Yes, I listen to a lot of sermons. And yes, I want to use my sermon-listening time well. I’m often asked, “Whose preaching do you like?”
These are all great preachers. This list is limited, though: almost all of the churches below do a good job of distributing sermons via podcast, which is how I get my diet of sermons. There are others sermons I could be listening to, but most of these work easily with my app (Apple Podcasts). Here are the preachers I have been listening to lately:
William Philip, Tron Church, Glasgow, Scotland
Liam Goligher, Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, PA
Mark Dever, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington DC
Vaughan Roberts, St. Ebbe’s Church, Oxford
Alistair Begg, Parkside Church, Cleveland, OH
Paul Levy, International Presbyterian Church Ealing, London
David Gibson, Trinity Church, Aberdeen, Scotland
William Taylor, St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, London
Ralph Cunningham, City Church, Manchester, England
Douglas McCallum, Cambridge Presbyterian Church, Cambridge
David Jones, Grace Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, CA
Paul Rees, Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, Scotland
Andrew Sach and Andrew Latimer, Grace Church Greenwich, London
Michael Lawrence, Hinson Baptist Church, Portland, OR
Jonty Rhodes, Christ Church Central Leeds, Leeds, England
Matt Fuller, Christ Church Mayfair, London
James Torrens, Highland International Church, Inverness, Scotland
Kruger De Kock, Canada Water Church, London
Andy Pearson, St. Peter’s Free Church, Dundee, Scotland
David Thomas, Christ Church Romford, London
Alasdair Paine, St. Andrew the Great, Cambridge, England
Yes, a lot of these are men from across Atlantic Ocean. A little backstory: there is this ministry based in London, Proclamation Trust , that was founded in 1981 by Anglican, Dick Lucas. Like me, many of the preachers above have some connection with this ministry.
Since its founding, the goal of the Proclamation Trust has been to encourage expository preaching. What is expository preaching? To save time, we can turn to John Stott:
“Exposition is the opposite of imposition. The expository preacher comes to the text not with his mind made up, resolved to impose a meaning on it, but with his mind open to receive a message from it in order to convey it to others ... The dearest desire of the expository preacher is so to speak as to let the Scriptures themselves speak, and so to preach that afterwards the sermon is eclipsed by the growing splendour of the text itself (from "Some thoughts on expository preaching;" cited in Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: A Global Ministry, 332-33).”
Dick Lucas, along with contemporary Evangelical ministers (including John Stott and J. I. Packer), believed the key to ministry in the church was the kind of preaching that, without frill and imposition, elevated the Holy Word. ProcTrust began simply as a preaching skills conference/workshop for ministers all over the world. You can listen to an interview with Dick Lucas conducted by Christian Heritage London. In 1991, David Jackman founded the Cornhill Training Course under the ProcTrust banner to train ministers from around the world in expository preaching.
The American connections with the ProcTrust are everywhere; Kent Hughes, Tim Keller, and Mark Dever, have been ProcTrust speakers. In 1994, impacted by ProcTrust, Kent Hughes began hosting an annual Workshop on Biblical Exposition which became the Charles Simeon Trust. Today, Simeon Trust hosts national and international preaching workshops several times a year.
The preachers above are on my list because I have been pleased to watch churches grow through the simple proclamation of the Word. These men are good at something that is, actually, rather difficult: preach expositional sermons.
