Charles Simeon: a model for preachers

Posted on April 28, 2023 
Filed under Encouragement

“Charles Simeon was the pastor of Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Cambridge from 1782 to his death in 1836 – a period of 54 years. It is difficult to find anyone before Charles Simeon who set about so systematically to teach people to preach.

By 1832 Simeon had published what he called a ‘skeleton’ or sermon outline on the entire bible – over 2,500 in all! They are quite detailed – a lot more flesh and blood than you might expect on a skeleton. But the skeletons were perhaps an outworking of his own experience as a preacher where for the first 7 years he said he ‘did not know the head from the tail of a sermon’.

JI Packer says that the genius of the skeletons was that they showed the preacher how to make sure that it was the text that did the talking throughout the sermon, rather than the preacher loading up the text with his own ideas. They also encouraged the preacher to find and stick to the one big idea of the text. …”

– Encouragement for preachers from Stuart Coulton at The Expository Preaching Trust.