Over the coming weeks, we will be highlighting Leadership Journal's Top 40, the best articles of the journal's 36-year history. We will be presenting them in chronological order. So today we present #39, from 1981, an interview with the incomparable Gardner C. Taylor.
In a 1979 story, Time magazine described Gardner C. Taylor as one of the seven best preachers in America. Yet Taylor, pastor of the 10,000-member Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, admits preaching has never been an easy task.
"As a young man I didn't feel entirely comfortable with my calling to preach; as a new pastor here in Brooklyn I felt the tugs to join in the political life that swirled around our community; and even now after thirty-two years here at Concord, I rarely feel fully delivered in my sermons."
In spite of these difficulties so common to the preaching ministry, Taylor is thankful for the life to which he's been called. "The Lord does not misfire. I'm thankful more and more every day he made me a preacher."
Taylor is a large, grandfatherly man, who commands as much respect for his genuine spirituality as for his considerable preaching skills. Called "the dean of the nation's black preachers," Taylor was born in Baton Rouge, attended Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, and came to Concord Baptist after pastorates in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Elyria, Ohio.
Leadership editors Terry Muck and Paul Robbins went to Brooklyn to interview Taylor. It was a profound experience. The external trappings of greatness are all there: a multimillion-dollar church built under his supervision in 1954; a two-story nursing home adjacent to the church, built in 1975; a 155-student grade school run by Lora Scott Taylor, Gardner's wife.
Taylor is pleased with these things he calls "God's blessings." But many will tell you God's richest blessing on Concord Baptist Church of Christ is Taylor himself.
Do you think you're a better preacher today than you were thirty years ago?
I know I am. But I'm not as good a preacher as I want to be. After I preached yesterday afternoon, I said to myself, "I didn't get at it the way I should have."
That will probably encourage readers.
I feel that way often. Now and then I get a wonderful sense of having been delivered fully through a sermon, but it doesn't last long, and by Tuesday or Wednesday that sermon begins to look awfully wooden and stale in retrospect. But I know I'm a better preacher now.
How do you know that?
I have a sense that I'm preaching closer to the heart of the gospel; I deal more intimately with the deepest concerns of people. In mv early years, I had a fascination for form and eloquence that was really not heart deep, I'm afraid. They say the reason baseball pitchers walk other weak-hitting pitchers so often is they're trying to impress them with their great stuff, so they try to make the ball dance on the plate. They end up walking people who couldn't hit a ball standing still. Some preachers have a similar problem of wanting to be a Fancy Dan and show their stuff. I've sensed my own growth away from that need.
What word would you use to describe a preacher who doesn't try to be a Fancy Dan?
Selfless. A remarkably gifted colleague, Sandy Ray, was at Cornerstone Church in Brooklyn for thirty-five years. I listened to him year in and year out, and I never heard a false note or saw a false move. I never sensed that this man was playing to the galleries. I know also a preacher of enormous talent whose preaching, although attractive, has never achieved the force, the thrust, which I thought was in him in his student days. I listened to him two or three years ago, and I think I found out what is wrong—he's using fancy footwork, he's showing he can do it. I'm sure he doesn't realize it, but there's always half a smile on his face as if to say, "Watch, now, what I'm going to do."'
He's caught up in the performance?
Yes. When I was younger I wanted to take elocution to train my voice. My wife discouraged me from it. I've always respected her judgment (she made Phi Beta Kappa back in Oberlin in 1937) so I never did it. Her reasoning was that preaching never ought to be a finished thing, a polished performance.
What discipline do you use to improve your preaching?
I try to gain depth through study, observation, and experience. Preachers make a grave error if they give up constant, disciplined study of the Scriptures and things written about the Scriptures. One winter, twenty years ago, I went through a three-volume systematic theology with long Germanic logical constructions that demanded line-by-line study. I came out of that exercise with a new appreciation for detailed theological work. Preaching books are also helpful. Right now I'm reading James Earl Massey's book, Designing the Sermon. He has a passage in there on "opening men up"—it's a great passage. I'm also reading W. M. Taylor's Parables, written in 1888; there's a wonderful value in old books as well as new ones.
Do you take great pains to be observant of human nature?
I don't take pains so much as it just happens. I find people extraordinarily interesting; each one I know has a wonderful storv. There's a woman in this church who was an usher. Even though she had a leg amputated last year I recently saw her ushering again. I marvel at the courage of the many who are called ordinary; they're unsung heroes.
Do you have a conscious sense of trying to make your sermons relevant to your people?
Kyle Haseldon, once an editor of Christian Century, had a saying about the Scripture being the re-vealant. There is no such word in the dictionary, but it's a good word: what is revealed, over against that which is relevant. The preacher's job is to see how these two things intersect and report on it. Karl Barth spoke about standing in the pulpit with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
Do most of your sermon ideas come from books or people?
Both. In my reading, for example, one sentence will set off a chain of reflection.
Like this idea in Massey's book you just mentioned?
Yes, "opening men up." That idea sparks a sequence of thoughts in my mind. Gene Bartlett, mv old colleague from Colgate-Rochester Seminary, has just written a book called Postscript to Preaching. He has a sentence in there that "in Christ we pass from P.M. to A.M." Someday I must do something with that idea.
I also get ideas from talking with people. Occasionally I play golf with a man who is the former president of a bank here in New York. He's a good man, although not particularly religious, and he told me one day he'd seen the stage play Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. He was talking about how moved people were at a certain point in the play, and then he said, "But you know what bothers me about black people? They depend on Jesus to do everything."
Well, I started thinking about that, and later I developed a sermon about that idea and sent him a copy. My thesis was that yes, black Christians do call on the name of the Lord often and depend on him greatly. But by and large they're the same people who are buying homes, sending their children to school, and making decent lives for themselves. They have done more concerning the practical things that matter than all of the social clubs, fraternities, banks, or other black institutions.
How far ahead do you plan your sermon ideas?
I operate on narrow margins of reserve. I rarely know what I'm going to preach about on the Monday or Tuesday before a Sunday preaching date. This morning (Tuesday) I have no conscious sense of what I'm going to preach about Sunday morning. By tonight—and this is a mystery to me—some idea will come. I may spark it by looking back through some of the things I've read, or by what Alexander McClaren called "sitting silent before God." I don't necessarily advise this for preachers—but it works for me.
How do you advise young preachers to prepare themselves?
I tell them not to neglect their own spiritual lives. Paul says "lest by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway." It's easy to get so engaged in the mechanics of preaching that one loses the vitality of it, the center. Some people are born closer to the veil that separates this world from the spiritual realm; they're more sensitive to things than others. Preaching is easier for them.
You're saying that if preachers don't internalize the truth, they don't have much to give out?
Nothing but a second-hand story, an arm's-length dealing with truth. I read this morning in the Book of Ruth where Naomi says, "I went out full and I've come back empty." That's the story of life. It's also the story of preaching; we must keep ourselves full so we can empty ourselves in the pulpit.
How do you evaluate the thoughts and ideas that come to you as worthwhile sermon topics?
The Bible has a thread, a theme, running throughout its length. Every preacher, Bible student, and Christian sees that theme—maybe not exactly as I see it, but not completely different either. A preacher's sermons radiate from that central theme like spokes from a wheel. Preachers must have a good grasp of the full sweep of Scripture before they can see it.
What's the theme as you see it?
God is out to get back what belongs to him.
Some ministers are offended if you suggest they're topical preachers, because they want to be considered exegetes of the Word. Do you have some thoughts on this?
I don't think preachers should flit about the Scriptures looking for favorite notions; they're liable to become Johnny-one-notes. Even in topical preaching, if a preacher is going to have the strength of the Word of God behind him, there must be a sense of Scripture. I remember Harold Cooke Phillips at Cleveland's First Baptist Church preaching a sermon during my seminary days on the angel in the sun from the Book of Revelation. He said at the outset that he was taking this idea out of its context. He did a marvelous job, but even in the hands of a craftsman as skilled as Harold Cooke Phillips the sermon was weakened because essential underpinnings had been taken from it. When taking a text, be careful of the context lest the text becomes the pretext for saying something you want to say.
All of the moods, experiences, and thoughts of the human mind are contained in the Scriptures. Paul Scherer said the preacher does not have to make the Scriptures relevant; they already are. The preacher only has to communicate the relevance that is native to the theme. The Bible is full of life-and-blood people; it's frightfully honest.
I'm also more and more convinced the Bible has a life of its own; it addresses itself to us in different ways at different times. Sometimes you'll read a passage of Scripture a hundred times and it's absolutely barren, it's silent. Then you read it the one-hundred-first time, and suddenly it talks to you, tugs at you for attention.
How should young preachers develop their style of preaching?
Each preacher has to come to terms with himself or herself. Different people have different inclinations and skills.
So it's an individual thing?
When I first came to New York, I was privileged to be a colleague of some of the greatest pulpit figures of this country. They were all great men of God, but they were all different. Robert McClacken preached with a probing wistfulness. George But-trick was a man very much in touch with the tides of current thought, yet always subjected them to the scrutiny of the Scriptures. Paul Scherer was grand and expansive. One of his students asserted that when Scherer said "Good morning" to you, it was an occasion. His preaching was almost Shakespear-ean in its manner. Sandy Ray had a gift for observation of human nature, of taking very simple things and giving them eternal meanings. He used to say, for instance, that some of us are ocean liners and we sail great waters; and some are little tugboats; but the only way the ocean liner can get to port is with the help of the tugs. He used to say that in preaching he always tried to do as he did on expressways and turnpikes: stay close to the right lane so he could find a good exit. A preacher has to find what he or she is all about inside and work with that flow. Arthur Gossip used to say he would preach to himself, and then find out that he had preached to all other people. Now a preacher can't become simply an echo of his own eccentricity, but one has to come to grips with self first.
There is tremendous power in accepting the verse, "By the grace of God, I am what I am." Right. When one has found that acceptance, that person has come into an incomparable authenticity. I have never known a preacher who did not have a unique power if he or she would allow it through. I had a student at Colgate-Rochester who stuttered. Sometimes when he preached he stuttered. But there was a force in the stutter that caused people to almost stand up in their effort to help him. It wasn't for effect; it would have fallen flat had it been that. But he could draw forth an interest in his preaching that very few others could do.
You've talked about how you develop ideas for your sermons, about the importance of staying close to the Word, and that preachers must project their sermon through their own personalities. How do you determine the purpose of your sermons?
Now, we cross the boundary into the mysteries. Dr. Scherer used to talk about a preacher who said he always prepared the first part of his sermon because he wanted to get going, but once he started, he depended on the Holy Spirit. A parishioner said to this man one Sunday that his part was always better than the Holy Spirit's part.
Sermons speak to people's needs. Pastoral experience teaches us many of the needs of people. Also, the preacher's own life, his own struggles, teach other needs. For instance, I had to talk very earnestly with the Lord recently about nagging worries I have for my wife. She's in excellent health as far as I know, but after forty years together, obviously something must happen sooner or later. She's been so much a part of my life that it is almost unbearable for me to think of our separation. I had to ask the Lord to deliver me from this terrible shadow. I'm sure these same worries affect other people also. I have to open myself before God and give voice to this in the light of the Scriptures. This is what I'm called to do.
Sometimes my sermons consciously address certain needs, other times it happens mysteriously. The Word of God breaks through the preacher by the power of the Holy Spirit. Other times, in spite of the preacher, the people will be ministered to. Occasionally a parishioner will say at the door of the church, "You spoke to me; this was my problem and you spoke to it." The preacher didn't mean to speak to that problem at all.
This coming Sunday is Easter Sunday, so I imagine you will preach on something that relates to this glorious occasion. The Sunday after Easter is not as special. What do you speak about on a "letdown" Sunday?
Why not preach about the let-down? Why shouldn't a preacher on the Sunday after Easter choose a sermon based on the incident of Thomas who was not there. To many people, the Resurrection doesn't seem to mean much, but the gospel has ^Wfcg te -Sa^y YO tei oo.
Do you sometimes have let-down Sundays?
Yes, I come to what my wife calls preaching plateaus, in which everything is flat country. I used to go through more of that than I do now, preaching slumps in which the stream didn't flow, the wheels didn't turn for three, four, five weeks. I learned to look inward at those times, offer what I was passing through to God. I tried to believe by the promise of the Word that those sermons spoke to somebody who was having in some sense the same kind of experience.
Let's put you in your study. You've decided on a sermon idea for Sunday morning. It's Wednesday, and you're sitting on this exciting idea that needs developing. How do you move from idea to finished sermon?
I think of a sermon as a journey, a trip I want to make. I want to know where I'm starting, how to get there, and where I'll end up. Incidentally, for preachers who want to work without manuscripts in the pulpit and have trouble memorizing their sermon, this idea of a journey is very helpful; if you get a sense of progression in your sermon you have a large part of the battle won.
Since I want to know where the text goes, I study it and get some sense of the Scripture myself. Only then do I see what others have to say about the passage. I might go to Joseph Parker's Preaching Through the Bible, McClaren's Expositions, Calvin's Exposition of the Scriptures, one of Barclay's commentaries, or The Interpreter's Bible. Sometimes I look at the critical commentaries and research the original language. At this point, I may find the Scriptures don't say what I thought they did; I have to be open to the possibility that I may have to change my idea.
At any rate, I try to get my introduction determined by Thursday night. I want the introduction to suggest rather than expose; I want it to be fairly cool and restrained. More times than not I start with a Scripture exposition; other times I start with an introduction which hints at the idea; then I turn to the Scripture and draw out of it the steps by which I want to proceed to the conclusion. This cannot be done in a mechanical way; the method depends on the sermon purpose, the text, and sometimes on your own mood.
Is this a hard part of the process for you?
No, the hardest part is waiting for the original idea to germinate, to spring into thought.
That's a weekly adventure. Once it comes, the sermon flows. Although I don't use it in the pulpit or memorize it, I write a full manuscript of every sermon I preach. Some of the material is lost in actual delivery, but material I hadn't planned on comes to me while preaching. The one makes up for the other. By Friday night, I like to come within a page of completion. Sometimes, when the momentum is flowing, I'll do the conclusion on Friday at two or three in the morning. But if not, then I'll leave the conclusion for Saturday morning.
That's my way, but every preacher's different. Spurgeon would have people in for tea on Saturday and then would say to them after an hour or two, "You must excuse me, but I haven't begun my sermon for tomorrow and you know how many chicks I have to scratch for." Dr. Buttrick did his sermons, the actual writing of them, almost all on Saturday night. I would be afraid of this, I couldn't do it. On the other hand, I do not fear waiting until Tuesday for my idea. I guess I would be in a fair panic if by Wednesday night or Thursday morning I didn't have some sense of what I was going to do.
How much time should pastors put aside for sermon preparation?
Dr. Fosdick said you needed an hour of preparation for every minute of delivery. I've never reduced it to that. I have insomnia, so I read at night. I read almost everything with a sense of, "How does this relate to my preaching?" For example, I read the New York Times theatrical section and the book review section. I came across something in their book reviews the other day which said Isaiah Berlin has "the gift of clothing ideas with personality." That's my job as a preacher—giving scriptural principles personality,
Frankly, I've always been a little chilled by the idea of spending an hour in preparation for every minute in the pulpit. Maybe people with greater discipline than I can do that, but I can't. I do think the preacher has to be saturated as much as possible with the central theme of the Bible and then with the subject of the sermon. Experiences and illustrations almost come running to the paper if you saturate yourself.
You're saying if preachers are saturated with the Bible and with life, they'll have all the material they need to preach great sermons?
More than enough. It comes down to eliminating material so you don't go off on bypaths too often. My father used to say there are two great problems that face the older preacher: repetition and digression. That's true. The danger is you get to be, as I'm afraid I've become, a kind of scarred old valise of anecdotes and remembrances, and it's awfully hard not to go running off behind some stray point that dangles in front of you like a carrot in front of a donkey.
Do you have any systematic way of keeping illustrations?
No, I admire people who do this, and I think they have a great advantage, but I find illustrations just come back to me as I'm preparing. I've been blessed with a good memory. Even the impressions of my earliest childhood remain vivid. I remember as a boy of five or six my first experience with death. We visited a neighbor, Miss Elvira, who was dying, and the lamplit scene in the house four doors from ours is still fixed in my memory.
Let's look at the negative side for a moment. When a fellow preacher comes to you and says his preaching is sterile, that the pulpit doesn't hold a challenge anymore, and that he dreads Sunday morning—what do you say?
One of my seminary friends, who feared preaching, was a student assistant in Cleveland and was called on regularly to preach. He would come in about Friday or Saturday and would say, "You know, it feels as though I just came out of the pulpit yesterday, and I have to go back in tomorrow."
For preachers like this who feel that every time they look over their shoulder Sunday is coming, I recommend they go back to the Scriptures. They should try to pick up the sights and sounds and smells of the Scripture and try to enter the situation of that text. What kind of street does this text live on? Is it a shabby street or is it neat and tidy? What are the sounds? Are they cheerful, are they melancholy? What people live around it? Are they people you'd want to be around? Dinner-party people, wedding people, rough people? When one goes back into the Scriptures to live in them and feel the pressure of Cod on human life, some deliverance in preaching will come. The excitement of proclaiming Scripture will be renewed.
For the general feeling of purposelessness, I find the best thing to do is to go see somebody that needs to be seen; almost always something is waiting there for you. I've had periods of drought in my preaching, but never long ones. I shudder to think of those who go through this and fear it is a permanent arrangement.
There is a sense, of course, in which preaching is an albatross on all of us. I go through a dreadful time on Sunday mornings getting ready to preach. Sometimes I pass laborers on my way to church and wish I were doing anything except having to come over here and get into that pulpit again. But once I get here and the music and hymns start, I get a sense of the people and something happens. Bob Gibson, the great St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, said the hardest thing about baseball for him was getting to the ballpark and putting his uniform on. Once he did that, it was a joy.
Is part of this nervousness caused by your concern to do the best you possibly can?
Yes, I want to do a good job. In fact if I don't have that nervousness, it's a bad sign. It very likely means I'm flat. But here again you enter the mystery of the Lord's promise, "I will be with you," and the Lord does stand fast to his promises.
What else do you do when you feel flat?
I study the history of preaching. No preacher should feel embarrassed about this calling, because some of the finest minds and the noblest spirits of the centuries have given themselves to this fascinating art. I don't see how any preacher could feel flat when he reads of Jean Massillon preaching the funeral of Louis XIV before all of the crown heads of Europe. From the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral, he looked out over that royal gathering for a moment and then said, "Brethren, in the hour of death, only God is great." Anybody who stands in that tradition must feel good about the calling.
When did you know that you wanted to be a preacher?
In a sense, it was in me all my life, but as a young man I recoiled from the idea. I wanted to go to law school and become a criminal lawyer. My boyhood friends in Louisiana tried to discourage me from that idea; at that time no black person had ever been admitted to the Louisiana Bar, and my well-meaning friends asked me where I was going to practice law, in the middle of the Mississippi River? In my senior year of college I was admitted to the University of Michigan Law School. But before I left, I had a fearful automobile accident; it touched me at the very center of my being, and through that experience I heard the Lord's call to the ministry. I felt both an enormous relief and a great embarrassment in telling everyone I felt called to the ministry. To be honest, I felt that embarrassment for several years. I did not start off with any great confidence or sense of appreciation and awe about being a preacher. I wasn't sure it was a worthwhile thing for a young, healthy, thoughtful man to do.
Were you influenced by negative models?
No, I had the bright image of my father, and my pastor was a college president, a very thoughtful man. I don't know what it was, but I just didn't think much of the ministry. Even when I came to this church at the age of thirty, I still had some of that in me.
Years ago the minister was called the "parson" because he was the "person" in the community. That's not so true anymore. A pastor faces many people in his congregation every Sunday who are more educated, more traveled, and more affluent than he. Does the preacher feel intimidated by this?
He might. But he has to go back to the great uni-versals in which he has authority. Many people are educated, but they aren't educated in the Bible as the pastor is. The people out there before us are dying people who one day will be corpses. A preacher has to assert his uniqueness as a proclaimer of the relationship between the temporal and the eternal.
What is your Sunday morning routine before you preach?
Well, I go through the same procedure Sunday morning that I practice Saturday evening. I listen to spirituals and gospel music on my stereo. They help me get into a cadence which belongs to my background. On Sunday morning, even before getting up, I like to go through the sermon in my mind to see what grasp I have of it. As I said, I've been blessed with a good memory. I read over my sermon three times: twice on Saturday, once to proof it because it has to be typed later, and the second time for absorption, and then once on Sunday morning before I leave the house. Once I get to the church, I see several people about the announcements, and then about 10:30 I seclude myself in my office and don't see anyone else until I go to the pulpit at 11:00. That is the moment of truth; all the apprehensiveness comes to a head. The hardest thing for me is getting started, getting off center. A preacher has three or four minutes, hardly more than that, to interest people. If I miss them in those first three or four minutes I'm finished. Their minds have gone off somewhere.
How do you start?
Some preachers have said they address one person somewhere out there in the congregation. I find it better to muse to myself for a while. I don't address people at the outset so much as myself. I want to do justice to my idea before I address the people. Now Spurgeon would not agree with this. He said to young preachers, "You better do justice to the people; an idea never walked out on you." But in those first minutes I like to get my bearings, perhaps in sentences that almost are repetitive until I can build up a sense of communication with people.
I can't give any formula for how I deliver a sermon; it depends on the sermon, on the mood of the preacher, on the mood of the congregation. Black preachers used to have a formula for it: "start low, go slow, get high, strike fire, retire." Paul Rees said that a sermon ought to move people up as close to the heart of God as they can be moved, and then left there. I agree with that. I want, by God's grace, to lead people into the presence of God in some area of their lives and leave them there.
Haddon Robinson, of Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary, has said many preachers fall short in the pulpit because they've never conquered the rudiments of public speaking. They pray, they study, but they need to get busy and learn something about public speaking.
He's perfectly right. Comedians use grabbers to get hold of people right away—that's a basic public speaking technique. If the preacher's opening sentences do not draw people into his flow of thoughts, then he is up against it for the rest of the morning. There are thousands of techniques preachers can use to communicate more effectively: the rhetorical question, the incident out of life, the illustration from literature, the dramatic pause. The techniques cannot be used mechanically; yet they have to be planned by the preacher as a living part of the sermon.
What role does the congregation play as you're delivering the sermon?
Once I get into the sermon, I try to get very close to the congregation. Any movement on their part, for example, bothers me greatly, because I have to feel they are right there with me. What I am delivering is not an abstract lecture, but a communication about a life-and-death matter.
In our black congregations there is some vocal response, not as much as there was once, but there's still a good deal and I enjoy it. We had a Canadian guest preacher here one Sunday when I was gone, Frank Zwackhammer, and Frank told me later he must have been laboring a point a little too long because one of our deacons said out loud, "All right, we've got that. Go on." The point is that there's an invisible, mysterious interplay which goes on between pastor and people, and I can feel whether I'm getting to the people or not.
What do you think determines whether you're getting to them or not?
Language, for one thing. The preacher has no excuse for unnecessarily sloppy language. Words must make definite suggestions, not only in their definition but in their sound. There are words that caress, words that lash and cut, words that lift, and words that have a glow in them. The great poets know this. T. S. Eliot somewhere speaks of his work as "a raid on the inarticulate." Preaching is a raid on the inarticulate and the inexpressible. Words are the currency in which the preacher deals; we must be very careful not to deal with them loosely, because if they are debased or devalued, there's no other currency in which to deal. A preacher should not worship at the altar of words, but he or she must have due regard and reverence for language.
Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug?
I like that. Sunday when I was preaching I said, "That is him," and I knew immediately it was grammatically wrong, but I was too far into the flight to try to do anything with it, so it had to stand. I hate to do that. My wife consoles me and says there are many things more important than correct grammar, but it still bothers me. I remember the story of Ben Perkins, a very popular preacher reputed to have a Ph.D., and one night he made some grammatical error and a critic in the congregation just hollered out, "Ph.D.'s don't say that!" Without missing a beat Perkins said, "It will be corrected before it gets to heaven," and went right on preaching.
What do you like to have happen in the service just before you preach?
I like to have the music bring people to a readiness, a waiting. In this congregation, on some Sundays I can feel an almost physical tautness of readiness for the Word of God. Now that's a wonderful moment, but it doesn't happen often enough.
Is this preparation done through the singing of hymns?
It's a combination of everything that has gone before. The last anthem is important. Last Sunday we sang a hymn very dear to me, "Oh, For a Closer Walk With God." When the people of God come together it is unique. It's not an audience, it's a congregation. There is nothing in the world that resembles the people of God coming together to worship. I give many secular addresses on public platforms, but I never have the tension about them that I have about a sermon. It's a different ballgame altogether. Worship is an event.
When you're in the midst of the sermon and you realize the people aren't with you, what do you do to try and find their wavelength?
I may reach out for them again by repetition or digression, or try to draw them closer with an unplanned illustration. But sometimes one must plow as straight a furrow as you can, finish, and leave the rest to God. No preacher is incandescent all the time. Arthur Gossip reports a mystical thing that once happened to him in a Scottish church. As he came down the pulpit stairs after preaching, he met a presence who said to him, "Was that the best you could give me today?" Gossip said he went back in the vestry and wept. I think it's a question every preacher has to ask himself, "Is this the best I can give?" If the answer is yes, that is all we can do.
Once the sermon has been delivered, how do you feel?
Well, I feel an enormous sense of relief. On the other hand, I very rarely preach and feel satisfied with what I've done.
Is that a tension with your own internal standards?
I think so. I have a foreshadowing now and again of what my preaching ought to be. I want it to be that way all of the time. But, of course, it's not that way all the time, and so I have to make peace with that reality.
How much analysis do you allow yourself to gc through once the task is done?
The sermons are taped. There was a time when couldn't stand to listen to them at all. Now, in my study at home, I will listen on Sunday or Monday night to what happened, and I will pick out places where I thought the transitions were poor or the language could have been better. Every sermon is a new adventure; you're not doing what an actor does who goes through the same lines every night. You're dealing with different material that calls fo different presentations. The preacher needs to naturally enter the mood of the Scripture. There is the Last Supper passage, for instance, in the Gospel of John where it says, "And Judas went out, and was night." There's a slow beat of doom in the phrase. The preacher needs to find those nuances and convey them in his sermons.
We talked earlier about the purpose of the sermon. What benchmarks determine that the purpose has been achieved?
Of course, one of the marks is public commitment. I'm conscious of it because we have a public invitation to discipleship after each sermon. I am somewhat let down if there's not public commitment. That's a poor measurement in many ways because the blessing of God on what I have offered is his business, not mine, but I admit I feel this. More important, I want to feel that when I have uttered the Word of God, I have been faithful to my calling.
Do you consider yourself to be a successful preacher?
I'm both pulled and repelled by the word successful. This church has done well by human standards and, I think, by spiritual standards. I'm thankful for the numbers of people. I'm more thankful for the peace which is among us and the spirit of the people. I look out at the congregation sometimes and see a great throng of people and, of course, it's gratifying and flattering. But the preacher has to keep reminding himself of something that my old church history professor, Francis Buckler, told us back at Oberiin. He used to remind us that when Herod came out and spoke with a dazzling raiment and the people said, "It is the voice of a god, not of a man," Herod fell dead. Popularity is a terribly dangerous thing. One has to keep realizing that ultimately people do not come to hear the preacher but to hear the Lord.
What would be your counsel to young preachers?
To realize that the Lord does not misfire. If he has put a pressure on your life to do this work, he knows what he's doing.
Any regrets?
With all the doubts and uncertainties I've had, I'm thankful more and more every day that the Lord made me a preacher. I remember early in my ministry reading what Wordsworth said, "What will you do when your ministry fades into the light of common day?"
Well, my preaching has long since faded into that light, but whenever I come down from that pulpit so weary that I never want to preach again, the Lord finds some way to revive me, and usually makes my next ministry opportunity one of my most exciting ones.
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