You Will Bear Witness: Reflections on the Christian Year by Bishops of the Anglican Communion

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

In the Anglican church, much of the worship and teaching in isolated areas of Canada is led by lay readers, men and women with very little theological training who undertake these tasks as unpaid volunteers. You Will Bear Witness is for them. James T. Irvine, a canon of and warden of lay readers for the diocese of Fredericton, has solicited sermons from 25 Anglican bishops from around the world and put them together as a preaching resource for the lay readers of that diocese. These sermons, most of which were written specifically for this book, follow the liturgical year from Advent to Trinity-tide.

On the whole, this volume is a great disappointment. Sermons are an oral / aural form of communication. However, the vast majority of sermons in this book are not sermons to be preached, but meditations written by the hand to be read by the eye. As mediations, most are adequate and some are quite good, challenging the mind and touching the heart. Unfortunately, one “sermon” fails even to be a meditation, for it is a transcript of a radio diatribe by the archbishop of Port Moresby on Papua, New Guinea, against the “new pentecostal sects” active and growing in that Pacific island.

Yet there are four gems within this book which could instruct any cleric or lay reader in the art of preaching. John Hannen, bishop of Caledonia in British Columbia, has provided a sermon, “The God of Heaven Will Give Us Success,” which is a model of oral cadence; reading it aloud would be a learning experience for most preachers. The bishop of Bathurst in Australia, Howard Writ, has supplied a sermon which demonstrates a clarity of organization and progression of thought which is often lacking in contemporary preaching. In “Christ Must Reign,” Faik Haddah, a Palestinian Arab who is bishop of Jerusalem, shows how the gospel can be preached to people living and hurting in a strife-torn region so that it touches the situation without becoming a partisan political statement. And hidden in the sermon by Harry Tevi, bishop of Vanuatu in Melanesia, is the best advice a beginning preacher could receive: “Preach Christ directly to the congregation, looking people in the eye, not reading to them … It is a dynamic form of the real presence of Christ, in which God happens to his people.”