I think preaching is really important. Paul's final chapter of the New Testament centres on a charge to 'preach the word'. The preached word is the heartbeat of a local church life, as God comes to address his people.
Today we can download Piper, Driscoll etc and spend our weeks listening to their sermons. My guess is that there are some (young/male) Christians who spend all week working through the archives of these guys, and then whole loads more who've never done that. I used to listen to quite a lot of their mp3s but I think I can probably count on one hand the number I've listened to this year. I still download sermons to aid my own sermon preparation, either to help with my exegesis, as a form of audio commentary, or to help with my communication skills by exposing me to different ways of preaching. I also download for more educational reasons from Theology Network, Bethinking etc, but a Sunday sermon is surely meant for something more. Something special goes…
Today we can download Piper, Driscoll etc and spend our weeks listening to their sermons. My guess is that there are some (young/male) Christians who spend all week working through the archives of these guys, and then whole loads more who've never done that. I used to listen to quite a lot of their mp3s but I think I can probably count on one hand the number I've listened to this year. I still download sermons to aid my own sermon preparation, either to help with my exegesis, as a form of audio commentary, or to help with my communication skills by exposing me to different ways of preaching. I also download for more educational reasons from Theology Network, Bethinking etc, but a Sunday sermon is surely meant for something more. Something special goes…