Enveloping the immaculate grounds and simple stone buildings of Princeton Theological Seminary is a stately and steady hush. The aura of those historic structures indicates a deliberate, thoughtful, and enduring approach to ministry.
Thomas Long, Frances Landey Patton Professor of Preaching and Worship, continues the Princeton tradition of engaging in careful theological thought and addressing creatively the church's contemporary situation.
He's been described as "one of the premier writers and practitioners of the preaching craft." His book, The Witness of Preaching (see LEADERSHIP, Spring 1990 for a review) was named book of the year by Preaching magazine.
Princeton seemed like a good place to get answers to some tough questions about how preachers can determine their priorities, both for the individual sermon and for the preaching schedule.
LEADERSHIP editors Mark Galli and Marshall Shelley met with Long on a day cold and gray, which belied the conversation.
What's the hardest part of preaching for you?
So much of it. The actual putting of the sermon on paper, taking an insight from the text and hammering it into the sermon, I find toilsome. Write, rewrite. I can't say it like I want to say it. I've got to get this done by six o'clock tonight and nothing fresh is coming.
I also put undue pressure on myself to deliver the sermon well, with good timing and fine phrasing. I am often disappointed in myself as a preacher; in fact, I'm harder on myself than my theology would call me to be. I don't like that nagging feeling: I wish I'd been a more effective preacher today.
Theologically, what are you to be as a preacher?
I think serious preachers, preachers who give themselves to this task, need to learn how to forgive themselves for not producing masterpieces every week. In some ways, the saddest churches are those wealthy enough to hire oratorically polished preachers who produce masterpieces and mountaintop experiences every week.
The Christian faith is not like that. There are mountaintop experiences but also sloughs of despond. Yet mostly the Christian life is a steady, undramatic journey. That's the way with sermons as well: one week will produce the really fine sermon, the next week will not be so good, but back up again the next week.
If preachers are putting themselves to the task (I'm not making an excuse for those who don't work at it), we can expect our preaching to be up and down. That's the way it should be. That kind of rhythm mirrors the rhythm of the Christian faith.
In terms of the individual sermon, what can one sermon realistically accomplish?
I think that the best sermons are, to use old-fashioned language, one-point sermons. By that I mean, in addition to having a unified theme, they each have a single function. They try to do one thing and do it well.
That one function can be to communicate an idea (God is sovereign) or to enhance an affection (thankfulness, joy) or to motivate to action (to praise God, love neighbor, repent, pray).
There's a certain modesty built into this. If I can only do one thing, it's not really appropriate to think about the one sermon apart from the continuity of many sermons. If I can do only one thing, then I can't present the fullness of the gospel in a single sermon. I have to depend on the liturgy and other opportunities to preach.
Many texts can be preached from a variety of angles. The parable of the prodigal son, for instance, can be used to preach about God's love, our need for God, self-righteous jealousy, repentance, among others. How do you decide which textual theme to highlight in a given week?
First, to be faithful to the gospel and to the congregation-with its varying concerns-we'll want to make sure all those themes are addressed over the long run. Our tendency is to go at a text always through the same doorway.
But on any given week, the way most of us decide on a particular angle grows out of our pastoral relationship with people. We simply ask ourselves, What do my people need this week? And that's a good way.
I would, however, raise a little caution flag about that. If that's the first or only question we ask, we will put on our pastoral care hat more often than our social prophet hat or theologian hat.
There are always broken places in people's lives, and most texts can provide comfort and challenge for that. Yet sometimes we need to say, "Even though we are broken and have needs, we're going to hear another word" (if the text speaks to it). In a sense, that's the most caring thing we can do, because we refuse to allow our brokenness to define the Christian faith.
It's like what a former professor said about preaching at Christian funerals: It's important to preach about the resurrection and to talk about grief and pain. But during a funeral it's also important to remember the mission of the church, to remember that life goes on, that the Christian community has a world to serve. It's not that we are saying, "Stop being so grief stricken," but simply, "Your grief is not the ultimate word about you."
The gospel says there's more to us than whatever pain we are experiencing at the moment. So the preacher should feel free to approach texts from a variety of angles, from the pastoral side, the prophetic side, the theological side, the biblical information side, and to rattle every one of those doors over time.
How do you decide which emotional style a sermon should employ? When do you maintain a subdued, rational, and didactic approach, and when do you need to become passionate, even fiery?
I try to be faithful to the content of the sermon, to let my voice and body be caught up in the spirit of the language that's in the sermon itself (and that language naturally comes from the theme and function I'm trying to communicate).
Some people criticize that view, saying that's manipulating people's emotions rather than genuine preaching.
An actor taught me a lesson that tells me otherwise. He was in a Broadway play that had been running for months and months. In one of his scenes, he was to walk over to a desk, open the desk drawer, and find, to his surprise and shock, a revolver.
The three-hundred-twenty-eighth time he found the revolver in there, he was not particularly surprised, but the script demanded that he be surprised. The audience needed him to be faithful to the script so that they could be surprised. So the three-hundred-twenty-eighth time he found the revolver, he registered surprise.
By the time I get in the pulpit on Sunday morning, I've generally gone over my sermon six or eight times. A little of the edge has gone off the intense sections of the sermon. But I still aim to communicate my original intensity.
I do so because I remember that I'm not the most important person in the preaching event; those who have gathered to hear the sermon are the important people. It is part of my ministry to let my body be gathered up into the emotion of the sermon. If I'm running a 103-degree fever, or if I've had an argument with my wife, it's still my responsibility to be gathered up into this event, not into my situation.
So the emotion of a sermon is determined by the text's theme and function, and it should be communicated, even if it has to be "acted" to some degree.
When making the sermon application, how specific ought it be?
My rule of thumb: as specific as the situation will allow. I push toward specificity rather than generality. In the best of Christian communities, you would not talk about "the tearing of the fabric of human relationships." You would talk about "the fight that's going on in the choir," as Paul does when he names names at the end of his letters: "All right, you two, let's straighten it out."
Have you ever done that and lived to tell about it? (Laughter)
Well, I said as specific as the situation will allow! For most of us, naming names from the pulpit would be more destructive than helpful. On the other hand, we don't want to retreat into a level of vagueness that doesn't have any bite.
My example was in terms of scolding. But if I am giving thanks for the blessings of God, there are many specific and well-known congregational events that can be lifted up: John's successful back surgery, the birth of Mary Elizabeth, the spiritual renewal in the youth group.
It sounds, then, like the best sermons won't translate from one place or time to another.
That's true, and it means that the best preachers may never become known beyond their own congregations.
A generation ago if you were on a baccalaureate or church conference committee responsible for selecting a speaker, you could come up with lots of names of nationally known preachers.
You can't do that any more. You'd be hard pressed to come up with more than a handful of nationally known preachers today.
Some people think that's evidence of preaching's decline. I think it's evidence that good preaching is now much more local.
It's being done by this preacher, standing in front of these people, whom he or she loves, speaking this text to their mission in this place on this day. That doesn't travel; it doesn't print. That's local and specific. And that's good preaching.
In terms of planning one's sermon schedule, how can preachers insure that their preaching will offer a congregation a nutritious, well-balanced diet over a year or more?
Preachers need categories, "mail boxes" to check in terms of their comprehensiveness. One widely used set of categories is the lectionary. The lectionary forces you across a broad spectrum of texts. It forces you to deal with theological themes in the seasons of the church year.
There are other ways to do this, though. You can take the phrases of the Apostles' Creed, for example, and think of them as theological categories and compare them with your sermon themes over the last two years. Have I preached on the church lately? On God the Creator?
If we do that, we invariably find that some of the boxes are empty and some full.
Another way to do this is to take a classic systematic theology, like Calvin's Institutes, and use the table of contents as a checklist.
When addressing a theme or emphasis, should it be dealt with week after week until it's thoroughly covered before moving on to the next theme? Or should preachers aim their sights differently each week, trusting that over time each theme will be covered in depth?
The question, of course, can have only a local answer-the situation of the congregation would determine how one should deal with themes.
In general, though, the second option-this week I'm going to do pastoral care, next week I'm going to be prophetic, next week something else-is too episodic. And the first option-a year on reconciliation, a year on evangelism-is too one sided.
In my view, sermon themes ought to be governed by some textual selection device-the lectionary or preaching through books of the Bible-interrupted by seasons in which the preacher emphasizes a theme, whether a series on the Lord's Prayer or the parables or our social responsibilities in town. Those seasons punctuate, for six or eight weeks, the normative experience of addressing biblical themes shaped by the current congregational needs.
How much should the preacher's personal interests and passion-the thing that is driving the preacher at the moment-determine the emphasis in preaching?
It's inescapable. We don't move unilaterally from a text to an application. What the interpreter brings to a text shapes and catalyzes the message. It's another example of God using human means to communicate divine truth.
The famous dry spells in preaching, those times when nothing seems to come from the text and preaching loses its magic, often set in because we have gotten to the end of a particular passion.
The way, therefore, to get out of the dry spell is not to fiddle with the dynamics of preaching or to go banging after biblical texts as if there were some new, fresh way to approach them. That's the time we need to be reading theology, sociology, novels-whatever it is that will reinvigorate our vision for ministry and the church.
And when a new controlling metaphor, a new passion, a new center for our energies is given us, suddenly preaching becomes lively again.
What is more important in preaching-zeal or artistry? The passion that's communicated or the eloquent phrasing of the message?
That's a false dichotomy, of course, but I recognize that some weeks we cannot polish both these aspects of the sermon.
If you push me to choose, then, I would choose the side of responsible crafting over personal zeal. I can be nourished by a preacher whose spirit is subdued, who carefully interprets the Word in my situation and finds just the right words to communicate to me. Such preachers may not be charismatic, but I can still be nourished by them.
I can't, however, be nourished by zealous sermons if they are not well-crafted-to me they never connect.
Are you a balanced preacher?
I can answer that quickly. No, I'm not. And I don't think any of us are.
Is perfect balance even desirable in a preacher?
It's like peddling a bicycle: a surge on one pedal is matched by a surge on the other, and the cumulative effect is a certain balance. But that's not the same as saying that any of us proclaims adequately the fullness of the gospel.
It is said of Martin Luther that if you chopped off his highs and filled in his lows, he would have made a wonderful factory manager. That's true about preaching. None of us wants to be idiosyncratic or eccentric. But the preacher who swerves and moves, has vision and dwells too long on certain themes is to be preferred over the management-by-objective, balanced but cold preacher.
Finally, should we deliberately shape our sermons to reflect the age in which we live-in particular this visual, television age?
Yes and no. If we read, watch movies, and keep in touch, we'll naturally adapt our style to this age.
It was interesting when Nelson Mandela was released. For a month or so afterward, his vocabulary sounded like he was a man from the fifties. He had been sequestered and was a bit out of phase. He sounded strange until he began to feel the rhythms of the language of the late 1980s.
On the other hand, I'd say no, we shouldn't adapt to this television age. Some of my homiletical colleagues think otherwise, believing that the human sensorium is changing so radically (because of television) that preaching must respond. Sermons, they say, need to become a kind of verse, full of images that shift every two minutes or so-MTV preaching.
I disagree. I may be wrong, and if I am, we might as well put slides on the wall. (Laughter)
But ultimately, although styles and fashions in communication change, the unique character of the spoken word does not.
I agree with Walter Onn, professor of humanities at St. Louis University and author of The Presence of the Word: there is nothing more powerful than one person standing up before other people and saying what he or she believes is true. It's more powerful than print, more powerful than television. Nowhere is the person more present than in the spoken word. And people recognize that, and respond.
Leadership Spring 1991 p. 133-9
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
