What’s the Difference Between Preaching and Teaching?

23 And he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. 24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them. 25 And great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan. (Matthew 4:23 - 25 RSV – all scripture is taken from the RSV unless otherwise noted)

 

So why is Jesus doing both preaching and teaching? What’s the difference between the two? We who have been thoroughly churched have come to believe that preaching is what one person, generally in some sort of denominational garb (although Rick Warren dumbed that down to a Hawaiian shirt and maybe some flip-flops) does from the front (that’s the pulpit, a sort of Jesus-blessed pitcher’s mound) of the church building, and that only happens on Sunday morning. The people the preacher (who is also known in more polite circles as the pastor, rector, or a bunch of other names that are incomprehensible to people outside of your denomination) speaks to are the sheep, (who else would a shepherd speak to?) which is to say in non-churchy language, the members of the church, or believers in Jesus. The subject can be manifold, but what we are used to is a sort of nice, tame, moral hygiene. If the pastor is more worked up, he might get into some invitations to soul-searching or even some condemnation of sorts, hopefully geared toward leading people to repentance and faith. What’s the difference between preaching and teaching? If you ask a lot of expert preachers and pastors, the answer is a little fuzzy, but seems to boil down to that if the pastor has eaten his Wheaties, he preaches, and if he has just had a couple rice crackers with skim oat milk, he only teaches.

 

But what I hope we’ll find in the pages below is that according to the guide for radicals known as the New Testament, (today we’ll just start with all the relevant verses from the Gospel of Matthew, to keep it simple) preaching is generally done outside of the church building, even in the streets. It’s not done on a holy day or in a holy place, because it is essentially speaking to unbelievers, not to believers. The message is short, and it’s focused on repentance, belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and the missionary message of the Gospel addressed to the unreached people of the world. By contrast, teaching is what is done in the traditional building (place) and time of worship, addressed to believers, i.e., religious insiders, and is generally a longer, more detailed explanation of the how, what, and why of living the life of being a Jesus-follower.

 

Why is this contrast between preaching and teaching important? First, the New Testament especially, but the Bible in general, is incredibly terse and compact. The greatest story ever told, and what is reportedly the longest parable in the New Testament, is still only about 500 words, which is less than one single-spaced page in #12 font! (Luke 15:11-31, the Prodigal Son) The creation of every animal, mineral, and vegetable in the universe takes less than a page in the book of Genesis. So why would the Spirit of God dictating the words of the New Testament waste words speaking of both “preaching” and “teaching”, (they are often both used in the same sentence: “and Jesus went all through that area preaching the Gospel and teaching in their synagogues…”) unless there were some essential difference between the two?

 

My goal in writing this is to set preaching free of the chains it’s been locked up in. Thousands of Godly martyrs lived and died fighting to liberate the written Word of God from its chains that it was (literally) fastened to the pulpit with in the medieval church. Thousands more lived and died to free the word from its metaphoric chains inside the monasteries and ivory towers by translating it into the vernacular. Today we have so many vernacular bibles that Tim Hawkins says that The Message Bible has a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. But our preaching is still chained to the pulpit. We “preach” inside church buildings, speaking primarily to believers. Although many pastors are gifted as evangelists, and are preaching messages designed to lead people to repentance and faith, (conversion) they are primarily speaking to believers, in the church building, and almost exclusively on Sunday morning. Preaching is not named in the New Testament as a spiritual gift, but since it is associated in most cases with the message of “The Good News”, aka, the Gospel, we should associate preaching with the gifted ministry of evangelists, one of the “big five” categories of gifted ones in Ephesians 4. But these gifted evangelists have been chained to the pulpit by our custom and culture that “preaching” is done in the church building. Preaching has been chained to the pulpit by our custom that “preaching” is in front of believers rather than unbelievers. Preaching has been chained to the pulpit in that our messages that we “preach” are generally long, complex, and directed toward the formed thinking of believers rather than toward the culture formed by the world outside, through which we of necessity must speak to reach unbelievers.

 

My goal in writing this is clarify the vocabulary of preaching and teaching in the Gospels, and by so doing to free preaching from the pulpit and put it back in the place it is in Jesus’ ministry, that is, in the streets. My goal is that at least some ordinary believers would come to realize that God sees them as preachers, that is, evangelists, and learn to proclaim the truth of the Gospel in the public square, that is to say, in meetings from a simple coffee with a friend up to a classroom, a courtroom, a stadium, a street corner, wherever it is that the Spirit of God shows up and calls them to enter the public domain with the Truth of the Gospel. My goal is that preaching would be released into the open air of the world, where it can challenge, convict, recruit, deliver, convince, cleanse, and as Jesus says: “…draw ALL men to Myself”. At the same time, I hope to clarify what the Gospels clearly show, that Kingdom teaching equipped by the Spirit of God releases people into their ministries, equips believers with the gifts, leads them into “all truth”, and is done with authority and power that can only come from God.

 

So what’s the evidence for all these points above? There are about 10 uses of the Greek word for preaching (“kerousso” – to proclaim, announce or preach) in the Gospel of Matthew, and about ten more uses of the word for teaching (“didasko” – to teach) Let’s start with the passage quoted above, under the title, Matthew 4:23-25. It is repeated almost word-for-word in Matthew 9:35ff.:  “And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity.” So we can think of these as the clearest examples of the contrast between preaching and teaching in the first account of Jesus’ life and ministry. The first important contrast is that both of these passages say that Jesus was “…teaching in their synagogues…”. If “in their synagogues” applied to both teaching and preaching, it would have been placed after the word ‘preaching’. Synagogues were the sabbath day places of regular worship. For the Jewish believer in the day of Jesus, this was the ‘church building’, which had become the place of worship for all but big national festivals which demanded presence at the Temple. These people would have been a mixture of believers in Jesus as Messiah and just believers in Jehovah God, but they would have been generally believers in a similar way to those worshipping in church buildings today.

 

Contrast the above to “preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people.” The phrase “the gospel of the kingdom” is loaded with buckshot. This means Jesus’ entire ministry of preaching, healing, delivering from demonic oppression, and redeeming the people he says he was called to. There have been books written about this phrase, most notably by George Eldon Ladd, and more recently Frank Viola. I’m sure there are many others. Suffice it to say for now that when Jesus is preaching the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’, it means that all heaven is breaking loose. Imagine crowds of people, some of whom have come on days or weeks’ journeys, some being carried or led by others. There are people stumbling, hobbling, laid on stretchers, blind, lame, paralytics, deaf, diseased, leprous, demon-possessed, haunted, hungry, and desperately seeking.

 

Where do these people find Jesus? If we look at the major stories of healing from the Gospels, we see that all heaven is breaking loose on the sides of well-traveled roads, where clutches of blind men shout out to him to stop and heal them, or on beaches or mountainsides, where crowds have followed him on land while he tried to get away by boat. There are paralytics lowered through the roofs of homes, there are desperately ill women who touch his garment in the street while he is smothered by crowds, synagogue leaders who throw themselves at his feet while he is walking somewhere else. This is the Gospel of the Kingdom as we see Jesus proclaiming it through both words and deeds. Jesus himself even equated His words with the works He did, empowered by the Father: “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” (John 14:10b) The preaching of the Gospel in this sense of both works and words, and particularly in the sense of healing and deliverance ministry, in all the examples above as well as many more, (I can think of only one miracle done in the synagogue, to the man with the withered hand) took place in open air, in homes, but certainly not inside the exclusive worship space.

 

So what does the message of “preaching the Good News of the Kingdom” look like? (“Gospel” is the result, filtered through Old English “God-spell” of the Greek word “eu-angellion”, meaning “good news”…) Start from the first story in Matthew 4:17, of Jesus preaching: “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” That’s it. In what Matthew records, it’s a 5-second message. Mark broadens the same story out to a 4-point message of 15 seconds: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” Regardless, the point should be clear: preaching is short and to the point, and focuses on the presence of God through His Kingdom, and the one universal decision all of us need to make to enter into that presence: to believe in the Good News of who Jesus is. The bar we have to get under in order to accept that good news is the bar of repentance. We can’t enter into the Kingdom with the pride of our own sin puffing us up. So there are two characteristics of Jesus’ first preached message recorded, that it was very short, and that it was focused on repentance and faith in the Good News.

 

When I committed my life to Jesus as a teenager, exceptional speakers would teach in church for 20-30 minutes. I believe Billy Graham preached in his prime for about 30 minutes. My spiritual dad was a quippy unassuming Presbyterian minister, a teacher who typed his short 15-minute messages in all caps on 2 half sheets of paper. There is an alarming trend today that many people who are thought of as the best speakers in the Antioch movement, as well as Bethel Church, Tim Keller before he passed away, and Andy Stanley among many others, who may say they are preaching, but take 30-40 minutes, sometimes up to an hour. By the definition of place, length of message, and themes noted above, I would say they are almost invariably teaching, not preaching. As a lifetime educator, I can tell you that many experts have verified that listening to someone else speak there is a limit of the amount of taught information we can receive, and that limit is far under 30 minutes. 5 minutes might be generous for an average adult. That is not to say that no one will ever scintillate our imaginations, present compelling word-pictures, and even motivate or chasten our hearts and minds for 40 minutes or more. The problem is that the few people who can do this effectively create a paradigm that all the rest of us cannot follow effectively. David Beckham could score goals kicking a ball well over 50 yards. Does that mean that every Saturday pickup soccer player who’s got some cleats and has played a few years should be shooting outside of the half line? He might not have any friends on his team if he does!

 

But let’s keep it simple and Biblical. Find any recorded message from one person in one sitting which is over 15 minutes. I can only think of one, and it is not recorded for the sake of mercy on all of us, but it nearly cost dear little Eutychus his life as Paul droned on literally all night. I guess that meeting did not have child care provided! I would say that story is recorded to show Paul’s incredible passion, love for the people, and energy level, but also to warn us about long-winded teachings, especially around kids! We today are making a habit of killing people with boredom and keeping them way beyond their capacity to effectively listen or imbibe something that they can actually know, understand, or follow/obey. If we are going to effectively preach in public, we should follow scripted or paraphrased accounts of Jesus, Peter, Paul, and others, and aim for a 5-minute message at most. If we hope to be effective teachers, the only script I know of is Jesus’ teaching* on the Mount, which might be 20-25 minutes, even embellished with segways. (*sermon is not a Biblical word, and is not in the text, it is a paragraph heading added later, and comes from an Old English word, not a word from the actual text—as a word describing our teaching or preaching, it sets us up to aim for long, boring, and irrelevant to all but academic and highly motivated adult listeners) There is one way to give a “holy kiss” to our listeners: Keep It Short and Simple.

 

Our themes for preaching, if we hope to emulate the preaching of Jesus, Paul, Peter, and others, are much more limited than the many (20 points??) which we see in the “Teaching on the Mount”. Matthew 4:17 limits it to two: “The Kingdom of God is at hand”, and “Repent”. As noted above, Mark broadens the same message out to 4 points, which include “The time is fulfilled” and “Believe in the Good News”. Again, returning to the verses quoted at the beginning, this is the “Preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom…” This short, pithy phrase includes two of the four points mentioned by Mark, Good News, and repent. So from what we have seen so far, preaching is shorter and more to the point than teaching, and preaching demands a response. (to be clear, I don’t believe we have the complete transcript for any preached message in the New Testament, with the possible exception of Paul in the book of Acts. Jesus’ preaching noted above we likely only have bullet-point summaries. On Pentecost, we have a part of the “script” of Peter’s preaching, but the author also says that “With many other such words, Peter…” It is likely the same with many other such recorded messages, so we don’t know their actual time, but we can infer their simplicity of theme and minimal points)

 

This “preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom” with words and wonders was in front of many people who were at least historically not known to be Jewish believers, or even having a grid for Jesus as the Messiah. These crowds, Matthew writes, were from all Syria, Galilee, the Decapolis … and from beyond the Jordan. These places were not all Jewish settlements. Although Jesus stated and acted on his calling to “The lost sheep of Israel”, he was also an at-times reluctant itinerant evangelist and healer to other people groups.

 

The story of the woman at the well recounted in John 4 is a type for this ministry to non-believing people groups. Jesus is traveling through Samaria with his disciples, and encounters a woman coming alone to fill her water jugs at the local well where Jesus is resting. She calls herself a Samaritan and notes the difference between her own faith history and Jesus’. When he offers her a perceptive “word of knowledge” about her conjugal history, she immediately goes back to her village and becomes a preacher who initially leads the whole town to come and learn from Jesus. Although the New Testament does not call her a preacher, her proclamation is simple and clear: “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did; could this be the Messiah?”. There are basically two points, and although it may be a synopsis, anyone could say this in 15 seconds. Jesus’ “preaching” to her is a prophetic word, followed by a few truths about where the true word of God comes from and his own identity. She is for all practical purposes an unbeliever, but not only changes her life based on his preaching, but also becomes a preacher herself. Once again, her preaching to her community appears to be in the streets and homes, and not on any day or place of religious worship.

 

Now that the general theme and points have been laid out, we can march through all the texts in the Gospel of Matthew and see how they confirm or question the theses above. We’ve already seen the accounts of Jesus preaching in Matthew 4:17 and both teaching and preaching in Matthew 4:23ff. Matt. 9:35 is identical to 4:23, just in a different setting, so we won’t review that again. Jesus’ preaching in the beginning of his ministry actually echoed what John the Baptist was already preaching, as Matthew records in 3:1: “In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As noted above, John is preaching to lead people to a decision regarding repentance and faith in the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

 

Now we move on to ‘The Teaching on the Mount’ beginning in Matthew 5:1. It begins by describing the setting: “Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying…” Although there is likely disagreement about this among Biblical scholars, it appears, depending on the uncertain referent to the pronoun “them” that Jesus was teaching his disciples, not “the crowds”. The major clue is that Jesus sat down before teaching them. The group was described as a “crowd”, and if it is the same group as described in 4:25, it was a “great crowd”. We see from other stories that Jesus was regularly surrounded by crowds of thousands. Regardless of the exact numbers, it would be very strange for him to sit down and try to address a huge crowd, without even a P.A. system; he would have been both invisible and inaudible. The teaching has 2326 words, give or take according to translation. If Jesus spoke at an average rate, it would have taken him 13 to 17 minutes to teach the entire message recorded in Matt. 5-7. We could generously say 20 minutes, verifying the time suggested above for a robust teaching. Even so, without it being recorded, it would have been almost impossible for any persons or groups to recall the whole teaching, since there are so many points. (the BibleProject conservatively finds 11 themes) So to sum up: Jesus is definitely teaching because Matthew said so. The audience (his disciples) are all at least becoming believers in/followers of Jesus as the Christ, the location is in open air, (the “mount”) the day was unlikely the Sabbath, since many of the crowds would not have been allowed to travel long distances on the Sabbath.  There are many, not just a few, subtle points. Jesus’ goal, according to the BibleProject, was to lay out the characteristics of the new life in the Kingdom of God, and although it was spoken with authority, to be obeyed, it was not apparently meant to lead people to a decision to repent and believe in the Gospel.

 

In the midst of the ‘Teaching on the Mount’, Jesus gives strict directives regarding the law and teachers of it. “Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 5:19) So the subject is the fine points of the new law of the Kingdom of God, and He, in the midst of His teaching, shows that other teachers also will have to be accountable for what they teach. They are clearly believers, since both the good and the bad ones will all be known in the Kingdom of Heaven (what Matthew calls the “Kingdom of Heaven” Mark calls “The Kingdom of God”, but they are synonymous, as they appear in the same stories and parables) So teaching concerns the way to live in the coming Kingdom, but not salvation or damnation. Similarly, at the end of the ‘Teaching’, Matthew says that the people were astonished, because Jesus taught them with so much authority, “not as their scribes”. Again, scribes were keepers of the written scriptures, and their teaching was regarding the fine points of the law, but Kingdom teaching should not only have the authority of scholarship, but also the authority that only comes from heaven. Kingdom teaching has in it the authority that Jesus brings to earth.

 

“These twelve Jesus sent out, … to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 And preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ 8 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.”(Matt.10:5-8) Jesus has just named 12 of his disciples also “apostles”, meaning “sent out ones”, then immediately he commissioned them and sent them out  “to the places where he himself had not yet gone”, to the cities of the “lost sheep of Israel”. So we again see that those in the Kingdom are taught, but lost sheep are preached to. The message is exactly the form of Jesus’ first message, which in turn he seems to have taken from John the Baptist’s preaching. As we saw in Matt. 4:23 and 9:35, there is again a juxtaposition of signs and wonders with the preaching of the Good News of the Kingdom. David Garrison recounts in Church Planting Movements (pp.221-238) how a missionary investigator sent to Bihar, India to interview new believers there spoke to 50 new Christians and found that they all knew Jesus as healer before knowing him as savior. Worldwide, the first cause of new believers coming to Jesus is experiencing a miracle or healing. The words “preach as you go”, as well as the context of giving the apostles authority to heal and cast out demons, both imply that the Gospel is being preached in open air, as argued above with Jesus himself. He instructed them to go to these people’s cities and their homes, not to their places of worship.

 

“And when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in their cities.” (Matt. 11:1) Already there is a sense of responsibility and authority on the Apostles for reaching their mission fields, which are “their cities”, not his! Jesus is going out to preach and to teach, even though he just sent them out only to preach… There is a clear expectation that already there are new believers among these lost sheep, because of the activity of the Apostles; Jesus will be preaching to those not yet believing, and teaching those who do.

 

“The men of Nin′eveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” (Matt. 12:41) Jonah preached, and the objective of his preaching was that the men of Ninevah would repent. God told Jonah to “proclaim” (a synonym for “preach”) that the city would be overthrown in 40 days. All the men of Nineveh “from the least to the greatest…” began to repent in sackcloth and ashes, up to the king of Nineveh, in the hopes that: “God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not” The result shows what God’s goal for preaching is: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them; and he did not do it.” God’s goal for men preaching is that people would repent, and turn from their evil ways, so that He can repent of the evil that He said He would do to them. We could say that because God is just, or even the beginning and end of all justice, He is compelled to judge those who do evil. Yet His desire is always that “all men might be saved”, and so He gives the honor, duty, and responsibility to men to announce the weight of justice and judgement coming on those who do evil without repenting and turning from it. Even in the Old Covenant, there was the responsibility to bring justice, judgement, and truth to all mankind, and Jonah was specifically called to preach to the enemies of his own people, and he wrestled with this calling, both running from it and rejecting its purpose. God holds Jonah to the responsibility he calls him to, and uses his preaching to lead an entire people to repent and, at least for the time being, be saved from calamity. Jesus uses this example of preaching to call people all the more to repent and be saved now, since someone greater than Jonah is now preaching to this people.

 

“… and coming to his own country he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?”(Matt. 13:54) The people Jesus taught in the synagogue in “… his own country” rejected him because they knew his ordinariness, and therefore could not accept his full identity, as son of man, son of God. These people could not legitimately be called believers in Jesus, but the New Testament consistently affirms that the speech occurring in the synagogues and the temple is teaching, rather than preaching, presumably because they had the Covenant, the word of God, and were already called to be God’s people; they were believers because they were meeting in the synagogue and the Temple as God’s people.  

 

“You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’” (Matt.15:7-9) Jesus is responding to the pharisees’ and scribes’ critique of his dirty-handed disciples, and He responds by upping the ante, quoting Isaiah who called out a hypocritical generation in his own time. Although the targets of this shot are hypocritical believers, they are nonetheless priests and lay leaders on whom the responsibility of the word of God falls. In Isaiah’s time as in Jesus’ time, even hypocritical priests and teachers (they are after all worshippers, even though in vain) have the responsibility of believers, and these have the higher responsibility of being called to teach other believers.

 

“And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” (Matt. 21:23) This is the day after Jesus had cleansed the Temple, casting out all the moneychangers and those who bought and sold “sacrificial goods”. Clearly the priests and elders were miffed about Yeshua messing up their syndicate. But when they confronted him, he was teaching, because he was speaking to those who were called to be God’s people, (as reasoned above) in the Temple.

 

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.”(Matt.24:14) … “Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”(Matt.26:13) These two sayings of Jesus, although very different in context and meaning, are placed together because they introduce a new phrase  as Jesus teaches his disciples about the eschaton, that is the end of the age. The phrase that accompanies this theme of the end of the age is that “… this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world…” The word “preach”, and the call for people to preach The Good News, or The Gospel, which falls on all those who follow Jesus, has wrapped up within it the necessity of reaching all nations, or “the whole world”. The idea that reaching the whole world is an essential part of the end of this age, and the glorious return of Jesus, is an essential part of the concept and the call we bear to preach. Anyone who sets his heart and opens his mouth to preach should have as his end goal the whole world. That is one reason why reducing the scope of preaching (as we have effectively done by linguistically limiting preaching to speaking inside the church building) to those already in the church, and therefore aiming far short of “the whole world”, is an effective disowning of the call to preach that Jesus gives us. We have received a call to set sail and fish the entirety of the world’s seas, and we have reduced our calling to farms with stocked tilapia ponds.

 

“At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me.”(Matt.26:55)  We have already discussed above the Temple as the place of teaching, rather than preaching.

 

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”(Matt.28:19-20) The disciples were called to teach obedience to Jesus’ commands with those becoming disciples all over the world, in every people group. That is a teaching call because these who are becoming disciples have already decided to follow Jesus. Discipleship is the continuation of what begins in evangelism, with those who are hungry and willing to enter in.

 

So the Gospel of Matthew begins with the preaching of John the Baptist, then the preaching of Jesus which echoes that of John, then Jesus preaching and teaching, as the people come to believe in him, then training and sending out the Apostles to become preachers, then teaching them so they can become teachers of new believers in The Kingdom. Finally, Matthew’s account ends with Jesus calling the Apostles to become disciple makers, who will teach and train generations of those who are being equipped to become preachers, teachers, and trainers of others.

 

Distinguishing preaching from teaching is essential to restore preaching to its place in the streets, restaurants, businesses, schools, universities, and wherever the people are. Distinguishing preaching from teaching is vital to equip and send out a generation of preachers who are not frocked or seminary trained, but who are gifted and equipped with brevity, authority, and Spiritual power. Distinguishing preaching from teaching is necessary to clarify the goals of Kingdom teaching are not to add bits and bytes of information to the crowded minds of believers, but to equip a generation for life outside the four walls. As we become a church more focused on the place and vital impact of making disciples of Jesus, not just converts, or church members, we need to restore preaching to its biblical place at the front door of disciple-making. We need to free preaching from its chains to the pulpit, hidden under the basket of the church building. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Matt. 5:14-16)