Top Highlights

• It is impressive that in all these New Testament metaphors the preacher is a servant under someone else’s authority, and the communicator of somebody else’s word.
• What these models of the preacher’s task make less clear is the need for him to relate the given message to the existential situation, or, to use the modern jargon, to ‘contextualize’ the Word of God.
• The metaphor is that of bridge-building. Now a bridge is a means of communication between two places which would otherwise be cut off from one another by a river or a ravine. It makes possible a flow of traffic which without it would be impossible. What, then, does the gorge or chasm represent? And what is the bridge which spans it? The chasm is th...
• It is across this broad and deep divide of two thousand years of changing culture (more still in the case of the Old Testament) that Christian communicators have to throw bridges. Our task is to enable God’s revealed truth to flow out of the Scriptures into the lives of the men and women of today.
• ‘What we want to know,’ they went on, ‘is not whether Christianity is true, but whether it’s relevant.