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You have sat under Bible teaching for years — careful, accurate, well-organized Bible teaching — and yet something is missing. The word has informed you. It has not undone you. And you are beginning to wonder if that is simply the way it is, or if something has been lost.

In this first conversation between Michael Durham and his longtime friend, Mack Tomlinson, the two men put their finger on one of the most consequential distinctions in the life of the modern church: the difference between teaching and preaching. It is not a small distinction. Teaching imparts information; preaching seeks an encounter. The teacher wants the congregation to understand something. The preacher wants them to meet Someone. And when that difference is blurred — when excellent doctrinal instruction is mistaken for the thing the New Testament calls preaching — the result is churches that are, in Durham's words, at the greatest height of theological knowledge they have ever known and hollow experientially at the same time.

Durham and Tomlinson trace this drift to the rise of the Bible Church movement in the early twentieth century, the narrowing of expository preaching to mean verse-by-verse commentary, and the loss of what the great preachers of previous centuries called a word from God — that burden over a text, in prayer, before a man dares to stand and declare it. Spurgeon did not preach until a text had, in his own words, bitten him. Whitefield, McCheyne, Bonar, Rowland — men rarely preached through books of the Bible. They preached a word they believed God had given them for that congregation, on that Lord's Day, at that hour. The recovery of that conviction, these two men argue, is not a minor adjustment. It may be the most urgent need in evangelical pulpits today.

In This Episode

• What the New Testament word for preaching actually means — and why the image of a herald changes everything
• Why a man can be an excellent teacher and not a preacher, and why the church desperately needs both to be distinguished
• How the Bible Church movement, for all its doctrinal faithfulness, contributed to the loss of true preaching in America
• What the classical definition of expository preaching actually is — and why most seminary students today have never heard it
• Why Spurgeon said he did not have the gifts necessary to preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible — and what that should do to our assumptions
• What it means for a preacher to have a word from God, why that language frightens Reformed people, and why it shouldn't

A congregation cannot encounter the living God through information alone — and the men who knew this best were the men who refused to enter a pulpit until they had first been broken open by what they were about to proclaim.