On 12 September,1983, the Rev. William Still, Gilcomston South Church, Aberdeen, universally recognized as the senior parish minister, both in years and influence, among evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, gave the following address to some fifty ministers at an In-Service course of his denomination, convened at St Andrews. The address was published in The Banner of Truth magazine in 1984, and was drawn to the attention of the men at the 2010 US Ministers’ Conference in Grantham, PA, by Craig Troxel, one of the speakers, who comments:

When I first read this article it helped to forge in my mind an all-important distinction. When it comes to the stewardship of the Gospel, there are two basic choices before the Church of Christ. Either the Church will be content to apply itself to God’s ordinary means and trust him for their extraordinary ends; or, the Church will pursue extraordinary means and content itself with ordinary ends. In his reflection of four decades of ministry William Still describes the extraordinary fruit that God brought about through one congregation’s simple devotion to God’s appointed means of grace: Word, sacrament and prayer. In a day when there are so many voices calling for the church to do ‘something more,’ here is a plea for the church to pursue ‘its own native activity’ in the power of the Spirit. One need not claim membership in the Stillite clan to feel a deep kinship with our brother and his (still) timely word. //

He says that he found, that apart from the Early Fathers and the Reformers, any such systematic teaching and preaching of the Scriptures was short-lived, and even the Puritans, who certainly covered the Scriptures in depth, used textual rather than systematic expository preaching. One is not saying that our practice has not been done by preachers throughout history and even today, but I think you will agree that it is far from the accepted form.

However, the abundant fruit of this form of ministry, which I have documented in a book called The Work of the Pastor, is such that only a lunatic would have abandoned it despite all that was said against it. //

Now, I wonder if any are saying, ‘How incredibly narrow this is as an example of congregational life! Such intense spirituality!’ Perhaps you think you could not stand it, let alone your congregation! Well, all I can say is that from that fount of praise, prayer and Bible Study every conceivable kind of outreach goes on into the wider church and the community. //

I take the opposite view, having seen the dissipation and dilution of effort by such all-inclusive activities on the part of the different denominations I have been in. I felt that my time as Pastor could best be employed by concentrating almost wholly on feeding the sheep and tending the lambs in their spiritual growth through a corporate life of prayer and the ministry of the Word. Then let the congregation go out – and encourage them to do so – with an absolutely free commission to be leaven throughout the community and to live their life out there amongst the people as the good Lord guided. //

You see, you could get crowds to come to pie suppers You see, you could get crowds to come to pie suppers and dances in the hall, but precious few to church on Sunday, until things were so bad that old J. T. Cox – the compiler of our Church Law Book, who was Presbytery Clerk back then – twice tried to close our congregation down because it could not pay its way. Serve it right, too!

I hope you see what I am saying: let the church be the church, and let it not incorporate into its fundamental constitution anything but its own native activity, and let all the rest be as much in the nature of an unofficial activity and outreach as possible. //

I was saying that in our experience the whole future of young folk attending church – to put it no higher than mere attendance, although I can put it higher – right up to early adulthood, has hung on getting them to attend regularly, preferably in the family pew, during childhood. To say that we cannot do this in our modern age is surely the most pathetic admission of failure in our elementary responsibility as Christian parents. //

But instead of arguing with people that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God and presenting a wealth of apologetics, as many conservatives have spent their time doing, one has felt that the way to press people into the kingdom, especially thinking young people, is to preach the Word and teach it, and let it do its own work by the Holy Spirit in their consciences, ‘precept upon precept, line upon line’ (although I know that these phrases were perhaps first used by Isaiah for a different purpose). I mean preaching in a dogmatic way, not in the aggressive sense of the word but in the positive sense of it. And it is axiomatic and essential that we must present the truth with that backing of prayer and that dependence upon the Holy Spirit (in both the study of the Word and in the declaration of it) which releases the latent power of the Word to reach not only the minds, but the consciences, hearts and wills of the hearers. Our purpose must be nothing less than life transformation and, consequently, the calling of many into the Lord’s service. //

William Still (1911-1997) was the Minister of Gilcomston South Church of Scotland, Aberdeen, from 1945 until his death. This article was previously published in The Banner of Truth magazine, No. 244 (January 1984),