a Problem. Speaking of theological college students in their final year preaching assignments, a lecturer said it's like they got their exegesis spot on, closed their eyes, fired an arrow randomly into the air, opened their eyes to see where it landed and said that looks like a good place to do application. And look, there's a question. If that's what they're saying about the students, what about those of us who've graduated from theological college and who are modeling to the students what to do? There is a nervousness in the air, though, about application, and Paul Grimond is Dean of Students at Sydney's Moore Theological College. He's just completed a Doctor of Ministry assignment on improving application in preaching Paul. That is a devastating quote, but it does ring true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's slightly sad in some ways, isn't it? And I want to say it's not across the board, it's not like every single student is like that.
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds like the way you quoted it.
Speaker 2:There's a range of things, but I do think it represents something that kind of comes from our tribal school, if you want to kind of put it like that, that where we're very, very keen to get the Bible dead on and dead right and there's a real nervousness about doing application. So we spend lots of that time on exegesis. We spend lots of time being able to communicate this passage really accurately to people and get it right.
Speaker 1:And the commentaries are really big on getting the exegesis right. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And lots of the process of learning at college is really about that end. And please, you know, I want to say up front I'm really for that. I think that that's a great thing. I think that the argument in my thesis is that just that, if that's where you stop, you haven't tried to do what God's actually trying to do in scripture and I think what God calls us to as preachers and pastors and people.
Speaker 1:What's the difference between a lecture in theological college and a sermon in church? Is it the difference between that? Well, like.
Speaker 2:I do wonder about that, or I think it depends what subject you're in and what the lecture looks like and etc. But I think we've inherited a background educationally where theory is much more important than practice. So historically and this isn't just theological colleges, I think this is our whole kind of Western education system Theory is pure and neat and it's the thing that you get right. And if you get it right, everything else will follow, because everything else is downstream from that, so to speak. I think one of the things that I'm arguing for in the thesis is that the skill of moving from comprehending your theory to working out what that means in the concrete realities of people's lives is another separate set of skills. But if you don't practice, it isn't something that you end up being able to do very well at all.
Speaker 1:You pick a couple of conversation partners, one of whom friend of mine, and he describes a week where I ran out of time, I didn't have enough time to do the hard work in the text and I ended up well preaching a talk that had lots more application at the end. And then at the end people said oh, that was great, you spoke to my life. And he said I'm then off in a tussle of should I go back to where I do all the hard work or should I stay just landing in people's lives? And as I read his article I thought actually he does reflect my tribe of thinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we feel deep tension, don't we? So we understand that. I really want to know what Paul said to the Galatians, for example. So I don't want to just and that's part of the problem with the kind of closing my eyes and peeing the arrow off in the space. I've got the exegesis right. I don't quite know how that relates to reality. Let me find somewhere and kind of rumble around.
Speaker 2:But if what the Bible says about what God is doing through scripture, which is actually transforming me, he's saving me, he's transforming my heart and mind, he's actually making me someone who lives their whole life wholeheartedly under the Lordship of Jesus, then we ought to actually expect scripture to kind of modify our behavior and our beliefs and our affections. It's poking us in all of those places all the time to change and transform people. And if we're thinking about how does that change take place? What happens there? Certainly God's spirit is at work, but the truth of scripture is being worked into our experience and in our way of understanding the world. And that means actually engaging with how these truths from the Bible affect my day-to-day experience as a lawyer or a schoolteacher or as a parent or one of any other thousand things that we can name in that space.
Speaker 1:How? What sort of application, then, are you arguing we should engage in?
Speaker 2:Well, if I want to go back one step, dominic.
Speaker 2:I think I would say that my argument is really that the Bible what's the Bible doing, the truth about who God is and who Jesus is is the same and it's constant all the way through scripture.
Speaker 2:But the apostle Paul didn't write one letter with 37 interesting points about God and Jesus and kind of get the scribes to work because he didn't have a photocopier and kind of send that to the church. Or throughout he addresses different churches in different circumstances of life, saying if you were someone who loved Jesus and had been saved by him and were a follower of him, these are the kinds of theological truths you'd grab for in this space in order to respond to these kinds of issues. So, dominic, in a sense the Bible is kind of apprenticing you to work out what are the intuitions and beliefs and affections and practices that characterize the Christian life, and it does it by putting you in different concrete contexts and then inviting you to think about how those things interrelate and form a set of beliefs and affections and behaviors that are genuinely Christian, that genuinely live out your life under the Lordship of.
Speaker 1:Jesus, and so I think how you've argued that. Where's that in the Bible?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question For me. There's a couple of passages that were really significant for me in writing the thesis. So I find Titus II really fascinating in that he says teach what's in accord with sound doctrine there in chapter 2, verse 1. And then the whole rest of the chapter. I'm theologically trained. I'm thinking what's in accord with sound doctrine? Atonement, ecclesiology, you know, etc. Etc. Etc, etc. And he goes well, this is what you should say to the older men about how they live. And this is what you should say to the younger men and these women. This is what you should say to them. And the slaves? This is how you should talk to the slaves. And it's all, and it doesn't finish with the last line teach what's in accord with sound doctrine.
Speaker 1:again, he kind of pops and tails it.
Speaker 2:He basically comes back to that at the very end. And then at the end of the section, in verses 11 to 14, there's a beautiful description of the gospel, right when he says the grace of God has appeared and it teaches us to say no to ungodliness and yes to righteousness. But right at the end there's that little, because you're waiting for Jesus. So Jesus has come. Once he's coming back again, you're living as his servant. But what did he come to do? He came basically the passage says two things to redeem you from lawlessness and to purify you to do good works.
Speaker 2:And so when Paul teaches people about who Jesus is and what his lordship means, that's never divorced from the shape of the Christian life. Knowing what to do as a follower of Jesus isn't just automatic. It's not like we all know exactly what it's supposed to be and you just find Jesus and now, of course, you just do the right thing. But there is a reshaping of our hearts and minds and affections. And if you think about the New Testament, right, you think about how often Paul gives you those lists of virtues and vices or he gets into. You know, in Ephesians four and five, don't lie. Let the thief work with his hands and give to his neighbor. The concrete reality of that is part of experiencing and seeing the goodness of what it means to live under the Lordship of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Okay, so how do I do it? I mean as you say that I think right, okay, I know what to do if I'm teaching an application in Titus two. I've got that clear Sure. But my personal Bible reading this year has been Jeremiah, and I'm up to chapter 25 in Jeremiah and I'm feeling pretty beaten about in Jeremiah. Yeah absolutely, and I am sort of and I do a little five minute video every morning and I've been saying the same thing in terms of application for pretty much 25 chapters.
Speaker 1:And I'm thinking, wow, I'm glad our church is not teaching through Jeremiah 25 weeks in a row at the moment. So I'm a little bit stuck.
Speaker 2:I have a friend who I believe at the end of his series on Jeremiah, his father said to him that was great, Don't do it again.
Speaker 1:Well, I have worked out. I did work out. I needed to take a break from Jeremiah, just for my own sake, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean part of me wonders whether we need to. We need to be more sensitive to literature. It's not just every book. I'm going to do every chapter of every book. There are sections, there are chunks, there are ways that the scripture works together to shape beliefs and affections and behavior. So partly it's in something like one or two kings, for example.
Speaker 2:I think the repetition of the evil and stuff is part of what creates the purpose and function of what's going on. But I think one of the things that I invite people to be thinking about when one of my big observations about people when they first start leading Bible study or preaching is that basically, you ask them, what are you going to teach from this passage? And they give you a summary of the content of your passage. Right, and we're very good at that. Even our like first year university students when I trained them to how to lead a Bible study group, they could summarize the content of the passage.
Speaker 2:But the author didn't write that content in order to share content. The author wrote that content in order to persuade you about something, to challenge disbelief, to encourage belief, to challenge a certain behavior, to ask you to repent and put off the old self to put on the new self he was trying to form in you, a person who loved what God loves and hate what God hates, and with a desire to actually live that out and put it into practice in your life. And so, when we come to even engaging with the text, the question that we're trying to ask is not just what are the contents of this passage, but what was the author trying to do with the content of this passage in the hearts and minds of the people who were hearing it?
Speaker 1:So I'm just thinking to Timothy 3 is to attribute correct and try and absolutely and make wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. But are you saying that I'm doing too much? Make wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus and not enough to attribute correct train.
Speaker 2:I mean, I do think that that is our tendency.
Speaker 1:And that you need to come to.
Speaker 2:Christ today. Yeah, that's right. I mean, peter Jensen is lovely when you're biased as a supporter, aren't they? But by your friends.
Speaker 2:But Peter kind of says there is a thing that we do with biblical theology, for example, where we say, basically everything in the Old Testament is about the, is about forgiveness, it's about the atonement, and so, whatever it's saying, you need to be forgiven today. Now, there is a deep truth to that. And if that's not the heartbeat because I think that lies behind the nature of grace, right, so if that's not the heartbeat of what we're doing, then we're missing something. But Paul very, very regularly wants to say to people, as someone who has experienced the grace of Jesus put off the old self, put on the new self. So there's this lovely little, these two little words that I learned from a guy called Dryden.
Speaker 2:I'm in a lovely little book called the Hermione of Wisdom, where he talks about the Bible, is trying to make the Christian life intelligible and desirable, he's trying to make it make sense and he's trying to help your heart to long for that. There is something good about living with Jesus as Lord. So as I teach you this passage, what I want to do is to show you how the truths in this passage relate to each other. To help you to change your belief, to reinforce something that you have believed or to believe something different from what you believed, I want to challenge you to think about. How does this match up with what you're confronted with in the world every day, and how do you cling to this when this is what the people around about you are saying this is true and this is what's going to be helpful.
Speaker 1:Show me where's that word. I mean that desire word. What's the verse that's in?
Speaker 2:Well, again, I wouldn't say it's in a particular verse, I mean it feels right to me.
Speaker 1:I just want to.
Speaker 2:Well. So I think it's for me the place. If you go and read some of the Puritans, what they're saying is the ministry of the word is not just to the mind, you're not just trying to give someone cognition, you're trying to shape someone's heart. So, very interestingly, when you look at the lists of virtues and vices, paul doesn't say look, there are these evil things jealousy, rage, malice, etc. Etc. Fix those up by thinking nice thoughts or just change your mind, but you're supposed to replace those things with love and kindness and generosity and compassion or whatever is lovely, whatever is.
Speaker 1:Think about those things Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So I mean there's a few key things there. That is, the Bible never separates your mind and heart in the way that we do in our culture. Your heart thinks and feels it is either rebellious or it's turned towards God, and your heart is transformed as you actually take on the truth and appropriate it and live it out. You know, james, the person who only hears and walks away and does nothing with it. That's foolishness, that's complete foolishness.
Speaker 1:The line in 2, timothy 3, teacher rebuke, correct and train, and then the preachers to do the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yes, in fact, to 4. To 4, verses 1 and 2. So, on the very back of having said to Timothy you're living in the last days, you have the Word of God which does all of these things, and then he says there's this incredible, the power of it in light of the coming judgment and Jesus' return. And what should you do? Reach the Word that famous in season and out of season. Then he uses three words that map almost directly onto the four words that he's used to describe scripture before Timothy, in relationship with people, do what the Bible is doing with them. And what that means is that when I come to preach, it's not me saying, oh, this, is God saying this. I'm not saying this.
Speaker 2:Actually, the biblical position of the pastor is I am saying this because God is saying this. So I'm going to exhort you, I'm going to challenge you, I'm going to invite you to be delighted. I'm going to speak things that are difficult. I'm going to do that in relationship with you, with the scriptures open, but there's not a gap, there's not. I teach you the Bible and then the Spirit magically does something that kind of translates that into your reality. But I'm supposed to preach that truth in a way that convicts, engages, persuades, shapes, remolds. You always, always dependent upon God at work in that space. But that must and can only happen when we actually get concrete, when we start to talk about the ins and outs of people's lives and when these truths become hard to believe or how these truths are so good for people who are struggling and finding life difficult or whatever else it is. We've got to connect the truth of scripture with people's experience, because that's where they live out the reality that Jesus has lord in their life.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I'm getting passionate about it. It sounds like you've been on a journey on this issue.
Speaker 2:I think definitely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and you've changed your own practice on this issue as well.
Speaker 2:I think I have. I think it's interesting. I go back and read some of my early sermons and realise that I was very, very keenly involved in getting the exegetical details exactly right, and I do wonder whether there is some development that happens in this over any preacher and past his life. Just for me now, two decades worth of ins and outs of people's lives has helped me realise that what I'm teaching in the Bible affects and impacts real people in the real world. But nevertheless, I hope that I haven't stopped working hard and understanding what the text actually says. But I think that as we preach it, there is a move and I'm going to use very dangerous language here, but I'm using it consciously. There is a step beyond the text, as you actually bring these truths to bear on the hearts and minds of the people that you're speaking to. It's a move that's controlled theologically, that's controlled by context, that's controlled by scripture, but it is still a move beyond the text and I think the New Testament does it all the time.
Speaker 1:Well, let me be vulnerable and you can critique me. I think a few years ago, if you look at my sermon outline, the sermon outlines of talks I've done up until maybe five or six years ago, you'd see Jesus comes to Jerusalem that would be point two, and Jesus cleans the temple, or something like that. But then if I think of state explain, illustrate, apply, I'd Now, instead of saying Jesus clears the temple versus 1 to 7, you'd have the application line and verses 1 to 7. And I'd actually be asserting the application line and then speaking to the text.
Speaker 2:It's interesting isn't it. So even there's a shift there, right? You might say instead of Jesus clears the temple, Jesus is zealously angry against sin. That changes the shape of that. Or you might even say Jesus is zealously angry about your sin.
Speaker 1:He cares about us not being sinful.
Speaker 2:Whatever it is that you put in that space.
Speaker 2:And I think again that is absolutely right and it's part of the. We're not just dealing conceptually, right. So I think lots of people use illustrations to explain complex ideas or to make some things clearer. Illustrations are actually application. Illustrations are concrete. For me, nearly all the time Illustrations are about. This is what it looks like when you take these truths seriously and you start to put it into practice in your life. This is why this is beautiful. Let me tell you a story about how this thing in real life and how beautiful and good that is, and how thankful we are that God's given us this truth.
Speaker 1:And if you've come to a conviction and you're a senior teacher of future theological.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to say I'm a future teacher of preachers and pastors who actually need to love people on the ground and bring the word of God to bear.
Speaker 1:What are you doing about it, apart from advising me in this conversation?
Speaker 2:Well, at college over the last few years we've been working really hard at rewriting a curriculum and part of that conversation has been how do we do more of getting students to engage with the problems of ministry life and bring the word to bear in those spaces, rather than just kind of learning it as an academic exercise? Now, to be fair, if I'm honest with you, I don't think that my lecturers at college were any less committed to that as a thing. I just think we've become more aware of perhaps our habits and the ways that that trains people, and we tended to do so like at college you would write an exegetical paper on this passage. Now we say write an exegetical paper on this passage, write a sermon outline, explain how you got from the exegetical work that you did to the sermon outline and why it matters. So we're actually trying to connect all of those dots together for people rather than move them out into the exhaloes.
Speaker 1:It does also feel like learning styles. I mean in terms of I just remember thinking, if I want my sermon to connect with people with different learning styles, I can't just stay in theoretician kind of mode. I've got to end up in application and there's really a clear I'm just going to stop you there just briefly.
Speaker 2:Learning styles may ping on some people in the education space. Learning styles as a thing has been a little bit debunked in the education space in the last little while. So there's like kinesthetic learners and auditory learners and visual learners and whatever. When you actually look at the information, it doesn't matter which one you are and which mode is used. That doesn't affect the outcome for students in terms of memory and learning. What does is if you use multiple modes together, everybody learns better.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? Why do you think it's the case or I think it's the case that the Pentecostal Church will have a congregation made up of a learning style that is different to the evangelical church? I'll just make that broad, classic, major assumption.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in God's kindness, it's not true everywhere, dominic, I agree with the generalization. I think in part it's partly to do with the difference between being a professional and a business runner. Anglicanism has traditionally produced people who become professionals, not who run their own small business, and I think that that's partly to do with our educational background. At whatever when I do there, there's a lovely little thing that Colb uses where he talks about.
Speaker 2:Adult learning is about having an experience, reflecting on it, thinking about how it fits with your worldview, trying something different and having a go and then starting again around the cycle. And you've got to go round and round. That's how we learn. That's how it works. When I talk to students at university about that cycle and what they do, well, most of their learning is the sitting and thinking bit and most of them have gotten to uni because they're particularly good at that sort of thinking bit, like they've been predisposed. Some very intelligent people that I know who have found the schooling system very, very hard to navigate because the way that they function and engage in the world is very different from the model of learning that we give people, and I think that our churches to some extent reflect the cultures that we've been shaped by.
Speaker 1:And how can we preach in such a way to appeal to a broader group of people than the narrow group we've been preaching to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, all I want to say is that if you believe that God's trying to show people the richness and goodness of living under Jesus's Lord and the whole of life under him, then you've got to preach the Bible in a way that you're not talking about an academic exercise. I don't want to tell you what Paul said to the Galatians. I want to tell you what God's saying to you. If we take that seriously, then we need to sit and engage with the text, and I haven't finished engaging with the meaning of the text until I've actually worked out what's this going to mean? Shape change, mold, do for the people that I'm speaking to, because I think that that's God's purpose in terms of what the scriptures are doing. If I get to the end of my exegesis and think right now I'm right to write a sermon outline, I haven't finished.
Speaker 1:The task is what I would say so do you find? That I find it so difficult to get the actual meaning right that it's only when that I'm therefore squeezing out the thinking time about application. But I also find that the magic happens in terms of me thinking about the people in the last 24 hours before the sermon, whereas the work about understanding the text, in a sense, I can do anytime, do you know? But it's actually the closer I get to the moment.
Speaker 2:But I think one of the things I would say about that but I would say that that last bit that you're doing is an essential element of actually bringing the text to bear and engaging with the meaning of the text. So John Frayme does this lovely little thing where he says imagine two people are talking about the eighth commandment do not steal. And one of them goes I actually think embezzlement that's included in that commandment. And another guy goes no, that embezzlement is a different kind of thing. It doesn't fit under the commandment. They're not talking about some application of the commandment subsequent to the meaning. They are actually still talking about the meaning of the commandment as they talk about what they believe it means and does in the world in front of them. So we actually need to believe that that part of the thinking and engagement that we do as preachers actually ought to drive us back into the text. We ought to be asking questions like would the apostle who wrote this recognize what I'm saying to people in front of me as being a valid and helpful application of the truths that are here in the text that he was talking about? Or would he not Even simply asking that question and then realizing we dig back?
Speaker 2:So in the last three weeks of college with second year I've been talking about our doctrine of sin, and this last week we just looked at a whole heap of concrete scenarios about what we believe, about how sin works. What do you do with sin in the life of a leader Because you believe in sinfulness? Should you treat everyone with suspicion or you should you assume incompetence rather than malice? As we talked about it, we realized it's not like. When we got there we had walked away from our doctrine of sin. That caused us to keep going back and thinking well, what do we believe about sin?
Speaker 2:Where does the Bible say that? But we were talking about the concrete enacting of those things in life in the world, and that was part of actually digging deeply into an understanding richly the doctrine which we possess. And so I just want to keep saying to people that bit where you think you're doing the application and it's supposed to be kind of subsequent to this, I think you can actually engage in it in a way that drives you back into the text and says is this what the text is talking about? Does this cause me to see things in the text that I haven't seen yet, as I'm thinking about my people being spoken to by God through this text. How does that shape and mould? You can use that as part of the process of engaging deeply in the meaning of the text, rather than being something that you do after you've gotten the first bit right.
Speaker 1:You've written a course to try and help people to do better in this.
Speaker 2:Well, my thesis was about actually trying to improve application in student preaching. So I had some volunteer fourth year students who came and did eight weeks with me as I tried to give them some theory and practical advice about what to do with it. And we surveyed them before and after and looked at results and whatever, and found significant shifts in terms of their behaviour, in terms of time that they allotted to what kinds of activities in their preparation process, when they did what, how they engaged the text personally, as well as thinking about their congregation, all of that kind of stuff and you're going to turn that course into a book.
Speaker 2:Well, the plan, dominic is. I have, in God's great kindness, more college. Gives me some study leave every four years and mines the second half of this year. And, god willing, pray please. The aim is to try and turn this into something that's usable for people on the ground, and I'm looking at it.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to it and benefiting from it. Paul Grimman, thanks so much for coming in. Paul Grimman has been my guest. He's the Dean of Students at Sydney's Moore Theological College and my name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastors Heart. We will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.