A virus infection kept me home last Sunday, and I had to “attend church” via radio. From the several church broadcasts offered by Chicago radio stations I made a good choice, for when the minister began his sermon I became absorbed. He held my attention to the end, and when the organist began playing the closing hymn I had the infrequent feeling that I could have stood more.
As I snapped off the radio the thought occurred to me that I had just listened to the first interesting sermon I had heard in a long time. This is more an observation than an indictment.
Sermons have greatly improved over the years, but in comparison with other prime competitors for people’s attention—radio, television, magazines, and books—they are not keeping pace. They lack preparation, prolonged thought, and inspiration. Mute testimony to this is our declining church attendance and the diminishing influence of the Church. The laity is being droned into slumber by sonorous sermons.
Many people still going to church do so out of long-suffering loyalty, or because they are attracted by what are sometimes referred to as “the cosmetics of religion”—those extras inserted into worship services to woo wayward worshipers into church. An accomplished organist, special anthems and tableaux by children and youth choirs, recognition of special groups attending in a body, jazz ensembles, guest soloists—these are the extra fillings. Even infant baptism is sometimes turned into a kind of baby show, scheduled merely for bringing in relatives by the pew-full.
Some of the revival of ritual is promoted by the desire to have an attendance-builder. Hope of success rests on the concept that people may be vain enough to believe something will prove interesting if they participate.
These “cosmetics” are legitimate and worthwhile to an extent, but they are supplanting the sermon, which is the voice of the Church and the greatest potential attendance-builder it has. There is nothing more enthralling than interesting sermons clearly expressed and well delivered. Penetrating, fresh, illuminating sermons can bring back the Church, and make her stronger than ever! Why aren’t sermons always interesting?
Why I Left The Pulpit
Curiously, the bulk of the blame is not the minister’s, but the laymen’s. The people in the pew have deprived themselves of interesting sermons by consuming an inordinate amount of their minister’s time. Present-day preachers are so busy doing everything in the church from conducting ladies aid elections to cranking the mimeograph that they have insufficient time and energy left for the reading, contemplative thought, research, and organization interesting sermons require.
I know, for I was a minister. After seven years of “successful” but frustrating work I went back to school and prepared for a career in religious journalism. I would go back into the ministry in a minute if I could have a schedule permitting me time to prepare quality sermons.
A few weeks ago while I was chatting with my pastor in his study, he mentioned how little time he had for sermon preparation. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand at the books and magazines neatly undisturbed against one wall and said, “I wish I had time to read these. As pastor of this church I’m nothing more than the manager of a $50,000 corporation.”
Time, and plenty of it, is the prime ingredient for creating anything worth disseminating. If a disinterested person outside the church has a choice—and he does—of investing twenty minutes of his time in listening to a sermon prepared in an hour or two or of reading a magazine article prepared in a day or two, you know which he will choose—and has been choosing.
Lee C. Moorehead, professor of preaching and worship at Methodism’s Saint Paul School of Theology, and an author, stated in a recent magazine article: ‘Certainly the thoughtful layman who wants his preacher to have something of substance to say on Sunday morning realizes that thoughtfulness is the result of intellectual activity that takes time. Therefore he will join the minister in helping to set up the conditions under which the minister has adequate time to study.… Thinking ought to take up a sizable block of the minister’s time” (Adult Student, Nov., 1962; © The Methodist Publishing House; used by permission).
Churches are spending much to train men for preaching, but the money and effort are largely negated by the poor stewardship laymen exercise in consuming their minister’s time.
How many hours of preparation a listenable sermon requires is difficult to ascertain, for men differ in their work habits. From my own experience, I found I needed one hour of preparation for every minute I was to speak. A twenty-five minute sermon, therefore, took me twenty-five hours to prepare. Of course, I couldn’t hold to that kind of schedule, and when I tried, I was sometimes accused of neglecting my job.
There are some consistently interesting preachers today. However one may differ from the beliefs and ideas of such well-known preachers as Harry Emerson Fosdick or Billy Graham—to name but two—there is one thing these gentlemen of the cloth cannot be accused of, and that is dullness. Perhaps this is why they are well known. Their ability to make men listen to their sermons lies not so much in oratorical talent as in what they say. Listening to them, one is readily aware that they spend hours on content and its organization.
The average parish minister, though, is kept so busy during the week that on Sunday morning he has the frustrating task of having to speak out before he has thought out. He must preach “off the top of his head,” and the result, usually, is a fuzzy, puerile sermon—and a half-filled church.
Journalism And Preaching
Part of the blame for uninteresting sermons must be laid at the doorstep of the seminary. My graduate education included training at both a seminary and a journalism school, and I must confess I learned more about sermon preparation in the latter than in the former. In the seminary I learned little more than sermon delivery, while in the journalism school the emphasis was on content.
I actually learned how to put a sermon together in a class on editorial writing taught by a visiting professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning Lauren Soth of the Des Moines Register and Tribune. When he learned I was a minister he told me that a sermon is nothing more than an editorial, and that if I wanted to hand in some excerpts from my sermons for editorial assignments, he would grade them. I was elated and had visions of breezing through a snap course, but the first five or six submitted averaged out to only a C—grade.
I was puzzled and a bit resentful. Didn’t he know I had spent three years in seminary learning how to write sermons? And I had pulled down an A in homiletics, too!
It was Mr. Soth’s comments in the margins that taught me the things I should have learned before. His comments ran like this: “inadequate subject”; “you don’t believe in your subject”; “thoughts incomplete”; “subject done too many times already”; “full of clichés”; “not told from best angle”; “straying from subject”; and “not put together well.” How these complaints exposed my sermons—and most of the sermons I’ve heard.
As the truth of these charges clawed through my pride, I wondered how many times I had lost the attention of my congregation because of such mistakes.
Eventually I received an A in the course, but it was only after devoting hours of thought to my sermon-editorials. One of the main lessons I learned was that something isn’t interesting just because I say it—even if I say it forcefully.
The Church will regain some of its lost influence when it restores its voice in the pulpit. Intelligent, positive, articulate, well-organized, and nourishing sermons will be listened to inside and outside the Church.
As one farmer advised his preacher on the way out of a service in which the preacher bemoaned the fact that more people hadn’t attended: “I’ve learned the best way to get my cattle to the feedlot is to offer them plenty of the right kind of feed.”
It is to the laymen’s advantage to work out a schedule with their preacher that will allow him time to tilt back in his swivel chair, put his feet on the desk, and stare squinty-eyed at the ceiling. They’ll soon find people flocking back to worship services and a host of green-eyed preachers wanting to serve their church.
END
Preacher in the Red
ALERT THE MISSING PERSONS BUREAU!
In my service to a rural congregation of 160 members, one of my obligations (and privileges) as pastor is to teach a class of Junior Highs on Saturday morning during the winter months. During a recent session of this class one lad asked this untimely question, “Who is Reverend Heart?” Before I could register my bewilderment, three other class members chimed in that they too wondered about Reverend Heart. I confessed my confusion and said I did not know him.
In quizzing the class I found out that Reverend Heart had something to do with the writing or the translation of the Bible. A bright member of the class added: “Pastor, you always mention him before you read the Scripture on Sunday morning.” Only then did I realize that the misunderstanding resulted from my frequent practice of introducing the Scripture reading with the words, “Let us listen now with ‘reverent hearts’ to the Word of God as we find it recorded in.…”—The Rev. E. D. BRUEGGEMANN, pastor, St. Paul United Church of Christ, Lebanon, Illinois.
