Lord willing, this weekend I will be traveling to Memphis to enjoy the annual Memphis School of Preaching lectureship. This year will mark the 11th that I have attended, the first of which I enjoyed in 2004 as a first-year student in the school.
When I was in Memphis I lived in an apartment furnished by the school, some 5 miles away from the campus. Today the students live at on-site apartment buildings within walking distance of the school building and library.
When I was a student Curtis Cates was the director and soon after my graduation he stepped down for health reasons and turned the reigns over to successors Bobby Liddell and (now) BJ Clarke.
A lot has changed in the near-ten years since my graduation, but one thing has remained constant: The school has an unflinching dedication to Truth and the preaching of it. The faculty has (and has always) given their centuries of combined education and experience to their students to better equip them for pulpit work, missionary work, youth work and so much more.
The motto of the school is “Preach the Word” taken from 2 Timothy 4:
Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.
2 Timothy 4:2
I can not express how well the school impressed upon me the need to take seriously the command to preach. I would not be the man I am today were it not for the two years I was a student at MSOP. When I arrived there, a few days before my 19th birthday I was young, slender, and rocking a full head of hair. Now I…
On second thought, enough about me.
MSOP has been training preachers for over fifty years and they show no sign of stopping. My prayer to God is that they continue to be the Bible-focused, faith-filled educators that turned this green, ignorant, impatient and immature young person into a slightly less green, slightly less ignorant, slightly more patient and slightly more matu…
Sorry, I said enough about me.
I pray God bless the Memphis School of Preaching, as I pray He blesses all other faithful schools of preaching in the world (there are many!).
Thank you,
Matthew Martin (class of 2005)…
(that was NOT during school hours!)
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