There is a quiet but significant crisis in many African pulpits today. It is not a crisis of enthusiasm—African Christianity is, by most accounts, a movement of extraordinary energy and growth. The churches are full, the singing is fervent, and the preachers are often gifted communicators of remarkable natural ability. The crisis is one of content. Increasingly, what fills the space between the opening prayer and the closing benediction is not the careful unfolding of Scripture but a mixture of motivational exhortation, prosperity teaching, personal testimony, and topical messages loosely anchored to a handful of favourite verses. The Bible is present on the platform, carried in with visible reverence, held aloft at dramatic moments—but it is not always governing what is said. It is decorative rather than determinative, a prop rather than a source.
This matters because preaching is not merely a cultural form that can be adapted without loss to whatever the audience finds compelling. It is a theological act with a specific character, a specific authority, and a specific purpose. And when that character is lost, something essential to the health, depth, and long-term resilience of the church is lost with it. The consequences may not be immediately visible. Churches can grow impressively for years while the foundations are being quietly hollowed out. But the hollowing eventually shows, and when it does, the cost to individuals and communities is considerable.
What Expository Preaching Is
Expository preaching is the kind of preaching in which the meaning of a biblical text governs the message. The preacher's task is not to find a text that supports what he already intends to say, but to stand under the text, submit to its argument, and then communicate that argument clearly, faithfully, and compellingly to the congregation. The sermon's structure, its main point, its subordinate points, its application, and its emphasis all arise from and are controlled by the passage itself. The text is not the starting point from which the preacher quickly departs. It is the territory in which the entire sermon lives and moves.
This is not merely one homiletical method among several equally valid options, to be chosen or set aside according to the preacher's preference or the congregation's taste. It reflects a deep and serious conviction about the nature of Scripture itself. If the Bible is what evangelical Christians confess it to be — the inspired, inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient Word of God — then the most natural, consistent, and appropriate form of preaching is the kind that lets that Word speak on its own terms, in its own voice, and with its own emphasis. Any method of preaching that consistently subordinates the text's meaning to the preacher's agenda is, at some level, inconsistent with a robust doctrine of Scripture, however sincerely that doctrine may be confessed in the church's statement of faith.
Paul's charge to Timothy in 2 Tim. 4 is not to preach what is helpful, what is popular, what meets the felt needs of the audience, or even what seems most urgently required by the circumstances. It is to preach the Word. The conjunction is important: he gives this charge precisely because a time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but will accumulate for themselves teachers who suit their own passions. The pressure to adjust the message to the audience's appetite is not a modern problem. It is a perennial one, and the answer Paul gives is not sophistication but faithfulness. The preacher's authority is entirely derived and entirely dependent on his honest and careful handling of the text he has been charged to open.
Expository preaching also imposes a particular posture on the preacher—one of submission before proclamation. The preacher must first be a hearer of the Word before he can be a herald of it. He must wrestle with the text in his study before he can open it from the pulpit. He must allow the passage to interrogate him — to challenge his assumptions, disturb his comfort, and correct his thinking—before he is in any position to bring it to bear on the congregation. This inward discipline is not incidental to expository preaching. It is one of its most important and most sanctifying features, for the preacher as much as for the people.
The African Context
African Christianity is richly diverse, and generalisations must be made carefully and with appropriate humility. The continent encompasses traditions ranging from ancient Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodoxy to the newest independent congregations meeting under trees in rural villages. What is true of Lagos may not be true of Nairobi, and what characterises urban megachurches may bear little resemblance to what is happening in quieter, less visible, but often deeply faithful rural congregations. These distinctions matter, and any honest assessment must hold them in view.
Nevertheless, several broad tendencies are observable across much of sub-Saharan Africa, and increasingly across the African diaspora as well. The prosperity gospel has established remarkably deep roots in many urban and peri-urban churches, drawing enormous congregations with a message that centres on financial breakthrough, physical healing, divine favour, and personal success. Its appeal is understandable in contexts of genuine material hardship, where the promise of tangible divine intervention speaks to needs that are urgent and real. But the theological cost of this message is severe. It reshapes the understanding of God, of prayer, of suffering, of the atonement, and of the nature of saving faith in ways that are not incidental distortions but structural ones. And it has proven extraordinarily difficult to dislodge once it has taken hold, precisely because its promises are emotionally compelling and its preachers are often charismatic personalities of great force.
Pentecostal and Charismatic influences have shaped African Christianity profoundly, and not without genuine fruit. The emphasis on the living God who acts, on prayer as real communication with a personal Father, and on the Spirit's active presence in the life of the believer has revitalised many communities and brought genuine blessing. But in a significant number of settings, these influences have produced a culture in which experience consistently takes precedence over reflection, sensation over formation, and the dramatic over the durable. The sermon has in some congregations been displaced almost entirely by extended musical worship, prophetic performance, and spiritual demonstration. What remains of the preaching moment is often brief, impressionistic, and driven more by atmosphere than by argument.
Even in more theologically conservative churches—those that would firmly reject prosperity theology and identify themselves with orthodox evangelical convictions—topical preaching dominates the pulpit culture. Sermons are constructed around themes drawn from contemporary life: marriage and family, financial management, anxiety and mental health, purpose and identity, leadership and success. These are not illegitimate concerns, and Scripture has much to say about all of them. But when texts are consistently selected to illustrate conclusions that have already been reached, rather than to drive the preaching agenda from within, the congregation is receiving something less than what faithful preaching can and should provide. They are receiving the preacher's framework for understanding life, illustrated with biblical references, rather than the Bible's own framework, applied to life with pastoral wisdom.
The consequences of this pattern accumulate quietly but seriously over time. Congregations grow impressively in numerical terms while remaining thin in their theological understanding. Believers are enthusiastic, often genuinely devoted, and frequently generous in their giving and service. But they are biblically illiterate in ways that leave them vulnerable. They can speak fluently about blessing, breakthrough, and divine favour but struggle to give a coherent account of justification by faith, the nature of the new covenant, or the relationship between the two Testaments. They are moved and inspired by the preacher's presence and personality but are not being steadily formed by the Word that endures when personalities fade.
Why It Matters: The Sufficiency of Scripture
The case for expository preaching begins not with homiletics but with theology — specifically, with the doctrine of Scripture. If the Bible is truly sufficient for all that the church needs — for doctrine, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, as Paul states with deliberate comprehensiveness in 2 Tim. 3—then the most urgent and most responsible task of the preacher is not to supplement it with cultural wisdom, psychological insight, or personal experience, but to open it, explain it, and trust it to do what it alone is equipped to do.
This is a conviction about power as much as about authority. The Word of God is not merely reliable information about God. It is the instrument through which God Himself acts in the lives of those who hear it. The writer to the Hebrews describes it in Heb. 4 as living and active, penetrating to the deepest levels of human existence, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Peter understands the new birth itself as occurring through the living and abiding Word of God (1 Pet. 1). Isaiah's declaration that the Word sent out from God will not return to Him empty but will accomplish the purpose for which He sent it (Is. 55) is not a promise made to any other instrument of ministry. It is a promise made specifically to the Word. The preacher who takes these texts seriously cannot treat Scripture as a supporting resource for a message that originates elsewhere. He must treat it as the message itself.
Expository preaching takes this conviction out of the doctrinal statement and puts it into practice at the most visible and formative point in the church's life together. When the congregation sees the preacher opening a passage, working through it carefully, following its argument, and deriving the sermon's content from within it rather than importing content from outside, they are receiving an implicit and powerful lesson in what the Bible actually is. They are learning, by repeated demonstration, that the text has an authoritative meaning that precedes and governs what the preacher says — that the preacher is not the authority, but is himself under authority. This is not a minor or merely formal point. It shapes the congregation's relationship to Scripture in ways that outlast any individual sermon.
The preacher who consistently subordinates the text to his own message is, whatever his intentions, training his congregation to relate to the Bible as a resource to be mined for supportive quotes rather than as a Word to be submitted to. The cumulative effect of this training is a congregation that handles Scripture instrumentally—using it to confirm what is already believed rather than allowing it to form, challenge, and sometimes overturn what is believed. Expository preaching, by contrast, trains the congregation in submission. And submission to the Word of God is not a posture that can be taught in the abstract. It must be modelled, week after week, from the pulpit.
Why It Matters: The Formation of the Congregation
Preaching that moves through books of the Bible systematically, passage by passage and chapter by chapter, does something that topical preaching—however excellent in its own terms—cannot easily achieve. It forms the congregation's understanding of Scripture as a whole. Over time, and the time involved is measured in years rather than weeks, a congregation that has been consistently preached through the major texts and books of the Bible develops a comprehensive and integrated grasp of the faith that topical preaching simply cannot produce.
A congregation that has worked carefully through Romans understands justification by faith not as a slogan but as a theological reality with deep roots and wide implications. It understands the relationship between sin and grace, between the Law and the gospel, between Israel and the Gentiles, between the wrath of God and the mercy of God, in ways that only sustained engagement with Paul's sustained argument can produce. A congregation that has been preached through Ephesians grasps the nature of the church as the body of Christ, the cosmic dimensions of redemption, and the practical shape of the new humanity that the gospel creates. One that has sat under careful exposition of the Psalms learns how to bring the full range of human experience—grief, rage, doubt, praise, penitence, exultation—into an honest and theologically ordered conversation with God. One that has heard Genesis and Exodus opened faithfully begins to understand the covenantal architecture that runs through the entire biblical narrative and provides the framework within which the New Testament makes its deepest sense.
This kind of formation is cumulative, and its cumulative character is precisely what makes it irreplaceable. No single sermon, however brilliant, can accomplish what years of faithful expository ministry achieve in a congregation. The knowledge is not merely deposited in the mind but woven into the fabric of how the congregation thinks, prays, evaluates experience, and makes decisions. It produces a community that has, over time, been genuinely shaped by the whole counsel of God rather than by the preacher's selection of favourite themes.
One of the most important practical consequences of this formation is doctrinal stability. Paul's concern in Eph. 4 is for a church that is no longer tossed about by every wind of doctrine, no longer vulnerable to the cunning craftiness of those who scheme to deceive. The protection he has in view is not primarily a stronger system of doctrinal policing but a deeper rooting in the truth—believers who have grown up into Christ in every way, who know what they believe and why they believe it, and who can therefore recognise distortion when it appears. Expository preaching, sustained over years of faithful ministry, is one of the primary instruments through which that stability is built into the life of a congregation. It is slow work. It is unspectacular work. But it is the work that produces the kind of Christians who remain standing when the winds come, because they have been rooted rather than merely excited.
A further consequence of systematic expository ministry is the development of biblical literacy in the congregation itself. When believers have heard their preacher work through a passage carefully—explaining its context, following its argument, noting its connections with other parts of Scripture—they are being equipped to do something similar in their own reading. They are learning what it looks like to take the text seriously, to ask what it meant before asking what it means, to follow the logic of a biblical writer rather than simply harvesting isolated sentences. Over time, this equips the congregation to read the Bible fruitfully for themselves, to evaluate the teaching they encounter in other settings, and to detect the mishandling of Scripture even when it is done with great confidence and impressive presentation.
Why It Matters: Confronting Error
The African church faces doctrinal challenges that are not peripheral inconveniences but serious threats to the integrity of the gospel. The prosperity gospel is perhaps the most visible and most consequential of these. It is important to be clear about what this teaching actually is, because it is sometimes defended as merely an overemphasis on legitimate biblical themes. But it is not an overemphasis. It is a fundamental distortion — of the nature of God, of the purpose of the atonement, of the meaning of faith, of the place of suffering in the Christian life, and of the shape of the covenant blessings promised to the people of God.
The prosperity gospel reconfigures the entire gospel narrative around human comfort and material success. It treats the atonement as a mechanism for securing financial and physical blessing rather than as the reconciliation of sinners to a holy God. It redefines faith as a spiritual force that activates divine provision rather than as the empty hand that receives the gift of righteousness in Christ. It has no coherent account of suffering, other than to attribute it to insufficient faith or unconfessed sin, which means it offers no genuine pastoral resource for the vast majority of human experience. And it produces a relationship with God that is fundamentally transactional—God is approached as a divine benefactor whose favour is secured by the right words, the right giving, and the right declarations.
This teaching cannot be effectively confronted by occasional warnings from the pulpit, or by counter-themed sermons preached when the problem becomes especially acute. Error of this depth and this appeal requires a response of corresponding depth. It is confronted most powerfully and most durably when congregations have been formed over years on the whole counsel of God. When believers have sat with Paul's account of suffering in Rom. 5 and understood that tribulation produces perseverance, and perseverance character, and character hope. When they have heard him in Rom. 8 describe the groaning of the present age and the certainty of future glory without any suggestion that present suffering represents divine disapproval. When they have followed him through 2 Cor. 4 and 11 and seen what the apostolic life actually looked like—marked not by prosperity but by weakness, hardship, and the constant experience of death at work, so that life might work in others. When they have sat with the Servant of the Lord in Is. 53 and understood that redemptive suffering is not an anomaly in God's purposes but central to them. When they have heard the letter to the Hebrews open the great cloud of witnesses whose faith was demonstrated not by the abundance of what they received but by the faithfulness with which they endured what they did not receive (Heb. 11).
A congregation formed on these texts does not need to be argued out of the prosperity gospel point by point. They already possess a framework that makes its distortions recognisable. Expository preaching inoculates against error not primarily by refuting false teaching directly, important as that is, but by filling the mind and heart so thoroughly with the true that distortions become visible precisely because they depart from what is already deeply known and genuinely loved. The most effective antidote to a false gospel is a deep and comprehensive grasp of the true one, and that grasp is formed, above all, by years of faithful engagement with the Word.
Beyond the prosperity gospel, the African church faces challenges from syncretism, from the blending of Christian confession with traditional religious frameworks, and from a therapeutic culture that increasingly shapes how the gospel is heard and preached. All of these distortions share a common vulnerability: they cannot survive sustained encounter with the full biblical text. They depend on selective reading, on the absence of the passages that would complicate or correct them. Expository preaching removes that absence. It brings the whole of Scripture to bear on the whole of life, and in doing so, it deprives error of the textual silence in which it flourishes.
The Preacher's Own Formation
There is a discipline that expository preaching imposes on the preacher himself, and it is a necessary, demanding, and profoundly sanctifying one. The preacher who commits to opening a book of the Bible and working through it passage by passage, week after week, cannot avoid the texts that make him uncomfortable, the doctrines that are difficult to preach in his particular cultural context, or the commands that cut directly across the expectations and assumptions of his congregation and perhaps of himself.
He must preach on divine judgment as well as divine mercy, because both are present in the text. He must preach on repentance as well as assurance, on sacrifice as well as blessing, on the narrow way as well as the open invitation, on the sovereignty of God as well as the responsibility of man. He cannot quietly skip the passages that challenge his theology or that he suspects his congregation would rather not hear. The text sets the agenda, and the preacher must follow where it leads, even when it leads somewhere he would not have chosen on his own.
This is an accountability structure of considerable importance, and it is one that topical preaching does not easily provide. The topical preacher, however conscientious, is inevitably drawn toward familiar texts and comfortable themes. His sermon series reflect his existing convictions, his pastoral instincts, and his assessment of what the congregation most needs — all of which are valuable, but all of which are also limited and shaped by his own blind spots, his cultural formation, and his personal history. He will tend to preach well on the themes he has thought most carefully about and to avoid, perhaps without fully realising it, the themes that remain underdeveloped in his own understanding.
The expository preacher is not immune to these tendencies, but he is subject to a corrective that operates independently of them. When he arrives at a passage he would not have chosen, he must preach it. When the text says something that challenges his assumptions, he must wrestle with it honestly rather than manage it diplomatically. When the argument of the biblical author moves in a direction the preacher finds uncomfortable, he must follow it rather than redirect it. This kind of submission to the text is not merely a homiletical discipline. It is a spiritual one, and it produces in the faithful expository preacher a breadth, a depth, and a theological balance that is very difficult to achieve any other way.
There is also the matter of the preacher's ongoing engagement with Scripture at a level of genuine intellectual and spiritual seriousness. Expository preaching requires sustained study. The preacher must understand not only what a passage says but why it says it, how it fits within the argument of the book, how that book relates to the rest of the biblical canon, what historical and cultural context is necessary for the congregation to understand it, and how its meaning bears on the specific circumstances of the people he is serving. This is demanding work, and it cannot be done superficially without the congregation eventually noticing the shallowness of the result. The discipline of expository preparation is one of the most effective forces for the ongoing intellectual and spiritual formation of the preacher himself—provided he takes it seriously and refuses to cut the corners that busyness and ministry pressure constantly tempt him to cut.
The African church has produced, and continues to produce, men of genuine gifting, deep personal faith, and real pastoral devotion. The question is not whether those gifts are present. It is whether they are being disciplined and directed by a sufficiently high view of Scripture, a sufficiently serious commitment to its careful study, and a sufficiently robust conviction that it is the Word, and not the preacher's personality or the congregation's enthusiasm, that is the real power in Christian ministry.
A Call to the Pulpit
The need is not for African preachers to import a Western homiletical tradition uncritically, as though expository preaching were a cultural product of Reformed Europe that must be adopted wholesale, complete with its particular stylistic conventions, its measured delivery, and its characteristic rhetorical restraint. Expository preaching is not a cultural style. It is a theological commitment—the commitment to let the meaning of the text govern the content of the sermon — and that commitment can be expressed through a very wide range of communicative forms.
It can be preached with the warmth, energy, narrative richness, and communal engagement that characterise African oral communication at its most powerful and most beautiful. African preaching traditions have resources that Western homiletics has often lacked: a sensitivity to story, a feel for communal response, a capacity for sustained emotional engagement, an instinct for the concrete and the vivid. These are gifts, and expository preaching does not require their surrender. What it requires is that they be placed in the service of the text rather than in the service of the preacher's performance or the congregation's entertainment. The goal is a preaching that is both faithfully expository and authentically African—not an imitation of Geneva or London, but a genuine engagement with the Word that is expressed through the full richness of the African communicative tradition. What expository preaching does require, in any cultural setting, is a set of convictions that must be clearly held and consistently acted upon. It requires the conviction that the text is the authority—that the preacher stands under it, not over it. It requires the conviction that the congregation deserves to hear what God has actually said, not what the preacher has decided to say about God on the basis of his own instincts and experiences. It requires the conviction that the long, slow, unspectacular work of biblical formation is worth infinitely more than any short-term measure of congregational excitement, numerical growth, or ministerial reputation. And it requires the courage to maintain these convictions under the considerable pressures that African ministry contexts can generate—the pressure to produce results quickly, to compete with spectacular neighbouring congregations, to give the people what they are asking for rather than what they most deeply need.
Paul's instruction to Timothy remains the clearest and most searching statement of the preacher's calling. Preach the Word. Be ready in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. Do the work of an evangelist. Fulfil your ministry. The charge was given in a context where sound doctrine was already under pressure, where more appealing and more immediately satisfying alternatives were already presenting themselves, and where the temptation to adjust the message to the audience's appetite was already real and powerful (2 Tim. 4). It is a charge that speaks with entirely undiminished force to the African church in this generation.
The churches that will prove most resilient, most fruitful, and most faithful in the generations ahead are not likely to be the largest, the most spectacular, or the most talked about. They are likely to be the ones where the Bible was opened Sunday after Sunday with care and seriousness, explained with patience and depth, applied with pastoral honesty and cultural sensitivity, and received by congregations who were taught to regard it as the living Word of the living God. That is what faithful expository preaching produces over time. Not necessarily the largest crowds, but the deepest roots. Not necessarily the most dramatic moments, but the most durable lives. Not necessarily the most impressive ministries, but the most genuinely transformed communities.
And that is what the African church, in this moment of both extraordinary opportunity and serious vulnerability, most urgently and most profoundly needs.
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