Don Carson - QTC Year of Excellence

When I heard a few months back that Don Carson was coming to Brisbane to speak to say that I was excited could have been an understatement. To be able to hear and meet the man who has had such an impact on world wide Evangelicalism would be an honour.

Now, I say this not because I 'worship' the man himself. I think there's an unhealthy tendency amongst us to idolise particular speakers for the speaking abilities or prowess in the pulpit. My excitement was not in the speaker itself, but in his clear and precise proclamation of the gospel. Having heard his series on 'Revelation' from @the Castle, I was looking forward to hearing his thoughts on theology and preaching.

So we arrived on a rather windy Brisbane Autumn morning and were ushered into a rather cold lecture theatre for the first of four one-hour sessions with Carson.

His lectures covered four main areas:

• Preaching and Biblical Theology: Connecting with the big picture
• Preaching and Systematic Theology: Connecting with the character of God
• Preaching and History Theology: Connecting with History
• Preaching and Pastoral Theology: Connecting with life, connecting with the heart

Whilst I took as many notes as I could, I can see now that they were far from sufficient in capturing all the little nuances of his lectures. Therefore I ordered the mp3 talks which also include his sermons from Friday night and Sunday morning/evening - the seminar itself was one Saturday.

The first session was of great interest to me. Biblical Theology, from the time I heard about it, has excited me no end! Biblical theology has been the greatest reason why I am passionate about preaching from the Old Testament, and find preaching the OT much easier than the New Testament (which is ironic since most people find preaching the NT easier!). But that's also possibly because I've leaned towards the OT in choosing passages to preach from.

That said there were many nuggets of gold to be found in Carson's session on 'the big picture'. In all his eight-point argument for preaching biblical theology was very persuasive. I will endeavour to make these notes available incrementally.

The second session was a bit more heavy in both content and language. Carson is a man of many big words, his expression is clear and emphatic, yet his style is very high-brow. In some ways you can immediately see that he is a lecturer back home in Chicago! My notes on this seminar were less than the previous one, but there were many challenges in this session also.

The third talk regained a lot of interest. Partly because the air-conditioning had been switched off and partly because we were all a bit snoozy after lunch. I had never realised how important history is to the bible - it is so grounded in history that to remove historical events would be to undermine the faith altogether. For instance, you can take Siddhartha Guatama (Buddha) away from Buddhism and you would still have the fundamentals for Buddhism. If you approached a Muslim, carefully, respectfully and logically, they would agree with you that Allah's vision could have been given to another man other than Muhammad. But you cannot do this with Christianity. Take away Jesus and you take away everything.

Now, I had already known this, but goodness everything else in the lecture was fantastic!

By the fourth session everyone was feeling pretty drained. It was a full on day so far with many things to digest, and yet another hour was approaching with yet another topic. I knew that Don Carson himself had just come from a Monday to Friday preaching conference in Sydney, but I later found out that his talks there were the same here. Thus we were getting a condensed week-long preaching conference in the one day!

But in a lot of ways you could say that Carson left his best for last. Whilst he may have been a lecturer for the past 30 or so years, you can see that his heart is still connected with his pastoral days. There was plenty of practical thoughts from Carson as well as some excellent illustrations.

In all I learnt quite a lot from the day. Not only by way of information from Carson himself, but also quite a lot in his style and story telling. With his excellent preaching style I was able to reflect on my own style and areas I can improve in. Not to be in the image of Carson, but to better improve my speaking ability.