How Important Is Preaching?

I get the feeling that many Christians today think that their own Bible reading or the home house group that they go to makes a far bigger impact on their Christian lives, and therefore is far more important to them, than the sermons they hear. So, were the men who wrote the catechism wrong, or just living in a different season? Was that true in their day, centuries ago, while we live in a different day, a technological day—things have changed? Maybe preaching was much more important in their yesterday than it is in our today? I suspect that Christians who draw these conclusions do so almost entirely on the basis of their own experience. But the fact that someone gets more out of the neighborhood Bible study than they do out of the preaching they hear doesn’t mean that that’s how it should be.