Time and again in his journal John Wesley records the words, “I offered them Christ.” With the modern ministry well-nigh engulfed in a sea of human problems, it is hardly surprising that the Godward side of the sermon is often obscured. The best corrective could be a reappraisal of the nature of preaching. For preaching is nothing less than the divinely-appointed means of bringing the listener face to face with Almighty God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
We walk into a church, sit in a pew, and lose ourselves in a subjective jumble of prayers, thoughts, and responses to the stimuli about us. The minister opens the Scriptures and begins to speak of God. Instantly we are lifted—almost torn—out of our preoccupied thoughts. We lay aside man-centered considerations, including our reflections upon the church, its staff, its facilities, its relationship to the community. In a few moments we will descend again to man and to our responsibilities for fellow human beings. But for the present, we are in the first chapter of Ephesians—in heavenly places with our Lord, dwelling upon his attributes, his love, his glory. We are transported almost outside ourselves until the very burdens pressing so heavily upon us are seen in true perspective for what they really are. Our hearts are warmed, our loyalties renewed. This is worship!
Compare the experience with that awaiting us in a church at the next corner. Here everything is geared for our special benefit. The hymns are intended to reflect our subjective feeling (“O for a thousand tongues to sing ‘of how I happen to feel today’!”). The choir puts on a Sunday morning concert for our approval. The prayers are heavy with moral instruction for our illumination, and the sermon, clearly designed to edify us, commends religion as the solution to unhappiness, emotional insecurity, and general maladjustment in this life.
James Bissett Pratt once contrasted the Protestant preacher, as he faces his congregation, with the Roman Catholic priest as he faces his altar. Pratt was a liberal Protestant making a psychological study of “The Religious Consciousness,” and he was struck by the advantage he considered to be held by the priest. He said that the priest was obviously dealing with God as though He were actually present, whereas the minister—even though he may have sensed the divine Presence—was hard put to make God appear real, since he was forced to direct his worship activities wholly toward the people sitting in front of him.
Pratt’s reasoning was palpably superficial, for the Presence of the Shekinah glory hardly depends upon the way the worship leader is facing. A real danger nonetheless that should be mentioned is this: a minister can become so trapped by the tentacles of church promotion that it becomes virtually impossible for him to free himself or his sermon in order that the Holy Spirit can draw hearers to Himself. There has to be a Godward dimension in preaching if the proclamation is to be something other than ecclesiastical elbow-digging or back-patting.
It cannot be emphasized too much that preaching is an act of worship, addressed to man, but in an ultimate sense offered to God. Along with the sacrifices of the broken and contrite heart and of the stewardship of life, there is the sacrifice of preaching. “This I do for God” might well be carved on every pulpit. The kerygma is not only good news about God, it is good news spoken for God, offered as worship to God. As Spurgeon says, “What can more truly be described as worship than hearing the Word of God as it demands to be heard, with faith, with reverence, with penitence, with personal application, with self-dedication, with abandonment of the soul to God our Saviour?… There ought to be nothing in preaching that is inconsistent with worship, nothing that does not promote it in its purest and most spiritual form.”
To speak of the sacrifice of preaching is not the same as to redefine preaching as a sacrament. Some neo-orthodox writers seem to argue that since words are symbols they are comparable to sacramental water, wine, and bread. Thus the relation of word and sacrament in the theology of the Reformation is reversed. When Edward Shillito says (in Christian Worship, N. Micklem, ed., Oxford, 1936) that “in preaching, then, we are administering a Sacrament,” he is on dangerous ground. Word and sacrament are not identical, and simply calling a sermon sacramental will not make it more of an act of worship. The important thing is that the subject matter be God himself.
The sermon that deals deeply and scripturally with God cannot help being relevant to the needs of modern man, for God is always man’s profoundest need. One spokesman for the laity put it this way: “The layman goes to church because he hungers for God. He believes that he can be drawn to God through Jesus Christ. Theology will not do it. Nice literary style will not do it. But divine love will do it, and the task of the minister, as we laymen see it, is to work into his sermons a warmth, a devotion, a deep conviction, a passion that will strongly draw them toward God through the grace of Jesus Christ” (Wilbur LaRoe, in Monday Morning, Feb. 27, 1956). We would prefer to say that theology alone will not do it, lest theology be demeaned, and that literary artistry alone will not suffice, lest it be disparaged; but we must surely concur in the plea for the pulpit aflame with God’s love.
It is only in compensation for the minister’s failure in mediating God to man that he is tempted to lean on worldly-wise techniques. Such strategies are a poor substitute for the setting forth of God’s Word. Preaching at its highest occurs when God’s Presence in the house of worship becomes so real that the preacher himself fairly drops out of the consciousness of the people. Dinah Morris in George Eliot’s Adam Bede remarks with true insight concerning Moses: “He never took any heed what sort of bush it was that was burning—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.” And John Brown of Haddington, Scotland, was said to have spoken of God with such fervor that the skeptic, David Hume, once commented, “He preaches as if Jesus Christ were at his elbow.”
Many things have been said and could be said about the relevance of the sermon to the needs of the congregation, the necessity for a twentieth century context, proper distinction between the committed and uncommitted, and so on. Many more things could be said about presentation and delivery. Yet important as such matters are, there is something even more vital for the preacher to remember: he is a herald, a proclaimer.
His message is so much spray in the universe unless it summons men and women worshipfully into the throne room of the King who created them and who now, through the grace that is in Christ Jesus, speaks to them of eternal verities.
UNDEVELOPED RESOURCES OF AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
One of the scandals of Protestantism is its failure to use the billions it has invested in church buildings to better advantage. Many magnificent edifices often stand locked and unused on Sunday nights and most week days. The not-so-splendid houses of worship are likewise dark too much of the time.
This situation is particularly unfortunate in view of the need for Christian education and information. While Roman Catholic and Jewish childhood and youth receive 500 hours of religious instruction a year, Protestants get about 50 hours. Protestants are too often unable to give “a reason for the faith that is within them” and to witness intelligently.
Southern Baptists have undertaken a notable project in their Baptist Training Unions which provides a graded educational program every Sunday evening, doubling the time available in their Sunday Schools. Week-day classes are often added. These Baptist houses of worship are veritable beehives of educational and evangelistic activity and Southern Baptists are growing more rapidly than any other major denomination in America.
It is time not only to use our church buildings more effectively but to employ the talent of our potential church leadership seven days a week.
