Pastors

PREACHING IN THE VULGATE

An interview with Calvin Miller

Calvin Miller is a 6′ 2″ contradiction. A Southern Baptist far from Dixie, he quotes Shakespeare with a soft Oklahoma drawl. His cowboy boots match his affection for Kenny Rogers but belie his love for Charles Dickens. The many fantasy buffs who bought his Singer Trilogy (InterVarsity) and other recent books with titles like Guardians of the Singreale (Harper & Row) can hardly imagine him soaking wet in a baptistry or out knocking on doors every Monday night, calling on recent visitors to his church.

But he has been a pastor ever since he was a junior at Oklahoma Baptist University. He married a young woman from his first congregation, went on to finish his studies at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, and moved to Plattsmouth, Nebraska, in 1961. He and Barbara started a church there and also welcomed a daughter and a son to their home. Then in 1966, they came to Omaha to pioneer Westside Baptist Church, where they still serve.

Miller’s great love is communication. He combines a flair for the artistic and literary with an intense desire to be understood. That is why LEADERSHIP editors Terry Muck, Dean Merrill, and Marshall Shelley invited him to Chicago to talk about the secrets of creative preaching.

With everything else going on in your life-writing books, overseeing a staff of six, calling on people, painting watercolors for exhibits-how do you find time to be a preacher, too?

Preaching is not a separate activity from the rest; sermons are drawn from life. My job is simply to observe life, to be aware, to notice how the Bible fits life and can be used to guide people. This is something that just goes on continually.

I do have times of intense preparation, of course. Every December I sit down, mark out the fifty-two Sundays of the coming year, and fill in what I want to preach on those dates. Right now I’m trying to write twenty to twenty-five new sermons each year. When you’ve been preaching twenty years, and all your sermons are manuscripted, you can spend the rest of the Sundays doing repeats.

Right now I’m writing a series on the gospel of Mark that will run about seventeen sermons. That’s longer than my usual series; normally I hold them to between three and six sermons.

Somehow we didn’t expect you to write sermons.

There’s a lot of debate about that in this relational age. But writing is just something I’ve always done. I like to write; I like to see what things look like. When I first began in the ministry, I was very shy and couldn’t speak well at all. I had to write it down, rehearse it in front of a mirror, get it nearly memorized, and then go preach it almost by rote.

I’ve gained a lot of flexibility over the years, thank goodness, but I still believe in writing sermons. Great things happen in terms of phrasing, tightness, and clarity.

We’ve just gone onto television, and the producer wants me to preach at least twenty-three minutes. I’m having a hard time stepping up to that, because twenty minutes has always been my natural length. Writing has always helped me preach tightly, without repeating myself.

Too many preachers say the same things over and over. If they would work at the discipline of writing, they would start seeing how one paragraph looks like an earlier paragraph, and they could streamline a great deal.

The pastor who has always preached extemporaneously imagines writing to be a mountainous task. Is it? How long are your manuscripts?

About fourteen pages, double-spaced, for a twenty-minute sermon. But I tend to talk fast. If a preacher doesn’t want to write the whole thing, he can at least write introductions and conclusions. The worst times in flying, they say, are the takeoff and the landing. I think it would be quite advantageous to write out at least those two spots in a sermon, working on the actual phrases.

When a phrase is well turned, it sticks in people’s minds. They come up to you two weeks later with it lettered in calligraphy-and you didn’t even think it was all that hot. It has become a principle for them, a slogan to live by.

How long does writing a sermon take?

For someone who’s never done it, it could be a nightmare at first. But it gets easier. Now, after twenty years of experience, I spend maybe six hours actually writing a sermon.

The trouble with us pastors is that we live so relationally, buzzing here and there, going from coffee cup to coffee cup, that we are not disciplined. Our sermons are sort of happenings-long happenings-because they mirror our lives.

Do you still memorize your script?

Oh, no. I really believe in the homily as opposed to the oration. A homily is a chat or talk, and the content of my manuscript is communicated informally. In fact, we’ve even stopped using a pulpit at Westside; I just stand up with my Bible and talk to the people.

Inside my Bible is an outline I’ve prepared from the manuscript. The manuscript stays back in my study-but the act of writing it preserves the nicely turned phrases, the particular ways of saying things that make them memorable.

Do you have a photographic memory?

Not at all. In fact, sometimes when I’m quoting poetry, I lose the trail and begin free-lancing-I’ve gotten pretty good at coming up with my own lines that, to the untrained ear, sound legitimate!

But the beauty of manuscript preaching is that when I come back five or six years later (I never repeat a sermon within five years) the material is all there. That doesn’t mean I don’t put a lot of work into it the second time; it still has to be updated. But the best of the old is preserved.

Do your people recognize when you recycle a sermon?

Sometimes, if they’ve been in the church long enough. People remember illustrations, and since I illustrate a lot, they notice. But I think a really good illustration bears repeating. In fact, some people will even ask, “When do we get to hear that story again?”

I was preaching recently, for instance, on gluttony, and I told about a lady I met once in a mobile home while I was out making pastoral calls. She was really large; in fact, I wasn’t sure whether they had built the trailer house around her, or whether she’d been born in it, or what. When I entered the door, she was sitting there eating a can of cherry pie filling.

The sight of it really bothered me-the ultimate picture of gluttony. And I told the people, “I had a hard time concentrating that day. On the one hand, I really wanted her to come to Christ, but on the other hand, I was afraid that if she did, I’d have to baptize her” . . . that’s the kind of story people ask to hear a second time.

You can’t produce a lot of good sermons in a year’s time. Twenty or twenty-five is about my maximum. But I want to keep pressing myself to produce new material.

Your new series on Mark-how is it organized?

I’m going theme by theme, event by event, rather than verse by verse. Going through a passage a word at a time is a little tedious, I think.

How do you decide what applications to make, especially when you’re locked into a series?

That’s the problem with series preaching. You must read a passage and say, “What is Jesus really saying here?” Sometimes I become aware of an emphasis that needs attention in the church, and it’s not in my series texts-tithing, for example. So I emphasize that separately-a short couple of paragraphs just before we take the offering.

Do you find yourself tending toward pet applications? Do you end up majoring on certain things no matter what passage you start with?

I think so. I think everybody does. I end up preaching a lot on freedom-setting yourself and other people free. I also seem to find places to emphasize integrity a lot.

How do you know if you’re skipping some things?

I need to work on that more. A lot of the books on preaching recommend a sermon committee in a church, to remind the preacher of what he does wrong or what he omits. I have a hard time rationalizing that with my role as a prophet. I want to hear what people say, but I don’t want an official group ruling on the content of my sermons.

How do you collect material for sermons?

I read about 120 books a year, and I always annotate in the back the sections that might be useful in a sermon someday. When I’m finished, I put the book on my secretary’s desk, and she types the sections onto half sheets of paper that fit in my resource file, complete with footnotes.

The file has about twenty-five categories. Every two or three years, I go through and throw out most of what has accumulated! But in the meantime, I use a lot of it in sermons, too.

Would you ever preach another person’s sermon?

No. I’m pretty fierce about doing my own. If I use another person’s illustration, I’m careful to say so. A good book footnotes its sources; so does a good sermon.

Which of the classic reference works do you value now after twenty-five years, and which were a waste of money?

It’s a funny thing about references: every time I start working on a series, I go out and buy more volumes on that topic or book of the Bible. And they help me-but in the end, I have to outline the passage for myself. I consult Kittel and Barclay and the rest, but often they tell me more than I want to know.

It is a challenge to keep sermons in the street. The sermon should always be in the vulgate-the language of the people. Even the best of the classics spoke to people in the common language of their time. We seem to forget that Shakespeare wrote to make money-and did pretty well financially. The problem with Hamlet is not that it was hard to understand; language has simply changed since Hamlet was written.

We must make the gospel speak to our day.

At Westside, what is the difference between Sunday morning and Sunday evening sermons?

In the two morning services, I’m extremely practical. The sermon has to relate to life, help people where they are, especially those who know very little about the Bible. Not all of my morning series are books of the Bible; I also do things like “Personal Victory” and “Integrating Yourself.”

Sunday night is a Bible study. Currently, we’re in Revelation. I go verse by verse, but I do it in a loose way, even allowing for talk-back at times. I never cease to be amazed at how people come out for something pretty solid on Sunday nights.

How many?

Around 300, out of an average Sunday morning aggregate of 1,100. Sunday mornings are tied closely to our evangelism outreach program. We have about a hundred people who go calling on Monday nights in teams of two, presenting Christ in the community. Anyone who makes a decision for Christ is encouraged to make a public profession the next Sunday. Thus, every sermon ends with an appeal to come to the altar. I don’t always say, “Be saved” or “You must be born again,” but I do invite people to the altar for whatever reason they may need to come.

About every four or five weeks, we have a family altar time, inviting families to come and kneel together. I suggest prayers for them to use as they meditate: prayers for forgiveness, for understanding of how to be more helpful to one another. Literally hundreds of people come forward. I was reluctant to try this at first, but it has proved to be a very good thing. For some, it’s the only time they ever pray together.

When you were a young pastor, how did you cope with your feelings after preaching a mediocre sermon? Were you frustrated with trying to do a bell ringer every seven days?

Yes! I remember some Sundays thinking, That was the third worst sermon of my career. I had an entire line-up in my mind: absolute worst, next worst, and so on, and I vowed never to preach any of them again.

Trying to outdo yourself week after week is a tremendous problem. If people compliment you one Sunday, you think, Boy, I’ve really got to turn it on next week, and before long, it becomes a soft-shoe routine. That’s why nothing substitutes for solid teaching in the pulpit. To communicate truth is far more important than to inspire. The press for inspiration is what gets us into one-upmanship. If we teach something usable and practical, illustrating it well, we should be content.

Series preaching, by the way, is a great help in this area. It forbids you to do cute things just to get attention.

How will you teach Mark to non-Christians and still satisfy the old saints at the same time?

Almost everyone appreciates the simple. A twenty-year-old Christian has some of the same basic needs as the new person; both may be struggling with guilt, for example. And the Holy Spirit has an ability to work with everyone according to his or her need. Preaching is the kind of event where God brings people together according to their needs and applies his Word to them all.

How do you get ready to preach?

I arrive at the church about 6:30 on Sunday morning and spend the next two or three hours making my outline. Up until then, the sermon has been only in manuscript form; now I write the notes I will take with me to the service.

If there’s a poem to quote, I go over it five or six times to make sure I have it. I polish a few particularly important phrases. I usually have about twenty-two entry points in a manuscript: things I must be sure to say.

Even with this preparation, the 9:45 sermon is still something of a dress rehearsal. A joke is always funnier at 11:00; a tragedy is more tragic.

What’s your all-time favorite sermon?

Years ago, when I was still a junior in college, I got a chance to preach at a little church in Hunter, Oklahoma. I had been arguing with the Lord about whether to enter the ministry or not; I’d tried preaching a couple of times in nursing homes, and it had been disastrous.

I had heard someone preach on Naaman the leper from 2 Kings 5, and so I decided to try that. I did all kinds of research on leprosy, wrote my sermon, memorized it, and headed for Hunter.

I lasted twelve minutes.

But this congregation had just finished with a preacher who thought anything under an hour was cheating God as well as the people, so they were delighted. They invited me to come back. And after three twelve-minute sermons, they called me to be their pastor.

I not only got started preaching, but I met my wife in that congregation. And Barbara always said the Naaman sermon was the best I ever did. So every six years or so, I preach on Naaman-if not for the Holy Spirit, at least for Barbara. I preached it again just this past Sunday.

I’ve improved it, of course, over the years, but it still deals with honesty-what happens to a man when he is willing to admit his condition. He has to go down to the river and take off all his armor. People see what he really is. He has tried everything else. He has tried to pay for his healing, and no one will take his money. He has called for Elisha to come out and do the leprosy liturgy. Finally, he is exposed before everyone, with nothing to commend him but the plan of a prophet. He comes God’s way and in complete honesty receives the gift of healing.

It’s a very good evangelistic sermon; it helps people be honest about who they are and what their problems are. I still like that sermon. In another six years, probably around 1989, I’ll preach it again.

What is a good sermon?

A good sermon is one that changes something in the hearers. That’s hard to measure, I admit, especially when people hear 52 or 104 sermons a year. How can you really change 104 things about yourself in a year? But still, when I see people growing, moving deeper into Christ, I feel I’ve succeeded.

God’s Word does various things to us, of course. It may break us, conform us to the image of Christ, convict us, even hurt us-but any of these are indications that a sermon has faithfully transferred that Word.

Another sign of a good sermon is that it balances conviction of sin with self-esteem. Bob Schuller’s new book says one of the groups in America that rates lowest in self-esteem is the evangelicals. All our lives we’ve been told how crummy we are, and we fail to see the other side: God’s creation. So sermons need to help people think well of themselves.

I’m not saying I want to move away from conviction, but everybody needs a little self-esteem to get through life. So this summer, when I preach the series on “Integrating Yourself,” I’ll quote Dr. Seuss:

If you’d never been born, then what would you be?

You might be a fish or a toad in the tree.

You might be a doorknob or three baked potatoes.

Worse than all that, you might be a wasn’t.

A wasn’t has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t.

A wasn’t just isn’t. He just isn’t present.

But you-you are you. Now isn’t that pleasant?

Today you are you, and it’s truer than true

That there’s no one alive who is you-er than you.

Shout loud, “I am lucky to be what I am!

Thank goodness I’m not just a clam or a ham

Or a dusty old jar of gooseberry jam.

I am what I am, and it’s a great thing to be.

If I say so myself, happy birthday to me!”

Amazing. Just quoting that seems to reinforce your individuality as well as theirs.

I can’t pontificate; I can’t preach from a pedestal, because the people know me too well. They know I’m artistic; they know I get mad in board meetings, tear my ear off like Van Gogh, and turn sweet as sugar later on. But that’s the reality of life. Maybe my preaching would be more powerful if they didn’t know me so well, but on the other hand, some very good things happen this way.

So you don’t cultivate the preacher-in-the-study syndrome?

No. As Stott said in his book, I don’t like speaking four feet above contradiction. I’ve never had much use for the fellows in the early 1900s who stayed in their studies all week, wrote beautiful sermons, walked to the pulpit at Riverside or Marble Collegiate on Sunday morning, did something big and impressive, and then walked back. I’d rather walk among the people and know them. That’s why I probably quote Kenny Rogers as much as Shakespeare. Ninety-five percent of them know “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille,” and that sums up where marriage often is these days.

How can you tell if you’re getting across?

I do a lot of face watching, for one thing. All good preaching is dialogue. They may not be talking back, but their eyes are talking, and so are their body movements. If I read these signals, I know when to quit (while I’m ahead). If an illustration isn’t working, I know to cut it short. If it is working, if it’s intriguing them-God forgive me, but I love it!

Yes, there is a time for a “Thus saith the Lord” monologue, but on those Sundays, I find it hard to step down from my prophet role in the pulpit and immediately go kiss babies at the door. I’m better off going out before the service, shaking a few hands, saying hi in the hallways, and then going to the pulpit. It helps me be more human.

Over the long haul, how do you know if you’re getting through?

I’d like to say that, after seventeen years in Omaha, all of my people have become spiritual giants. But I don’t notice that so much. I have made a commitment to be faithful in teaching the Bible, in studying, in disciplining myself to write sermons, and I have to trust that God will apply what I say to accomplish good. I suppose if I kept a list of people who have come to know Christ, I could point to numbers, but I don’t do that. . . .

What can you not do with a sermon?

Well, for one thing, a sermon cannot create an atmosphere of love in a church. That comes from living in context with your people. Even sermons on love don’t necessarily produce a loving congregation.

Second, sermons don’t provide a community witness. The Southern Baptist Convention is a prime example of this point, because hardly a church of our 35,000 doesn’t say “Be born again” at least once a Sunday and sing three verses of “Just As I Am.” Yet 79 percent of them are not growing. There must be a lag between the preaching and our ability to be in the field. A community witness comes from the heart of a pastor who wants to lead others to Christ; it’s a sustained appetite with him, and he refuses to take short cuts even though he’s busy with other things.

One of my temptations, as Westside gets bigger and more people get involved in sharing Christ, is to say, “Does it really matter if I do it anymore?” Yes, it matters-it matters to me. My ministry must be practiced, not just preached.

A third thing to mention is the vitality of lay involvement. That can’t be nurtured by sermons. The preacher has to step down and share the pulpit with lay people. Every three or four weeks, we have a man or woman share something that has happened in their life in Christ; we give five to seven minutes for this, and it says that this is their church, not just mine.

One more thing: prayer will not automatically grow from sermons. You have to stop in the middle of services and pray. People can come forward to pray, they can break into small groups to pray, anything-but just preaching on prayer will not do the job.

Is it tougher to preach now than in the days of Whitefield or Finney?

Yes. Kate Caffrey in her book Mayflower describes in detail how preaching was a major event in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Preachers read their sermons, competing for the finished phrase, and no sermon could be judged worthy if it was less than two hours long. People took inkhorns and pens to church, all scratching copious notes while they listened.

In fact, a law was even passed in New England to forbid church-hopping on Wednesday nights; people had to go hear their own preacher and thus hold down the traffic.

Well, that day is long gone. Sermons now have to compete primarily on the basis of their honesty and relationship. The average preacher simply cannot match the great movies and television productions.

Yet I believe what Malcolm Muggeridge said in Christ and the Media about God’s word being still a word. It is not a saving image; it is a saving word. People are still redeemed by hearing rather than seeing. So preaching has a lot going for it regardless.

You mentioned earlier that you use a lot of illustrations, and we would expect that from the kind of books you write. What, in your opinion, is a bad illustration?

One that calls too much attention to itself and not enough to its point. Stories can hold interest-but if they don’t do what you want, they’re no good. That’s often the problem with jokes.

I used a bad illustration last Sunday in the Naaman sermon. I was talking about how important integrity is in every area, even in insinuations. I mentioned the Colombian coffee commercial that shows Juan Valdez picking coffee beans one at a time, and I said, “It’s very difficult for me to think such a commercial is honest-little Juan out there picking coffee beans for the entire West one at a time. What I think happened is that when they finished filming, he got back up on his combine and ran over his burro.”

My Nebraska crowd laughed, of course, but after the service, a man handed me a pretty agitated note, reminding me that poor countries don’t have many combines and that coffee beans are picked by hand. It kind of irritated me at first, but I had to admit I hadn’t thought my illustration through, and as a result, I had been unkind as well as inaccurate.

That’s the problem with someone like me who likes satire; I can be more biting than I should.

Illustrations are designed to make one point, and when you start pushing them for two, you get into trouble. You cannot illustrate the nature of hell from Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus. You can illustrate the danger of procrastinating or of being hardhearted, but if you want to preach on the reality of hell, you have to find another passage.

You shouldn’t have to bend an illustration at the end to make it fit your point. It ought to fall into place naturally, quickly.

Tell us one of your particularly good illustrations.

My family is a limitless supply. I was preaching on the Second Coming and wanted to say how most of us would like to adjust the timing just a bit. We want Jesus to come . . . but after the kids graduate, we get our first royalty check, or something else. So I told about Melanie’s reaction to my rule that she could not date until she was sixteen. At fifteen and three-fourths, the Christmas prom came along, and a boy asked her to go. When I stood firm, she became incensed and said, “Dad, I just hope the Lord comes back between now and February so you have to live with yourself all through eternity knowing I never had a date!”

Illustrations like these not only make a point but have the added benefit of drawing people into your personal life. I only have to be careful not to use things like this without permission.

Have you found yourself over the years developing a mindset that sees everything as a potential illustration?

Absolutely. Illustrations are so important that I work on them all the time. Some preachers say illustrations obscure the general teaching and get in the way, but I disagree. The fact that Jesus told so many stories must mean something.

I do admit, though, that story telling is an art, and not everyone is equally good at it.

How many do you use per Sunday?

One or two strong ones, plus some lesser ones. Any more than that means you’re just stringing stories together without much correlating truth. Preaching is far more than story telling.

When do you find time to read?

In the afternoons. I’m in the church office every morning, but usually in the afternoons, I’m home reading or writing. I’m turning more and more to the classics, it seems, although I read the best of popular inspirational books, too.

Occasionally I get inspired to write in the middle of the night, and so I do. But I try to maintain a sense of leisure through all my activities. Too much hassle means you don’t do much talking to God. You can’t run into the throne, blurt everything out, and have a very victorious spiritual life.

When I start painting, things just seep away for me. I can really get lost, especially if the picture is going well. Art is never hurried. The more you try to push, the more bland it becomes. Sermons are the same way. If you push too hard, you don’t put very much into them.

How would you advise a young pastor who feels his sermons are not flowing creatively?

I would say he needs more incoming stimulus. Novels, movies, plays-these make a person imaginative. If you read only the Bible, you narrow your vision. In one of James Cavanaugh’s poems he talks about how too much intensity distorts. Zeal has a way of blinding us and ruining the art we would like to create.

The people who come to my church are taking time for movies, plays, and books. And while I must be selective in the kinds of entertainment I allow myself, I still think most pulpits suffer more from drab content than from the moral license of filmmakers or playwrights.

One day I was listening to Dan Fogelberg on the radio singing “Leader of the Band,” and suddenly I realized here was the making of a good Father’s Day sermon. I grabbed a little book I keep at home and began copying down the words. I used it sometime later, and did the kids ever pick up on that. Wow, the preacher listens to Dan Fogelberg!

I’m really big on movies. I don’t believe in seeing bad movies, but I think it’s important to see as many good ones as you can. So many things come to the surface. I’m usually sitting there in the dark scribbling things on my popcorn bag to use later.

I’m always quoting something out of Star Trek. If I preach on the Second Coming, I have to use “Beam me up, Scotty” somewhere along the way.

Poetry is another form that can convey so much in preaching if selected well and quoted well. There’s a place in the musical Scrooge, for example, that illustrates conversion beautifully, where he sings, “I will begin again, I will live my life/ I will make sure my story ends on a note of truth, on a strong amen/ And I’ll thank my stars and remember when I was able to begin again.”

In Mary Poppins, Mr. Banks sings, “A man has dreams of walking with giants/ To carve his niche in the edifice of time/ Before the mortar of his zeal has a chance to congeal/ The cup is dashed from his lips, the flame is snuffed a-borning/ He’s brought to wrack and ruin in his time.” What a picture of disillusionment.

On the other hand, Don Quixote-one of my favorite characters-is always useful to quote when he says, “I’ve never had the courage to believe in nothing.”

For most people, you have to use Shakespeare in little doses. I’ve used the line from The Two Gentlemen of Verona that says, “He does not love who does not show his love.” From the prologue of Romeo and Juliet I’ve quoted the opening lines and then proceeded to preach a sermon entitled “Misadventures and Piteous Overthrows.”

But other poets are even more practical. I’ve always liked Robert Service and, in a missionary sermon, I’ve used his “Call of the Yukon”-

Send not your foolish and feeble,

For I harry them sore;

Send me men girt for combat,

Men who are grit to the core.

I wait for the man who will win me,

I will not be won in a day;

I will not be won by weaklings

Subtle, suave, and mild,

But by men with the hearts of Vikings

And the simple faith of a child.

Desperate, strong, and resistless,

Unthrottled by fear or defeat-

Them will I gild with my treasure,

And them will I glut with my meat.

Don’t you have to love poetry in order to use it well in a sermon?

I think so. But there are people in the congregation who love it, too, and they automatically become your fans.

You’ve been preaching for twenty-five years. Are you getting weary of it?

I don’t think so. Each Sunday is a new challenge-especially when you stay in one church. I’ve been at Westside seventeen years now, and they know everything I have to say, so it forces me into authenticity. Over a period of time this long, people hear a life and not a sermon.

When you’re speaking out of town, you can snow folks a little and make them think you’re more than you really are. But at home, they’ve already had to forgive you for any number of things, and you have to be yourself.

What are your goals?

They keep getting simpler. I no longer have to have a Corvette, for example. I would like to finish a new building at Westside, and more importantly, I want to see God do an authentic work among his people. I’ve always had this dream that someday God would do something we couldn’t handle. I love it when God is doing things so radical you can’t explain them and don’t even know why they’re happening-but they’re marvelous.

That means I have to keep adjusting to growth and change. When our church had only ten people, we all went home together on Sunday nights for pizza, guitar playing, and singing till midnight. As soon as we started growing, the lines of social intersection began to bypass me. When people went to the theater, they didn’t seem to ask us anymore. New staff members came, and they got the invitations instead. There have been more adjustments ever since.

The larger we become, the more it forces me into loneliness. I hate the phrase “lonely at the top,” but it’s real, and it has the benefit of forcing me to know Christ better. I agree with St. John of the Cross, who said, “Do not pray that you may have friends. Pray that you may have enemies, because only then do you retreat of necessity into the bosom of Christ.”

And ultimately, loneliness gives birth to powerful preaching. You can get illustrations from togetherness, but you get power only when you’re alone.

Leadership Spring 1987 p. 12-21

Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

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