Acts 18:1-5 - Should pastors spend all their time preaching?

“When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.”

What’s the role of a Senior Leader? There’s loads of things that need to get done: Staff/Volunteer line management, Admin, Pastoral visits, Leadership Development to name just a few. Of course, we all know that preaching is one of them.

Now I’ve usually been one of those people that would advise Senior Leaders to preach less and spend more time leading by setting vision, developing team and other things, but reading this, along with the Apostles’ in Acts chapter 6 who gave their time to the ministry of the Word and prayer, I’m going to spend this article investigating whether I should re-address my position. So forgive me whilst I think aloud in this article.

I watched a fascinating video by the late, great Tim Keller (you can also read something similar here) about his sermon preparation routine. Basically the routine was this:

• 4 hours exegeting a passage
• 4 hours turning it from a Bible Study into a Preach
• 8 hours revising it in a word-for-word format
• 9 hours Preaching it 4 times on a Sunday

He worked that out as 25 hours to prepare and deliver one preach. No wonder he was world class at it. But that’s a lot of time. In a 40-hour week, that’s almost 63% of his working week on preaching alone. Is preaching worth 63% of a Senior Leader’s time? Well let’s assume “yes” for now and see what benefit we might get from this.

1.  Spiritual Formation can occur on a Sunday

I’ve been long wrestling with the role of preaching on a Sunday. Sunday services have changed over time to be more of a “shop window” for the church. This means that midweek activities must do more of the heavily lifting in the sense of Spiritual Formation. We expect people from all different backgrounds with completely different levels of Biblical knowledge. But when everyone is there, and the message is of significant quality, Spiritual Formation can become a Sunday activity. Should the leader be able to spend more time in prep, the preach should be of a higher quality, at least theoretically.

This of course assumes that the preach is going to be formational in nature. The trend, especially amongst more evangelical/Pentecostal is that preaches are having less of a formation on people, and more of an inspirational rallying quality to it. I’ve got no problem with that per se. So it will completely depend on the leader’s style as to whether the message will lend itself to spiritual formation or not. If the pastor is like Keller i.e. a Teacher, then it makes sense to lean into that.

2.  Culture is set

Another good advantage I can see with a leader spending time on preaching is that the culture of the church can be set much more easily. Think about it, if they are hearing the leader speak for 30 minutes every week, you can really be intentional about talking about the way you want the church to be.

Ok, well what about the downsides?

1.  Church becomes Sunday oriented

If 63% of your time is spent focusing on the 1 hour a week rather than the other 167 hours, you inadvertently make your church service the biggest thing. It becomes the thing that everything orients itself around. Now as I said, if the preacher can combine the talk with things that will be of significant depth, this can be a good thing, but if this is not the speaker’s gifting, you’re creating something where all the effort goes into something that is only a shop window. That can make a shallow church, as the leader’s effort isn’t thinking about how the church is growing spiritually but instead how new people are brought it. Again, that’s not bad in-and-of-itself, but extra work needs to happen outside of it.

2.  The church loses its evangelistic edge

This is also true. If every meeting is a deep dive into the meaning of the book of Habakkuk, is that going to be engaging for newcomers? I don’t know. Clearly for Keller, this wasn’t an issue, as his church was evangelistically very strong.

My Conclusion so far

Here’s my conclusion so far: I think that it is worth the time, but it comes with a number of caveats.

Caveat 1: Your preaching needs to be theologically deep and evangelistically wide

If you want to do a Paul, or a Tim Keller, and spend almost all your time preaching, you better make it good. And good for me means that it must be both deep and evangelistic. It must be deep in the sense that it unlocks a passage and gives great insight into the text itself, but also the context, and it must be evangelistic in that it speaks to the culture we are in and leads people to Jesus.

It means that the preparation must be really, and I mean really, good. There was a lot of talk a few years ago about church services needing to be ‘deep and wide’ – but I found that the proponents of this approach weren’t particularly deep. There was a lot of life-application stuff, but not a lot of formation. This is not the case everywhere, Keller was a great example of someone who, for me did this excellently.

It means that we need to be talking about deep theological issues but make it relevant, and when I mean relevant I don’t mean funny videos, I mean diagnosing and dissecting modern culture, explaining to people how we got here and how to interpret the times through a new lens, the lens of Jesus.

Caveat 2: You need Silas and Timothy

Paul was able to start only preaching when Silas and Timothy arrived. The passage doesn’t say what they were doing, so I’ll translate this into a modern context straight away. All we know is that Paul had people he could trust so that he could focus solely on preaching.

Today, I think that role is found in the Executive Pastor Role. What’s an Executive Pastor? An Executive Pastor is the essentially the CEO of the church. He (or she) is the one who leads the staff, delivers on objectives, develops key leaders and keeps the whole church running. It is basically taking all of the practical roles off the Senior Leader so he can focus solely on preaching.

A church is primarily an organism, not an organisation, but there are certainly organisational elements to a church. In that sense, if the Senior Leader is the heart and the mouth, the Executive Pastor is the brain.

Caveat 3: The Celebrity Trap

There’s been a big move in recent years to ‘teaching teams’ – where you have 3 to 5 primary speakers rather than one. This has the benefit of sharing the load. If you preach every week it’s 63% of your time, whereas if you preach once a month it is 16% of your time per month. It also has the added benefit of fighting against the temptation of “personality driven churches”. Humans love putting people on pedestals and the more profiled one person is, the more it becomes a danger that the one person get put into an ‘untouchable’ state, which is unhealthy for any person, let alone a church leader. And this isn’t just a megachurch thing, it can affect churches of all sizes (it’s worth saying that I’m a fan of churches of all sizes!)

Final Conclusion

Having weighed up the evidence, I think that there is a benefit to high quality preaching. It’s needed more than ever. But with the dangers that come from having only one main speaker, I think it is better to use a teaching team. That means that, unlike Paul, don’t spend all of your time preaching. Preach less, but better. Of course this pre-supposes that the Paul’s preaching was primarily in the church service, but I don’t think that’s true. His preaching was in the market place whilst he was selling tents, it would have been in the local synagogue, convincing the Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. Much of Paul’s preaching would have looked a lot like a pastor having a part-time job and speaking to people at work. In that sense, I think in that Senior Leaders can learn an awful lot from Paul.