Dick Lucas at 100: 'Transforming preaching'

Today is Dick Lucas’ 100th birthday. As Director of The Proclamation Trust (PT), a ministry started by Dick in 1986, it is my privilege to write something to mark this milestone, though on behalf of countless others in the UK and around the world.

Humility

Dick eschews praise. He is a humble, godly man who has assiduously pointed away from himself to Jesus. A suggestion to call the new PT building at Elephant and Castle “Lucas House” was quickly voted down. Instead “Proclamation House” was chosen, reflecting the ministry, not the man.

Mark’s Gospel was a favourite of Dick’s. He taught Mark reflecting its two-fold purpose as a proclamation of the gospel for faith and discipleship, and a training manual for ministry. The first “model minister” in Mark is John the Baptist. Undoubtedly a powerful and persuasive preacher, John the Baptist’s self-assessment was striking. “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptise you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1v7-8) Dick’s ministry was expressive of exactly this, a conscious unworthiness and powerlessness that issued in deep convictions about the effectiveness of prayer and the ministry of the word. To these he dedicated his whole life, so that the person people encountered through Dick’s ministry was not him, but the living Lord Jesus. When John the Baptist preached, consciously pointing away from himself to Jesus, then Jesus came (Mark 1:9). Likewise, when Dick preached, Jesus came.

At the Evangelical Ministry Assembly in 1991, Jim Packer gave two addresses on preaching, summarised as “Some Perspectives on Preaching” in Preaching the Living Word: Addresses from the EMA (Christian Focus, 1999). “Christian preaching is the event of God himself bringing to an audience a Bible-based, Christ-related, life-impacting message of instruction and direction through the words of a spokesperson.” This is an apt description of Dick’s preaching.

Open-handedness

An expression of Dick’s humility is gospel partnership, an open-handedness and collaborative spirit to embrace and work with others that has characterised his whole ministry.

Teaching Mark Gospel’s as a training manual for ministry confronts every generation of leaders with the ever-present dangers of rivalry and ambition, and putting others down because they are not part of our group. At the start of the second half of Mark’s Gospel, alone with the Twelve, Jesus asks them: “What were you arguing about on the road?” But “they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest” (Mark 9v33-34). The antidote to rivalry and ambition is attitude expressed in action. The attitude Jesus commends: “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9v35). The action that results, is welcoming and serving the very least (9v36-37). Then John, speaking on behalf of the Twelve asks: “Teacher … we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us” (9v38). The timeless evidence of tribalism – “he is not one of us”. Again, the antidote is attitude and action. The attitude is caution in expressing judgement on another. The action is not to look down on the humblest acts of Christian service; instead to value everyone as the Lord does. These timeliness truths were taught by Dick, but also authenticated by Dick in his life and ministry.

Movement

This commitment to work with others leaves a legacy that is a movement rather than a ministry. The challenge to those in leadership today is to follow the example of collaborative partnership. It is only by working together that we grow and multiply this legacy. For a movement to happen there needs to be convictional alignment, but when there is alignment, to work apart, or even against, is detrimental.

So what is the movement that is this legacy? It is a holistic movement of many parts: preaching, word ministry, training, planting, evangelism. The catalyst to the whole is preaching, specifically expository preaching.

Movement in expository preaching

Through the second half of the 20th century, the ministries of John Stott, Martin Lloyd-Jones and Dick Lucas were hugely significant. All were committed to expository preaching, though with marked differences in approach. Dick not only modelled expository preaching through the pulpit ministry of St Helen’s Bishopsgate in London, but began to train others. The Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA) started in 1984. The main component was “Expositions for Expositors”, where Dick, the preacher, would expound a Bible book to preachers who would then preach it in their churches.

The EMA was complemented through the year by expository lectures. Notable series included Romans, Hebrews and 2 Timothy. The lectures were given in various locations across the UK, and, in time, across the world. The format was a group of preachers gathering together over a number of sessions with Dick opening up the Bible book. The question Dick was answering: “How do you preach this?” People who were there recall the excitement of these times, as if people were discovering something new and wonderful. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Dick was creating a culture, that became a movement. The culture was people spending time with an able leader passing on convictions and principles that in time they would pass on to others. It quickly became a centrist movement, uniting people from different networks, tribes and denominations around a shared commitment to expository preaching. Anglicans and Independents coming together under one banner. The Proclamation Trust was started in 1986. One reason was to mark, in an appropriate way, Dick’s 25th anniversary as Rector of St Helen’s. Providentially, this coincided with the more important reason – to galvanise the growing movement around expository preaching.

A key step in cementing this centrist movement was the partnership between Dick, an Anglican, and David Jackman, an Independent. David was minister of Above Bar Church in Southampton. Both men shared the same convictions about expository preaching. Both men wanted to train gospel workers committed to expository preaching. The hand of God was surely in this, bringing these leaders and their constituencies together. This partnership established the Cornhill Training Course in 1991, with David Jackman as Director. The location was St Peter’s Cornhill in the City of London, hence the name Cornhill. The vision of Cornhill was to train men to preach, and men and women to teach the Bible in a variety of contexts, reflecting the Bible’s positive teaching on complementarity. It is notable that a movement in preaching was paralleled by a movement in training gospel workers.

Global movement

Dick’s open-handedness and collaborative spirit, extended beyond bringing Anglicans and Independents together in the UK to reach across the world. John Stott first visited Australia in 1958, the same year that Basic Christianity was published. In the years that followed, this book had a significant impact in Australia, as in the rest of the world. In 1965, John Stott returned to Australia to give the Bible readings at Church Missionary Society (CMS) summer schools in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The expositions from 2 Corinthians had a profound impact on preaching in Australia, which had become predominantly preaching on an individual text without reference to context. Peter Adam, writing about this time in an article for TGC Australia comments: “I was a new convert when I attended the CMS Victoria Summer School at Belgrave Heights in January 1965, when John Stott gave those studies on 2 Corinthians. It was the first time I had heard expository Bible preaching. My response was: ‘That is how to preach the Bible, and that is what I want to do!’ I knew that such preaching would grow churches, and when I went to London in 1972 and visited All Soul’s Langham Place and St Helen’s Bishopsgate, I saw that it worked!”

Following John Stott’s visit to Australia in 1965, the College of Preachers was set up by John Chapman and Dudley Foord in Sydney to promote expository preaching. This was one of a number of initiatives that started a movement in Australia around expository preaching. The bridge that John Stott had built between the UK and Australia was soon crossed by others. Dick Lucas, David Jackman, William Taylor, Richard Coekin, Trevor Johnston and others travelled to Australia and brought many from Australia to the UK, including John Chapman, Philip Jensen, Peter Jensen, Col Marshall, Peter Adam, John Woodhouse, Simon Manchester and Carl Matthei. These men, and many others, gave significant momentum to the movement around expository preaching in the UK. Notable were Philip Jensen’s addresses on ministry at the EMA in the late 1980s. The remarkable growth of Sydney Anglicanism saw a preponderance of Anglicans coming to the UK, but not only Anglicans. David Cook, Principal of Sydney Missionary and Bible College, exercised a very significant preaching ministry in the UK, with frequent visits over a decade from 2005. Andrew Heard, Chair of the Australian Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), Senior Minister of EV Church in New South Wales and a Director of Reach Australia, has spoken at the FIEC Leaders’ Conference in the UK and will be returning in 2026 to speak at the Reach UK Conference in London. Carl Matthei, Head of Campus Bible Study in Sydney will be speaking at EMA 2026. The bridge that Dick and others built and crossed between the UK and Australia is a long one, but vital for the future of evangelicalism in the UK, and perhaps Australia.

There are many other strands to this global movement in expository preaching, like the Simeon Trust, based in the US and reaching across the world, and the Timothy Trust in Canada.

Challenges for expository preaching today

An important question to ask is whether expository preaching today has lost something. If it has, one reason is the unusual giftedness of men like Dick. From time to time God raises up people who are exceptional, and therefore in some measure not imitable. There is, however, a danger in describing what they do, with the intention to learn and grow from their example, that we reduce what they do to tools, even rules, and fail to capture all they do. The so-called “Lucas lessons” were simple, humorous tools Dick used to help people learn expository preaching. Dick set light to them. Listening afresh to Dick’s preaching from Mark’s Gospel, especially the 1985 series “The Original Jesus” (1985) and the 1997-98 series “Jesus Rediscovered”, is refreshing, inspiring and exciting.

I quoted earlier Jim Packer’s definition of preaching as “Christ-related, life-impacting”. Packer continues: “Communication from the text is preaching, only as it is applied and brought to bear on the listeners with a life-changing thrust. Without this it would only be a lecture.”

Application is directing the text to people, bringing it to bear with life-changing thrust. This is the pastor-teacher’s privilege in a local church, preaching to people God has given them to love, prayerfully aiming at the heart or whole person – mind, conscience, emotions and will – for their transformation, having first been transformed themselves. Application is not in addition to exposition. It is better exposition, expounding a text and looking people in the eye, saying “Do you believe this?” John Piper calls this “applicatory exposition”, “urgency of exposition” or “soul-penetrating exposition”. The brilliance of Piper’s perspective is that exposition, rightly understood, and done well, embodies application, with the goal of transformation always in view.

Dick’s preaching was all of the above. We thank God for this man, and the movement that is his and many others’ legacy.