How Dick Lucas Helped Me to be a Better Preacher

Dick Lucas (former rector of St Helen's Bishopsgate and founder of The Proclamation Trust) turns 100 today. Quite a milestone.

According to the Office for National Statistics, there are just over 15,000 centenarians in the UK, just 0.02% of our population.

No doubt the popular press would want to know, ‘how have you done it?’ Such stories are a staple of our newspapers. The answer - it often seems - is a healthy dose of humour, cynicism, and a surprising 20-a-day habit.

A commitment to preaching the living word of God

I worked alongside Dick for eight years, and I can attest to a decent dose of self-deprecating humour, some well-placed cynicism, and the complete absence of a nicotine addiction! Yet I’m less interested in his physical longevity than in his lifelong commitment to preaching the living word of God.

I’ve known of Dick for a long time. My late father-in-law was an early member and enthusiast for the St Helen’s lunchtime talks. Not a few of his friends and colleagues were converted under Dick’s preaching.

More recently, working alongside him was a great privilege. He used to come and lie on my sofa with a twinkle in his eye, pretending to be on the counsellor's couch.

But in fact, it was me who was the true patient, learning about Dick’s passion for proclamation.

I would be the first to acknowledge that he and I were not cut from the same cloth. Our backgrounds could not be more different. And I was never his parishioner, so I don’t know what it would be like to sit under his preaching week by week. Yet I learnt a lot from his musings and ruminations.

We can all learn from one another, whatever our particular evangelical tribe. And so, to commemorate his birthday milestone, here are four nuggets of wisdom from Dick.

“Expository preaching is a mindset not a method”

I never heard Dick say this publicly (though he probably did). But he repeated it to me often.

Preaching can often be reduced to a set of principles and rules. And it’s important to remember that when Dick started to be influential, he was often working with preachers who had no idea where to start. In such a setting, principles and aims were key.

Yet he prefers the language of ‘mindset’, not ‘method’. Method may be needed to get some people to the end point. But method is a subsidiary task. Changing our mindset is key.

And expository preaching is – at this point – about letting God speak. Of course, this is mediated through a human voice and personality. But we want to keep asking ourselves, ‘what does the Bible say?’ or, even more profoundly, ‘what is God saying?’

Such a mindset will cause us to make certain decisions in our preparation. It will focus our minds on structure, authorial intent, purpose – all that jazz!

Those are tools in the craftsman’s hands that – combined with a healthy prayer life – cry out, ‘Speak, O Lord!’

“I want to preach the tone of a text and not just its content”

Lots of emphasis has been given to the content and context of a Bible passage. This is right. There is no substitute for deep study and heartfelt meditation on the text before any preacher or teacher.

But often absent from this equation is a desire to simply convey not just what is in the text, but the manner in which it is spoken into existence.

A faithful sermon on a psalm should sound different from one on a narrative. A lament should be sober. A praise psalm should be joyful. A gospel sermon should not be identical to an epistle.

I don’t think Dick and I would convey these differences in the same way! But they remain nonetheless, and good preaching reflects tone as much as it does content.

“I was a pietist before I was ever an evangelical”

One of the most interesting things that Dick ever said to me in our Monday morning counselling sessions was that he was a pietist before he was ever an evangelical.

Pietists are more often known for their heartfelt pursuit of spiritual renewal and active living than they are for their love of absolute truth. This, as far as I can tell, was Dick’s spiritual world before he ever really grasped the depth and wonder of the gospel.

I guess Dick was telling me that he understood, appreciated, and even pursued this kind of individual commitment to personal piety as part of his deep love for scripture and the saviour it reveals. What a beautiful combination.

Too often we draw a sharp distinction between preaching that engages with truth alone (too boring) and that which speaks to the heart (too casual).

Why on earth should we choose between them? I hope and trust that my own preaching takes the middle ground. I want both piety and truth in a heady, gospel mix.

I love hearing that in preaching I sit under, and I strive for it myself.

“Rules are made to be broken, brother”

You only have to listen to one Dick Lucas sermon to realise that he does not keep his own rules.

The original ‘Lucas Lessons’, as they were called, were rather idiosyncratic teaching tools to help preachers make a start and develop good disciplines when it came to expository preaching.

Yet Dick often breaks his rules. There was no one right sermon on a text or passage from which deviation was preaching heresy. You might be surprised to hear that, but that was never his way.

Arguably you need the groundwork to be able to do this well. So, I have preached a 10-point sermon on a short passage, which was essentially 10 points nibbling round one main idea. Not exactly a model sermon in some people’s eyes. But I remember talking about it with him, his eyes glistened and he said, ‘sounds wonderful, brother.’

This is no excuse for casualness or imposing our own views on a text. But it is allowing God to use us and speak with a vitality and immediacy that some preaching today clearly lacks.

We all have different models and heroes when it comes to preaching. Most of us have many of them. But there is no doubt that Dick has had a profound impact on the state of healthy preaching in churches today, including FIEC churches. And I know he’s been a great help to me.

So, may I say, with heartfelt thanks, Happy birthday, Dick, from all of us at FIEC.