What is Preaching versus Teaching?

Question 11025.

The difference between preaching and teaching is one of those questions that sounds academic until you sit through a service where somebody got it wrong. I have heard lectures delivered from pulpits and I have heard rousing appeals delivered in Bible studies, and in both cases the congregation went home slightly hungry without quite knowing why.

Scripture uses two distinct families of words for these two activities, and the New Testament keeps them close together without ever quite collapsing them into one. Getting the distinction clear helps pastors know what they are doing on a Sunday morning, and it helps ordinary believers know what to expect and what to ask for.

Preaching and teaching are not the same activity

The most common Greek word for preaching is kerysso, which means to herald, to announce publicly, to proclaim as a town crier proclaims. A herald does not workshop his message with the crowd. He carries an announcement from someone with authority and he delivers it whether the town likes it or not. That is the flavour of preaching in the New Testament.

The most common word for teaching is didasko, which means to instruct, to explain, to build understanding step by step. A teacher assumes the announcement has landed and now sets about making sure it is understood, connected to everything else God has said, and worked into how a person actually lives.

So preaching and teaching answer two different questions. Preaching asks what God is announcing to this room right now. Teaching asks what this text means and how it fits with the rest of the book. Both are indispensable, and confusing them is where most of the trouble starts.

What Paul actually charged Timothy to do

When Paul gives Timothy his final instructions he says “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching”. Notice how preaching and teaching sit in the same sentence without becoming interchangeable. The verb is preach. The manner includes teaching. Patience is the connective tissue between them.

Earlier in the same letter Paul tells Timothy to entrust what he has heard to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. That is a chain of instruction, not a chain of announcements. A herald can announce something once. A teacher has to hand something on in a form that can be handed on again.

Both callings appear in Ephesians 4 among the gifts given to the church, and I have written elsewhere on whether pastors and teachers are one calling or two. My own view is that in most local churches the same man carries both, but he had better know which one he is doing at any given moment.

The herald and the tutor

Think of it practically. A herald stands in the market square and shouts that the king has won the battle and the city is free. Nobody in that crowd needs a footnote. They need to hear it, believe it, and start behaving like free people. That is preaching, and it is why preaching carries urgency, direct address and a demand for a response.

A tutor sits down with the same citizens the following week and works through what freedom now means for taxes, for property, for the old laws that no longer apply. Nothing new is being announced. Everything announced is being unpacked. That is teaching, and it is why teaching moves slowly, doubles back, and cares about precision.

When Jesus went through the towns of Galilee, Matthew tells us he was teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. Two verbs, one ministry, one Saviour. He did not pick between them.

Where preaching and teaching overlap in practice

In real church life the line is porous, and I would be suspicious of anyone who drew it too sharply. Good preaching contains real instruction, or it is only emotional weather. Good teaching contains real proclamation, or it is only religious information. A sermon that explains a passage carefully and then presses it home on the conscience is doing both jobs in the right order.

This is why I am so committed to expository preaching. Working through a text in order forces the preacher to teach what is actually there before he announces anything, which is a healthy discipline for a man who might otherwise announce his opinions with heraldic confidence.

The failure mode of preaching without teaching is a congregation that feels stirred every Sunday and cannot tell you what the book of Galatians is about. The failure mode of teaching without preaching is a congregation that can diagram the Greek and has not repented of anything in a decade.

Why the balance of preaching and teaching matters for a church

A church fed only on proclamation becomes emotionally dependent on the pulpit. Every week needs to be bigger than the last, because there is no accumulating body of understanding to rest on. That is exhausting for the preacher and dangerous for the flock, and it is one of the signs of an unhealthy church that people often miss.

A church fed only on instruction becomes a seminar with hymns. The knowledge grows, the affections cool, and after a while nobody quite remembers that the Bible is God speaking rather than a syllabus. Paul warned that knowledge puffs up while love builds up, and he was writing to a church that thought rather highly of its own understanding.

Preaching and teaching together keep a congregation both warm and solid. Announcement without instruction is a fire with no fuel. Instruction without announcement is fuel with no fire.

Does teaching require the same authority as preaching?

Preaching in the New Testament carries a public, authoritative, representative character. The herald speaks for the king. This is part of why I hold that the regular public preaching ministry of the gathered church is given to qualified men, a position I set out more fully when discussing the role of a pastor.

Teaching is much wider in Scripture. Older women are told to teach younger women. Priscilla explained the way of God more accurately to Apollos. Parents teach children. Believers teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns. Teaching is a gift distributed across the body, and a congregation that only receives instruction from one man is wasting most of what God has given it.

So the authority attaches to the office more than to the activity. A great deal of genuine teaching happens over coffee, in kitchens, in car parks, and God uses all of it.

How preaching and teaching shape a congregation over years

One of the things you only notice after a decade in the same pulpit is how slowly a congregation is formed. Nobody is changed by a single sermon in the way we imagine when we are young. People are changed by hundreds of them, laid down like sediment, until a way of thinking about God has been built that they could not tell you the source of. Preaching and teaching are the two materials that sediment is made of, and the proportions matter enormously.

A congregation fed on heavy proclamation and light instruction develops strong instincts and weak reasons. They will know that something is wrong with a teaching without being able to say why, which leaves them vulnerable to anyone articulate enough to reframe it. A congregation fed on heavy instruction and light proclamation develops the opposite problem. They can spot the error and feel nothing about it.

Paul told the Ephesian elders that he did not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God, and the phrase in Acts 20:27 covers both activities. Declaring is heraldic. The whole counsel is a curriculum. He spent three years there, night and day, with tears, and both words describe the same three years.

Handling the two well in one sermon

Practically, most of us have one slot on a Sunday morning and both jobs to do in it. The order that works is teaching first and preaching second. Establish what the text says, in its context, with enough care that a thoughtful visitor could check your working. Then, having earned the right, press it home with the authority of a man carrying an announcement.

The reverse order tends to fail. Proclaim first and explain afterwards, and the explanation feels like justification for something already decided. People sense it, and their trust in the pulpit quietly erodes. The Greek euangelizo, to announce good news, still assumes there is news with content, and content has to be laid out before it can be announced.

Watch your transitions, because that is where preaching and teaching meet. The sentence that moves from what this meant to Corinth to what this means for us on a wet Tuesday in the Midlands is the hinge of the whole sermon. Rushing it is the commonest fault I hear, including in myself.

So, now what?

If you preach, ask yourself honestly whether the people you serve could sit an exam on the books you have taken them through. If they could not, you have been heralding without instructing, and the announcement will eventually thin out into slogans.

If you teach, ask yourself when you last called anyone to repent, believe, or obey. Instruction that never issues in a summons is not neutral. It quietly trains people to treat the word of God as material to be mastered rather than a voice to be obeyed.

And if you are neither, but simply sit in the pews, you can help enormously. Ask your pastor questions that require teaching. Tell him when a sermon has pressed something home. Both preaching and teaching grow stronger in a church where people are hungry for them, and I have never met a preacher who was not sharpened by a congregation that actually wanted to be fed.

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”

Ephesians 4:11-12 (ESV)