"To preach the Gospel requires that the preacher should believe that he is sent to those whom he is addressing at the moment, because God has among them those whom He is at the moment calling; it requires that the speaker should expect a response"
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Allen’s line is less a pious pep talk than a rebuke to a certain kind of religious professionalism: preaching as performance, as routine, as “content” delivered whether or not anyone is actually being addressed. He insists the preacher must feel commissioned not in the abstract but in the room, to these people, right now. That’s a high bar, and it exposes the quiet evasions that can creep into church life: sermons crafted to be safe, general, unanswerable. If you don’t expect anything to happen, nothing has to.
The subtext is startlingly democratic. Allen roots authority not in the preacher’s charisma or the institution’s prestige, but in the belief that God is already at work among the hearers. The congregation isn’t a passive audience; it’s the site of an active call. That reframes preaching as an encounter rather than a lecture, which is why “expect a response” lands like a dare. Response implies risk: people might resist, challenge, repent, change their plans, demand follow-up. Expectation drags the sermon out of the realm of ideas and into consequences.
Context matters: Allen wrote in the era of British missionary expansion and its hangover of cultural confidence. His broader project criticized paternalistic mission methods and argued for indigenous, self-propagating churches. In that light, this quote polices motive and method. Preaching isn’t exporting a message to a faceless “field”; it’s recognizing agency in the people in front of you and treating them as capable of answering God without being managed. The sentence is a theology of immediacy, and a critique of control disguised as care.
The subtext is startlingly democratic. Allen roots authority not in the preacher’s charisma or the institution’s prestige, but in the belief that God is already at work among the hearers. The congregation isn’t a passive audience; it’s the site of an active call. That reframes preaching as an encounter rather than a lecture, which is why “expect a response” lands like a dare. Response implies risk: people might resist, challenge, repent, change their plans, demand follow-up. Expectation drags the sermon out of the realm of ideas and into consequences.
Context matters: Allen wrote in the era of British missionary expansion and its hangover of cultural confidence. His broader project criticized paternalistic mission methods and argued for indigenous, self-propagating churches. In that light, this quote polices motive and method. Preaching isn’t exporting a message to a faceless “field”; it’s recognizing agency in the people in front of you and treating them as capable of answering God without being managed. The sentence is a theology of immediacy, and a critique of control disguised as care.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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