Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

Posted on October 22, 2010 - by Stephen Murray

Lausanne III: The Priority of Word Ministry

Vaughan Roberts (Rector of St Ebbes, Oxford and President of the Proclamation Trust) taught the congress this morning from Ephesians 4. It’s actually a passage I’ve spent some significant time in recently and so I was fairly familiar with the content. Roberts did a fantastic job of presenting Paul’s agenda in Ephesians 4: to call for a unified, mature church that is brought together by the  call of God and built upon the centrality of his word. From this platform he broke into a passionate plea for word ministry to be central in our churches and ministries (as I think Paul does in Ephesians 4).

According to his convictions Roberts heads up the Proclamation Trust which has, for many years now, given themselves to the training of Bible teachers in the UK. In a roundabout way their ministry has been very influential in forming my own theological framework of Bible teaching and preaching. I attended an apprenticeship programme early on in my training that was led by people trained through the Proclamation Trust and so naturally I was delighted by Roberts’ plea and vision for word ministry and its place in the church.

In my last post I expressed my desire to see a robust, urban church planting movement embarked upon, here I want to express my conviction that a thorough ministry of the word be at the absolute center of such a movement. Interesting to note that Tim Keller has been (in his own words) influenced much by Dick Lucas the founder of the Proclamation Trust in much of his preaching and teaching. We can be thankful for people like Vaughan Roberts who are leaders in calling us back to the simple, Christ-centered, exposition of the Bible that will, according to Paul, cause the whole church to grow up in maturity in Christ.