Another lamb to the slaughter had made his way before the entire college community for the weekly sermon class. It was bad enough to just get there - the college chapel, lead the worship, and then preach. After all you had had no sleep for days, could easily have taken up Spurgeonic pipe smoking to calm yourself (well the great CH did it after all), and then you were wheeled out in front of friends and faculty in the hope they would be kind. In the really old days of Spurgeon's, a student would have 2 sermon classes during their college existence, I'm guessing to see if you had improved or not! But we had it easy - just the one sacrifice. We died only once! The old students died twice! This was between the 88-92 years in the days of PBM. But it didn't stop there, for having survived the chapel bit, everyone retreated into a lecture theatre wherein the sacrificial lamb was positioned centre stage, and surrounded by all in the jolly college community. Then 2 critics from the student body and 2 from the faculty would sprout forth their deeply considered critiques (all pre-prepared in advance from seeing the students script) - "The preacher completely missed the point of the text and should consider his entire future in the ministry to be in jeopardy!" "The prayer led at the start sent me to sleep, and lacked theological substance!" "The preachers voice was thin and sounded like Kermit the Frog, he should pack it in now and return to the Muppet show!" "There are only 3 ways to preach this text, and this preacher chose neither! He should re-consider returning to be a road sweeper!" "The preacher entertained us this morning, but perhaps he should consider the stage as a stand up comedian!"
It would take you several months to regain any sense of divine call upon your life, if at all, but hey ho, thats what set Spurgeons apart from the others as being "The College of the Prince of Preachers!"
But I remember one severe but necessarily true criticism by a faculty member of a student's sermon: "We are not interested in hearing what the student thinks about this text, we are wanting to hear what God thinks! Please tell us!" Ouch!
Opinion - what's yours? As an observation, and a kind one at that, we do seem to love having opinions about viritually every topic. Some people are even outspoken to the point where either they very clearly have a view on everything, or they just will not stay quiet. You just know in any group setting that they are going to speak and express, once again, their rather tedious perspectives and wearisome views, which have in any case been heard one hundred times before. Yawn!
But what if we actually made it a discipline and a choice to remain quiet and to listen? To perhaps trash any pre-concieved "opinions" and actually spend time listening to a fresh one?! Oh joy, oh rapture when we might reach the place of realising that maybe, and probably, no one is actually interested in our opinions. But that may be a sad place to find yourself in if you are highly opinionated. So I give you a half way house: why not assume that no one is interested in your views unless they ask for them? In which case, you can indeed carefully respond, with tact and grace, with your "obviously only true" and correct world changing opinion!
But this is just my opinion!
Sam Griffiths Pastor of Wellington Baptist Church, Somerset.
