A PASTOR I KNOW HAS SERVED the same church for more than twenty years. His staff members joke about the yellowed notes he takes into the pulpit. They call Sunday mornings “golden oldie time at pulpit city.” The pastor was an effective preacher in the ’70s, but at some point he stopped growing and starting repeating. His sports illustrations are out of the ’60s and ’70s. During the unbelievable summer of 1998 when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa kept America counting as they raced to break the Roger Maris single season home-run record, this pastor used illustrations about Hank Aaron.
Apparently he did not realize that many in his congregation had no idea of Hank Aaron’s contribution to baseball—that his lifetime home-run total surpasses even that of the legendary Babe Ruth. This preacher’s points are good and timeless, but he wraps them in yesterday’s news, so his preaching does not connect well with a large portion of his audience.
At any stage of life, an effective preacher understands the times and discerns the winds in popular culture. Of course, that is much easier to do when we are in our twenties and thirties, because we are a part of the youth culture that defines the buzz in music, literature, the arts, and sports. In the second half of life we naturally tend to move from the center of our culture, and it is easier to lose touch. While the biblical text never changes, our audience does.
The point of staying hooked into popular culture—and thus into the world of our listeners—is not to come across as hip but simply to communicate clearly the gospel. At mid-life we cannot be something we are not—thirty years old. And we must do more than merely refine techniques and skills we learned twenty-five years ago. If we are developing only our skills—and not grappling with the new paradigms for communication—we are like an anesthesiologist trying to improve her skill of administering ether. Nobody uses ether anymore—and hasn’t for years.
I have discovered two levels we need to monitor: the macro level of the culture and the micro level of our own experience. Throughout Your Ministry’s Next Chapter, I’ve warned against the mid-life temptation to decelerate from life and ministry. The following chapters focus on the art and skill of preaching, ensuring through our communication that the gospel is presented in all its fullness.
Facts vs. feelings
In mid-life it is critical for preachers to continue to develop their understanding of culture. Avoiding the “Hank Aaron syndrome” requires that we become alert to the language of the day, the vocabulary and experiences common to contemporary society. For example, the lighthouse is a traditional religious metaphor for something that helps one avoid danger and arrive safely to port. In previous eras that image may have been understood by most congregations, especially those along the coastal areas. That is not the case today. “Keyword” is a contemporary word that comes from the world of on-line. A keyword is a shortcut—type it into the search-engine box, and the user can go directly to a web-site or on-line area. A keyword acts as a guide to help a person avoid getting lost in time-consuming searches. “Keyword” is a better term to use than “lighthouse”—both illustrate truth but one is fresher.
On television, I recently heard Billy Graham, now in his late seventies, and noticed he used computer terminology several times. He spoke of something being “byte-sized,” and he used the word “rebooted.” Clearly Graham is doing his homework on what communicates to his audiences, and that is part of the reason he has been so effective for so long.
Subscribing to a variety of magazines has helped me to stay connected to the contemporary culture. The magazine Wired deals not only with the business/technological world but also with the younger generation’s desire for no boundaries in life. Although its audience is well-educated, this magazine reveals how widespread antigovernment feelings are in our country. The paramilitary mind-set of the rednecks who play soldier in the isolated parts of rural America is really not that much different from the technology geeks who band together to oppose any attempt to censor material on the Internet. The desire to remove limits imposed by authority is the common thread tying these two groups not only to each other but to many people in our congregations. Philosophically this magazine does not fit me at all but it helps me to understand the spirit of the age.
Even the advertisements in Wired are teaching instruments. These printed commercials are designed to touch the emotions of the reader. They are image-driven. This is a key cultural switch from years ago when words were primary. My generation appealed to the rationale in order to get to the emotions; the present generation tends to appeal to the emotions to earn the right to address the rationale.
I also try to read a couple of bestsellers every year. I ask church members what they are reading, and if I find several mentioning the same book, I try to read it and identify the issues it addresses. About three years ago I heard people talk about the Dilbert books. I was unaware until then how much frustration people were feeling at work. I not only preached on the subject but invited a guest speaker to address the futility people experience at work. What folks were suffering because of downsizing and rightsizing was more than worry about job security. They felt betrayed and bitter; as though they were pieces on a chessboard.
Although my first choice is not fiction, I also try to read one popular novel each year. Sometimes I have forced myself to write a book review of it, so I can get my mind around the major moral issues involved. I must admit this has been rare. A group of ministers in our community formed a book club and meet once a quarter to hear a review and to interact with its ideas. I also make it a habit to take younger people to lunch and pick their brains for ideas. Asking them to explain what they do for a living is a major education. I discovered that specialization in the work market is far greater than I realized. In the process of staying current, I have also learned how deep the spiritual thirst is in our society. Even white-collar professionals often feel like pieceworkers at a factory. With today’s technology, most people work only with one small ingredient of a large complicated recipe. They struggle to see the larger meaning of what they do and how they fit into the big picture. As a result of this knowledge, I preach on finding meaning in life much more than I used to.
Strategic emotion
I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s in what some call “The Weekly Reader generation.” The Weekly Reader was a little black-and-white newspaper distributed in grade schools that kept students informed on current events. Conventional wisdom of the ’50s told us that facts were going to form the future, so the magazine was filled with facts. As a generation, we tended to trust facts and mistrust emotions, and that may have affected our religious views as well. Emotional religion was for the uneducated and unbelieving, and religious teaching focused on the factual proofs for Christianity.
I learned that as a preacher I needed to prove factually that biblical principles “worked.” If the Bible commanded us to honor our father and our mother so our days on earth would be long, I validated that injunction with statistics showing that people with happy families lived longer. While feelings could be manipulated, facts were the sixteen-penny nails of our faith.
But things have changed. The generation behind me, often called Generation X, tends to trust feelings over facts. Its young men and women know that facts can be manipulated, that there can be information without knowledge. Madison Avenue knows this well. Think of the Nike commercials on TV: they don’t tell you anything about the product or the price. Nor do they compare Nike shoes with any other athletic shoe. They touch your emotions, showing Michael Jordan hanging above the rim while you hear the roar of the crowd. And that communicates to you that Nike makes a great shoe.
The use of image to evoke emotion and thus action has serious implications for the preacher. In a sense, the ability of a preacher to evoke emotion in a Generation Xer—not in a manipulative way, of course—can help gain credibility and drive home the truth of the gospel. I know a pastor who sometimes weeps during his sermons, and it has been fascinating to hear the different reactions of people in his congregation. One woman, embarrassed by her pastor’s emotion, said, “My pastor cries during his messages. Do you think maybe he’s having an emotional problem?” On the other hand, I’ve heard younger people say, “Man, he’s real. He’s got the stuff.”
My point here, of course, is not to imply we should use emotion irresponsibly or ignore reason. I am simply trying to buttress my thesis that, on a large scale, the way people think has shifted in recent years, and the mid-life pastor needs to continue to grow to be effective. Nor am I saying we should eliminate facts from our preaching. Rather, we may want to use emotion strategically in our communication to increase our effectiveness—especially with younger listeners.
In 1998 the Birmingham, Alabama, area lost thirty-four people in a tornado during Holy Week. A thousand homes were destroyed and hundreds of people were injured. On Sunday morning the newspaper ran photos of all thirty-four victims on the front page. The paper also included stories about each of the victims. The tragedy was on people’s minds as they came to church, and I needed to speak to their hearts about how this event could possibly fit into the message of Easter.
I began with a story about a wedding I performed in the 1980s. At the rehearsal, the whole wedding party was downcast and the bride was crying. I assumed her emotion was because of the normal pre-wedding jitters. As I was leaving the church to attend the rehearsal dinner, the bride and groom asked if they could talk with me. As soon as the bride entered my office and shut the door, she burst into uncontrollable sobs. I asked her what was wrong.
“My father found out this morning that the biopsy report was positive,” she said. “He has a malignancy. It’s a fast-moving cancer and he doesn’t have long to live—and he’s walking me down the aisle tomorrow.”
Then the groom said, “How do you rejoice when you really want to cry?”
I told that story on Easter Sunday and repeated the question: “How do you rejoice when you want to cry?”
“It’s been a long and hard week in Birmingham,” I continued. “This morning all of us sat around our breakfast tables and looked at the pictures of thirty-four individuals. We wept as we read the stories of those people between the ages of two and eighty-nine who died this week. There’s a side of us that says, ‘I really find it difficult to celebrate Easter today.’ But we don’t have any choice. It’s Easter. We’re Christians. And we are supposed to rejoice.”
I went on to tie our story in Birmingham with the story of the first Easter in Palestine, how it had been a devastating week in Jerusalem—the lives of at least three people had been taken, the lives of the disciples had been shattered, and yet there was a wonderful promise from Jesus. I had to work hard not to make the rest of the sermon a manipulative, emotional monologue. I avoided the temptation to say, “Don’t you all want to be ready for Jesus when the next tornado comes?” Instead, I discussed the meaning of the Resurrection.
My point is the placement of the illustration in the sermon—at the beginning. If I had preached that same message in 1975, I might have ended the sermon with a story such as the one from the wedding. But because of the cultural shift from reason to emotion, I placed the moving story at the beginning. I needed first to connect with my audience, and then bring in the facts of the Resurrection.
However, there is still a place for rational apologetics in our preaching—the “Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord” approach. The mid-life seeker connects with that. She wants historical evidence for Jesus. The young adult seeker, however, tends to ask different questions. He says, “I want to know there is a spiritual reality. I could live with it being a myth, but I want to know it touches my soul.”
I am finding I have to use more “spiritual” terms in my preaching now. Twenty years ago pastors tended to stay away from such language because we were afraid of sounding churchy. Many non-Christians feel comfortable with spiritual language, even though they may not know the reality behind it. Recently a woman asked if she could have lunch with me and one of my associates. She said she had an important question she wanted to discuss: “Can I become a member of the church without becoming a Christian?”
She had been attending church because she loved the spiritual aspect of our ministry—she apparently sensed the presence of God and enjoyed learning about prayer. She also liked our children’s programs. But she was struggling with the role of Jesus. At lunch, she told me she had difficulty believing Jesus was the Son of God, so we talked about the uniqueness of Christ. We continue to talk to this day, as she explores the truth of Christianity. I speak to her out of reason and logic, but what initially drew her into our church was its appeal to her heart and soul.
Even with the advent of emotion over reason, I have discovered that young people are much more confrontational today than they were when I was growing up or even than they were fifteen years ago. Many in my generation, while they might have disagreed, would not likely challenge a pastor’s authority publicly or even face-to-face.
But today young people will say openly, “Pastor, I don’t agree with you.”
My style, which in the past honored diplomacy, has mildly changed. Although I am not an “in your face” preacher, I am more direct than I was a few years ago. At one of our contemporary services recently, I spoke on the issue of homosexuality. I stated strongly that homosexual behavior is wrong. But with equal directness, I said that too many Christian teenagers feel justified in harassing and even beating up homosexuals, and this is as offensive to a holy God as homosexuality is. In fact, I said, both the homosexual and the one harassing him stand guilty before God.
When I finished, some of the older people said to me, “You came down harder on those ridiculing homosexuals than you did on homosexuality itself.”
I responded, “How many homosexuals do you think we had here tonight?”
“Hopefully, we didn’t have any,” they said.
We probably did, but I let it go and said, “How many people here, do you think, have ever ridiculed or harassed a homosexual?”
“Probably several.”
“Well,” I said, “they were my target audience.”
Apparently I hit the mark: a number of the young people I talked with after the service gave me positive feedback, and one nineteen-year-old college student said, “I needed to hear that. I knew it was not right to harass homosexuals, but you said it was a sin.”
Who’s Barney?
“Don’t ever preach that sermon again.” Norma Jean’s blunt words after the Sunday morning service surprised me, since she was one of my consistent encouragers. The topic of my message had been “A Christian Approach to Death.”
“Tell me why,” I said.
“It was too hard. Everything you said was accurate, but it cut into my soul because I’ve just lost my mother. It wasn’t that you were insensitive. It was just too harsh.”
That was in the 1970s, before I had experienced the loss of someone close to me. I had spoken on the stages of grief in a Christian context. My exegesis was skillful and the application had seemed on target—but there was no heart in it because I had never lived it. It was clinical, not real.
Later, I learned more about dying, and more about myself. My dad passed away in 1983, and several years later, my father-in-law. As I watched my wife and her family deal with their loss, I realized how unusual was my way of grieving. Not only had I been insensitive to Norma Jean, my parishioner, but when my father-in-law passed away, my unsupportive response was hurtful to my wife.
Several years later I preached the same sermon in a different setting, and it seemed better received. The primary difference was not in the location or even the content but in the preacher. My experience with grief had changed me and my preaching.
Wisdom gained through life-experience may be one of the greatest benefits of mid-life. During the early years of ministry, we have three primary sources for every sermon: Scripture, the work of the Spirit of God in our life, and insights we have gleaned from the text. The result is we frequently preach things we don’t really know to be true but that we accept as true from other sources. That’s only normal. We’ve had little life-experience. The young preacher risks sounding like an expert when in fact he has no experience from which to make application. He can sound much like a business consultant who draws his information from the latest book.
But at mid-life, I can preach to young parents with greater integrity because I can still remember on some level what it was like during those years. I may not even use a personal illustration, but I will likely not give a glib illustration that glosses over the needs of young parents. I have a greater sensitivity to their needs because I have been there. I have been a parent of young children.
Life experience deepens our understanding of Scripture and thus shapes our communication for the good. I never understood the relationship between King David and his son Absalom until I had children of my own. I can remember preaching what I thought was a powerful sermon on David’s failure with his children. It was creatively titled, “Why the Apple Has a Bad Seed.” Yet when a close friend dropped off his well-trained son at college and then saw his moral character degenerate, I grieved with him and that changed my understanding of the David and Absalom drama. When I took my oldest daughter to college nearly a thousand miles away from home, hoping she would choose good friends and make good choices, the story hit me even more deeply.
But here’s the temptation at mid-life: to preach from our most recent experiences. Unless I discipline myself, I find I speak from the last five years of my life.
My wife and I are now in the empty-nest stage. We know what it is like to send three kids off to college—it is an immediate issue for us. So I have to make an intentional effort to listen to families who are sending their children off to first grade, or who have a new baby. I knew I needed help with this when our staff was planning a major children’s event at church.
Someone said, “We need to have Barney here.”
Barney? Barney Fife? I thought. No, it wouldn’t be him.
“Who’s Barney?” I asked.
“You don’t know who Barney is?” someone replied.
Everyone but me seemed to know Barney was a singing purple dinosaur, a playmate of kids everywhere. I had lost touch. To counteract this, I intentionally visit young couples in their homes. I had always imagined that someday I would pastor a large church where I could contact people by phone and letter, and someone else would handle the home visits. But I have found that for preaching purposes, as well as for follow-up on prospective members, I need to see people in their home environments. It also helps me to understand how a young family works today. The kids bring out their toys and video games. I learn what nine-year-olds talk about. I may then use a video game in a sermon as an illustration.
It is more of a challenge to identify with teenagers. Every year I meet with our graduating seniors—mostly to listen to them talk about high school and some of the tough stuff with which they have had to deal. I always learn something new. For example, one student talked about the number of seemingly good kids who use drugs—sharp, middle-class kids who otherwise have their lives together. Another spoke about the rise of the “straightedge” movement: youth who discipline their bodies, do not use drugs or alcohol, stay away from sex, and keep themselves physically fit. Often parents are pleased with the newfound structure in the lives of their teens but are not aware that the glue holding this group together is an extreme antigovernment attitude. The self-discipline they pursue and parade is not intended to honor God, but rather is a means to survive the future conflict they think is inevitable.
Learning about this trend sharpened my preaching. Rather than urging young Christians to be disciplined, I now say that self-discipline for its own sake is not enough. I say that the reason we discipline ourselves is for the glory of God. Not only is it more relevant to youth but it is closer to the biblical ethic of self-discipline.
The relevance of passion
When I was younger I worried a time would come when I no longer would be able to communicate well, that my ideas would eventually grow out-of-date. I no longer fear that. Although I work diligently to stay current, I am learning that being out-of-date has less to do with age and more to do with being authentic in character, wholesome in attitude, and disciplined in study. Preaching is communicating relevant godly information in a package that can be understood by the hearer. But preaching must be presented through a person who has a genuine walk with God. The gentleman who was the interim pastor just prior to my coming to the church I now serve is an outstanding communicator. People of all ages connected with his sermons. With a natural sense of humor, he addressed even the most serious issues. But more important, the congregation sensed his heart for God. One reason some ministers lose their power in the pulpit in mid-life is that they have lost their passion. The exegesis may be accurate, the logic unflawed, and the language like that of a poet, but unless there is spiritual passion the material is out-of-date because the preacher’s soul is not up-to-date.
In early 1987 I felt as though my spiritual life was in a fog. It was a difficult stretch of life for me for a variety of reasons. Simply to survive, I preached old sermons I had delivered at another church. I tried to add enough current information, with an illustration upgrade here and there, so no one would know.
About the time the fog seemed to be lifting, I delivered a new, never-before-preached sermon. A member complimented me: “You preached today like you really believed it.”
“I hope I always do.”
He countered, “Sometimes you preach as though you think we ought to believe it, such as the way I talk to my children about eating balanced meals. They know I believe it, but they also know it is not too important in my own life.”
More than staying in touch with the younger generation, I want to preach with spiritual passion. I want to preach as though I believe the gospel, for at mid-life I truly believe it more than ever.
Copyright © 1998 Gary Fenton
