The toughest thing about being a success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.
Irving Berlin
If you compare yourself with others, you may be bitter or vain, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Max Ehrman
Preaching is not the art of making a sermon and delivering it. Preaching is the art of making a preacher and delivering him.
Bishop Quayle
I like to think of myself as a fairly effective public speaker, but I’m absolutely amazed when I hear one of my sermons on tape after it’s been professionally edited. I can’t believe I sound so good!
My live sermons contain the typical hems and haws and unplanned pauses and occasional malaprops. But when the editor is done with it, those things are all gone. I can’t help thinking that when people hear me speak in person after they’ve heard me on tape, they’re bound to be a little disappointed. I would be!
Modern technology and the mass communications media, especially television, have created a type of pressure on pastors and other communicators that didn’t exist a few years ago. It’s the pressure to perform, to be compared not just with the pastor across town, but with the nationally known speakers. That pressure can create tremendous anxiety.
Part of the pressure comes just from the fact of how widespread is the media’s reach. Almost every Christian, it seems, has a favorite television or radio preacher or listens to sermon tapes from some well-known speaker. That can be very threatening. As one pastor says, “Knowing that many in the congregation have already watched a TV evangelist that Sunday morning makes me nervous. I say to myself, If they have just heard a great message from Robert Schuller, Jimmy Swaggart, or James Robison, what do they expect from me? Compared to them, I’m sure I come across pretty pale.”
What both pastor and people often forget, however, is that they’re unfairly comparing the great strength of one person, the well-known speaker, to just one area of the local pastor’s ministry. The big-name speaker may be lousy at church administration or visitation or any of the other duties of a pastor, but the vast majority of the national audience will never know. All they know is that he’s an excellent speaker.
Local pastors, on the other hand, have to do a good job with all their responsibilities or the church will suffer. Speaking on Sunday is only one part, albeit an important one, of the pastor’s task. If effectiveness in visitation, say, or personal evangelism were the point of comparison, the local pastor might outshine the television evangelist.
The prominent speakers, with their staffs to handle various responsibilities so they can concentrate on preaching, are like the doctors who specialize in heart transplants. They do one thing, and do it very well. The local pastor, on the other hand, is like the small-town physician in general practice who has to handle every medical need, from setting a broken arm to removing a ruptured appendix. Can he do the heart transplant? No, but it’s not fair to expect him to. His is a very different role. In most situations, people don’t need a high-powered specialist; they need someone who is competent and nearby.
Another way to look at this comes from Earl Palmer, who tells the story of a junior high school orchestra that plans to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. You can bet they’re not going to perform the piece as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But does that mean they shouldn’t play the piece? Of course not. Not many people will get to hear Sir Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony in person. It’s better to hear Beethoven performed by the junior high band than not to hear Beethoven at all. Even when the rendition is unpolished, the music is good and has value in and of itself.
In church, similarly, the message itself has such value that it overcomes even faulty delivery. And as we’ll see shortly, there are incalculable benefits to hearing the message in person from the local pastor.
The World of Illusion
Each of us is being compared not only against the best speakers, but also against their unrealistic best. At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned how much better I sound on tape after I’ve been edited.
The same sort of thing happens to musicians, who find themselves being compared unfavorably to recordings. Mrs. Jones singing a solo in church on Sunday may have a modest amount of talent, but she may fail to hit a note now and then, or her accompanist may get a little behind her. When the congregation compares that performance to the latest Sandi Patti record, guess who loses? What the congregation fails to consider, apart from the fact that Sandi Patti does have a rare vocal gift, is that the recording is the result of numerous takes, rerecordings, voice-overs, careful edits, and all the other tricks of the music recording industry.
In other words, Mrs. Jones isn’t even being compared to the real Sandi Patti. She’s being compared to the very best Sandi Patti that technology can produce, a level of performance that exists only in the highest-quality recordings. Sandi herself can’t match that quality when she performs live. That’s why no matter how good any performer’s live performance may be, if you’ve heard the recording of the same music before, you may leave the concert feeling a little disappointed in the technical quality.
Where the illusion created by technology reaches its height, however, is in television. This is true for several reasons. First, there’s just so much more that can be done when you’re dealing with picture as well as sound. Lighting, backdrops, stepstools behind the podium to make the speaker look taller, wardrobe and makeup, computer-generated graphics — all these things and more improve the appearance and presentation of the television speaker.
Further, with multiple cameras, the television crew can enhance other parts of the effect as well. For example, by using several cameras, you can offer different angles of the speaker, adding visual interest. Other cameras will be getting shots of the audience. And what if one of the crowd should have the audacity to yawn while a camera is trained on him? They’ll edit out those few seconds of videotape and substitute footage shot at another point in the service or by a different camera.
The result is that when the edited version appears, you see only bright, alert people who are hanging on the speaker’s every word, gazing intently at him or furiously writing notes. Chances are that the people you see will also be well dressed and groomed. The illusion is that everyone in the audience is like that.
In an actual church, of course, it’s never that way. The congregation is made up of many kinds of people, some well dressed and some not, some who are attentive but others who are reading, whispering, or sleeping. Unless we recognize the illusion of the television image, we’re bound to feel the real service is not nearly as effective as the televised image.
A second reason the illusion is so powerful is that many people still believe “pictures don’t lie.” The time is generally gone when people assume that something must be true if it appears in the newspaper or a book. But because we tend to believe what we see — surely our own eyes wouldn’t deceive us — even when our conscious minds remind us that the image has been carefully edited, we are far more trusting of the messages we get from television. The medium itself has that authority attached to it, which makes it a powerful way to communicate any idea. It’s terribly easy to start believing that the illusion is reality.
Third, the television preachers tend to speak with a great deal of certitude that appeals to those who want the world and the Christian life simplified, who want to see everything in stark clarity: “There are four ways to look at this” or “Here are the five steps to resolving this problem.” The speakers say it with conviction as their eyes bore into the camera. Combining that message with the medium is a very effective approach.
When I speak, on the other hand, the attitude I try to communicate is “I’d like to look at this situation from three perspectives, but there may be more that are just as valid.” Or I’ll say, “I can think of four ways of dealing with this problem, but there are probably others that would work as well or even better.” I personally think this is a more realistic approach, but compared to the certitude of the typical, well-edited television preacher, this approach can be interpreted by some as tentative and unpolished.
Fourth, the illusion works so well because we have a society today that actually prefers the illusion to reality. People are more concerned with image, with appearance, than with substance. They want their leaders to be smooth, confident, certain, well dressed. They want to hear testimonies that speak of total, final victory, not the process of coping and growing. They want answers that come easily, not approaches that demand study and struggle.
This preference for illusion is a huge societal flaw. Some years ago, prognosticators said we’d evolve an age like this, a media age in which slickly packaged communicators are preferred over people with substance. In fact, I’ve read about advertising and public relations agencies that claim they can make virtually anyone a United States senator — on two conditions: (1) sufficient funds, and (2) the would-be senator has to promise not to say a word that the agency doesn’t script for him. If he insists on saying things of his own during the campaign, the price goes up because that will mess up the image they’re creating and require them to do repair work.
This matter of image over substance has become so important that some experts believe that to some extent, Jimmy Carter’s political demise was the result of having a weak face — a weak chin and a smile that reveals too many teeth. In photographs, so the theory goes, his smile made him look too vulnerable, and people want a national leader with more of a square-jawed, invincible look. All that says nothing about his abilities or his character, yet people choose a leader based in large measure on that kind of superficial evaluation.
A certain kind of person, and there are many like this, is also drawn to the slick, confident image of celebrities for personal reasons. Namely, such a person aspires to that image and lifestyle. So, in the Christian world, such people enjoy it vicariously through the big-name speaker.
I see a secular example of this phenomenon in the case of a famous former congressman from Harlem. I used to wonder how he could have such a huge following among the poor of that ghetto when he was known as a womanizer and was widely considered to be corrupt. Then I began to see that he appealed to the aspirations of many of those people. They all wanted to be rich, but they couldn’t be, so they enjoyed seeing him, one of their own, be rich for them. They wanted to drive Cadillacs but couldn’t, so they got their pleasure out of watching him ride in a limousine. They would have liked to have been invited to the big political dinners but weren’t, so they enjoyed knowing he was. And in exchange for the opportunity to identify vicariously with his success and prosperity, the people of that district were willing to accept all the negative aspects of his life.
Without trying to take the parallel too far, I think the same kind of phenomenon, the same identification with a successful and prosperous leader, takes place in the world of the Christian media superstars. Again, it’s a triumph of image over substance.
Finally, I’d like to point out, with all due respect, that even the Bible itself can cause problems. That’s because many people fail to keep in mind that the Bible represents condensed history. They read the relatively few pages of the Bible, and Moses and Jesus and the apostles appear to perform one miracle after another and to go from spiritual high to spiritual high. People don’t think about the many days of mundane living and travel and even tedium that all of us, including the people in the Bible, experience.
The miracles of Jesus, for example, were spread over three years of public ministry, yet they’re discussed within a few short pages of the Bible. Thus, it’s easy to get the impression that he was doing something incredible every day, but that’s probably not the case.
We need to remember that faithfulness is not measured primarily by our highs but by our long. It’s our ability to remain faithful in the routines of life that proves our commitment.
True Ministry Has to Be Local
As best I can portray it, that’s what we’re up against. That’s where this tremendous pressure to perform comes from. It’s easy to feel insignificant and hopelessly overmatched, to feel you can never win in such comparisons.
When I feel as if I can never measure up, I try to remind myself that the key to an effective ministry is not how large it gets, but how local. Unless it touches specific people, no ministry can ever be successful.
The key to the spread of the gospel and the work of the church is what I call the incarnational principle. There’s something intrinsically powerful about the gospel’s being communicated from one person to another, face to face, and there’s just no substitute for it.
The Incarnation, of course, was God’s amazing decision that the Word of God, the Son, should become flesh and dwell among us, revealing the Father to us by becoming one of us. Why do you suppose God chose to present the gospel in that way? I don’t think it was the only way he could think of. He could have written his words in fire across the sky. He could have visited everyone in a dream.
No, he knew (because he made us that way) that we’re social creatures, that we learn best through a flesh-and-blood example, that truth that works in skin and bones is truth that will be believed. When God has chosen to communicate, he has generally used weak, vulnerable men and women, the greatest of whom came as a helpless baby, to touch and to speak and to heal.
Many of God’s greatest messengers would not have fared well on television. Some have said that were Jesus walking the earth today, he would certainly be on television, but I’m not so sure. For while many Western Christians like to think of Christ as tall and handsome, he was in all probability a normal Middle Easterner: on the short side, darkly complexioned. In Isaiah 53:2, we’re told that he had “no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him. Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.” That doesn’t sound like someone who’d make it big on television, does it?
Neither does the apostle Paul strike me as a probable media star. Like Jesus, he was no provider of quick and final spiritual cures, though he did speak with certitude. And regarding Paul’s appearance, some have inferred from things he said that he may have been rather ugly to look at — no Hollywood image here. In fact, rather than attract people through a strong, slick image, Paul with his thorn in the flesh was a demonstration of God’s power manifested through human weakness.
Does all this mean Jesus and Paul would not have been effective communicators today? No, I don’t think their impact would have been diminished at all because of the incarnational principle, the best way to convey truth over the long run. People need someone they can touch, someone whose honest example they can see day after day, someone who doesn’t throw out easy answers and then go off the air but who can grapple with life as it is and work with people to find real answers. An incarnational pastor doesn’t broadcast proclamations from Mount Sinai; he walks with people through the wilderness, finally arriving at the Promised Land.
Another way to put this, perhaps, is that the Christian life is taught most effectively when it is lived out consistently over a long period of time. People want to know: Is this stuff really true? Does it really work in the tough situations of life? When a couple’s child dies, does their faith carry them through, or is it shown to be a sham? These are the questions people ask, and the answers say a lot about how they’ll respond to the claims of Christ.
And they’re questions that can only be answered by the lives of local pastors. The television preacher can’t answer them in a way that people will really believe. There’s no way he can provide that example. The gospel is a life-long proclamation, not a half-hour message.
It’s interesting how non-Christians in a community know who has demonstrated consistent Christian character. I overheard a conversation at the gas station, and one man said, “I’m not a Christian, but if I ever became one, I’d want to be like Frank Smith.” From his tone of voice, I was sure that Frank Smith had been living a consistent Christian life for years.
A colleague of mine, Victor Monagrom, is a person like that. He works with Youth for Christ in India, and he’s now an old man. One time many years ago, he was trying to get across the border into Burma, and the guard at the gate asked him for a bribe.
“I cannot give you a bribe, because I’m a follower of Jesus Christ,” Victor answered.
The guard told him that in that case, he could stay in India.
Victor waited, day after day, staying at the border station from the time it opened till the time it closed at night. He just sat there all day, watching the guard take bribes to let people across the border.
Finally, after eight days, the guard called to Victor, “Hey, you! Come here.” And he stamped Victor’s passport and sent him into Burma.
Many years later, Victor again was traveling from India into Burma. He went to the same station as before, where he encountered another young guard who would not let him through unless he paid a bribe.
As before, Victor replied, “I’m a follower of Jesus Christ, and I cannot give you a bribe. Here are my papers. They’re all in order. Please stamp my passport and let me go.”
The guard refused, so he and Victor got into a little argument. The guard’s supervisor heard the commotion and called from the back room, “What’s going on out there?” He came out to investigate, and he turned out to be the guard Victor had dealt with so many years before.
He recognized Victor and said, “Didn’t we have this out years ago?”
“Yes,” Victor said.
The old guard laughed and turned to the young one and said, “You might as well stamp his passport. I went through this with him years ago, and he will win. He will not pay. This man is a follower of Jesus Christ.”
In those intervening years, as the older man had become a bureaucrat, he had never forgotten Victor. He knew that his kind of character never changes, that it will sooner or later win out. The Victor Monagroms of this world will never pay to cross the border; what they will do is change the world in a way no media illusion ever could.
Phil Donahue, the television talk show host, has something of a reputation for giving clergy a hard time, and he has said the reason he’s that way is that he has little respect for them. Most clergy will do anything for some media attention, he says.
In his autobiography, however, he tells about an encounter with a pastor who was different. It happened while Donahue was a young television reporter in Ohio, and one day he was sent to West Virginia to cover a mine disaster. He went by himself in a battered little car, carrying a minicam to film his story.
It was so cold when he got there, however, that the camera wouldn’t work. So he put it inside his coat to warm it up enough to run. In the meantime, the families of the trapped miners were gathered around. They were just simple mining people — women, old men, and children. Several of the trapped men were fathers.
Then the local pastor arrived. He was rough-hewn, and he didn’t speak well at all. But he gathered all the families around in a circle, and they held one another in their arms while he prayed for them.
As this was going on, Donahue was still trying to get his camera to work, and he was incredibly frustrated because he couldn’t film this poignant scene. Finally, after the prayer was over, Donahue managed to get his camera operating. So he told the pastor he had his camera working now and asked if the pastor would please do the prayer again so he could film it for the evening news.
Donahue says, by the way, that he’s been with the world’s best-known public figures, including preachers, and they’re all willing to redo a scene in order to get on the news.
This simple West Virginia preacher, however, told Donahue, “Young man, we don’t pray for the news. I’m sorry, but we’ve already prayed, and I will not pose.”
To this day Donahue remembers that pastor with respect. You don’t forget that kind of character, no matter who you are or what you believe.
I trust this helps explain why I believe that despite the pressure to perform, the local pastor is indispensable, and why I believe that being there with people more than makes up for the professionally edited charisma of the polished preacher.
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
