Pastors

THE SHAPE OF GOD’S BODY

Philip Yancey

It’s not easy to describe the church.

The first time I attended LaSalle Street Church in inner-city Chicago, I sat behind a middle-aged black woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter. When we stood to sing, the girl turned around and grinned at those of us in the pew behind her. We smiled back politely, and she continued grinning and staring at us. She acted strange, even retarded. Then on the fourth stanza of the hymn, she bent over, grabbed the hem of her skirt, and lifted it over her head, exposing herself.

Welcome to church.

Over the next few years, we learned to count on the unexpected. One Sunday a man aimed a football, a perfect spiral pass, at the pastor who was standing at the altar praying over a full tray of Communion glasses.

Another time, a street woman wrapped in many skirts wandered to the platform during the sermon, genuflected, and started talking aloud to the pastor.

A more hostile man called down curses on the pastoral staff during the congregation’s spontaneous “Prayers of the People”: “God, burn down their houses this week!”

A downtown church that does not turn away the poor, the homeless, or the unpredictable, risks attracting people who may disrupt the services. Although the barely controlled chaos took some getting used to, I learned that God is as present here as in the well-orchestrated suburban churches I had come from.

I think of urban churches like LaSalle Street whenever I read Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth. There, too, a spirit of barely controlled chaos reigned. The letters spell out the makeup of the congregation: Jewish merchants, gypsies, Greeks, prostitutes, pagan idolaters. No other New Testament books reveal such violent swings in tone. Paul battled church schisms, exploded at a report of incest, and fought to keep the Lord’s Supper from turning into a free-for-all. Corinth makes my church seem positively boring.

Most scholars believe 1 Corinthians predates virtually every other book in the New Testament. Paul may have written it just two decades after Christ’s resurrection, around A.D. 50-55. The first few chapters show him struggling with a basic question: “Just what is this thing called ‘church’?” Paul had never asked such questions about Judaism; culture, religious heritage, race, and even physical characteristics of worshipers clearly established the identity of that religion. But what was a Christian? What should a church look like? The answer must have seemed elusive indeed in the unruly context of Corinth.

Paul’s hesitation comes through in the way he gropes for words. You are God’s field, he says in chapter 3, and explores that metaphor for awhile. I, Paul, am a servant-no, better, I’m like a farmer who plants while another person waters. But, really, we’re both God’s fellow-workers.

Let’s try another metaphor, he continues. You are God’s building. Yes, exactly. I lay the foundation, and someone else adds the next layer. Better yet, you’re a temple, a building for God. Think about that: God living in you, his sacred building.

Field, building, temple-make up your mind, Paul, I think to myself as I read through his string of metaphors. He continues in such a vein throughout the book until finally, in chapter 12, he latches onto the metaphor of the church as God’s body. The book changes tone at that point, its style elevated from that of personal letter to the magnificent literature of chapter 13.

I think we have, in 1 Corinthians, a record of Paul thinking out loud, trying out different ways of describing this thing called a church. Each metaphor casts a different light on the subject, and the last one, the body, seems the most accurate description of all. Paul spends a whole chapter exploring physiological parallels, and his other letters return to that same modern metaphor of body more than two dozen times.

I identify with these chapters because of my own occupation as a writer. I often go through a similar procedure of searching for precisely the right word or metaphor: experimenting with this one, discarding that one, trying to force one, and then, ahh, the fine sense of relief that comes with locating the word or phrase that truly fits.

And yet, because of the nineteen hundred years that have elapsed, not all the metaphors Paul used to describe Corinth fit so well today. The truths they point to have not changed, but the readers have changed. Consider the illustrations from farming. Every Corinthian knew what they meant, for farms and vineyards surrounded their city and they bought their produce from farmers at a local bazaar. But from most U.S. cities you must travel at least thirty miles to see a respectable farm, and food comes scrubbed and shrink-wrapped on the shelves of a grocery store.

The building metaphor has the same problem. In Corinth you could buy a load of blocks and lay out a foundation with no more skill than the ability to dig a ditch and follow a straight line. Now you need building permits, jackhammers, earth movers, forms assemblers, concrete contractors (with union cards, please), and a general contractor to supervise it all. Somewhere in all the specialization, the force of the metaphor dissipates. As for Paul’s reference to temples, who builds temples anymore?

What would Paul, the master of metaphor, say in 1 Corinthians 3 if he wrote it today-if he were writing, say, to LaSalle Street Church in downtown Chicago, or First Presbyterian Church in Spokane, Washington, or St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Georgia?

I do not intend to speculate on what Paul would write, but I have let my mind roam over what exists in my neighborhood, searching for some metaphors that might apply to the church. I have asked myself, What is the church supposed to be, anyway? What should it look like?

God’s Driver’s License Bureau

I find it easy to spend most of my time around people very much like me. For the most part my friends resemble me in education, age, and values. They drive similar cars and have similar interests.

Intellectually, I know about the various ethnic groups around me-a million Poles in Chicago, and even more Hispanics, for example-but I rarely run into them. (I tried shopping in a Hispanic grocery store, but got hopelessly lost in the two long aisles devoted to different varieties of beans.)

Every three years, however, I get a notice ordering me to report to the Driver’s License Bureau to renew my license. Sometimes I have to take a written test, sometimes merely fill out a form and pose for a photo. But each time I must spend at least an hour standing in line, surrounded by a cross section of Chicago. That hour proves most educational.

So many overweight people in the world! Why are most of my friends on the skinny side? I ask myself. Where do all these obese people live? Who are their friends?

And so many senior citizens! I have read about the graying of America in Time magazine but, again, I have few regular contacts with people outside my age range.

I encounter the ethnic mix of Chicago directly, for it is the main reason I must spend an hour in line. Instructions are shouted, over and over, in simple English, to bewildered men and women.

I am amazed at how many people wear blue jeans each day, and at how many have not yet discovered deodorant, and how many had no access to an orthodontist when growing up. This is the real world here in the lobby of the Driver’s License Bureau.

My reactions may primarily reveal my own shelteredness, but I suspect all of us, by nature, gravitate toward people like us and rarely step outside that circle unless something forces us to-like an order to report to the Driver’s License Bureau. Or, unless we meet such people at church. And that is what I like best about the church I now attend: Diversity abounds, which consequently provides an outlook on the world I get in no other way.

I think back fondly on two people in the church of my childhood in Atlanta, Georgia-people I took turns sitting with when my mother was off teaching Sunday school. I loved sitting with Mrs. Payton because she wore animals around her neck. She had a stole, a garish bit of frippery that consisted of two minks biting each other’s tails. All during the service I would play with the hard, shiny eyes, the sharp, pointed teeth, and the soft skin and floppy tails of those magical animals.

Mr. Ponce wore no animals around his neck, but I knew no kinder person anywhere. He had six children of his own, and he seemed happy only when a child was sitting in his lap. He was a huge man, and I could sit there contentedly for an entire service without his leg falling asleep. He praised the pictures I drew on the church bulletin, and drew funny faces in my hands that would smile and wink when I moved my hands a certain way.

I remember Mr. Ponce for his kindness, and also for an enormous sprout of nasal hair that gave me endless fascination. If you asked me whom I liked best, Mrs. Payton or Mr. Ponce, I would have a hard time answering, but probably Mr. Ponce would get the edge. My own father died when I was only a year old, and Mr. Ponce provided for me an important male presence.

Later, when I grew older and more sophisticated, I learned the facts of Mrs. Payton and Mr. Ponce. Mrs. Payton was rich-that explained the animals around her neck. Her husband owned a successful Cadillac dealership. Mr. Ponce drove a garbage truck. He barely brought in enough money to support his large family. And, older and more sophisticated, I realized to my shame that as an adult I probably would not have befriended Mr. Ponce. Talking to him might have been awkward; we might have run out of things to discuss. We probably wouldn’t have had the same tastes or interests.

I am glad, very glad, that the church of Jesus Christ in my childhood included both Mrs. Payton and Mr. Ponce. I now see that the church should be an environment where both Mrs. Payton of the hairy stole and Mr. Ponce of the hairy nose feel equally welcome. I should not have to wait every three years for my trip to the Driver’s License Bureau for a reminder of what the real world is like.

Paul said the same thing to another congregation, in Colossae, “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (3:11).

God’s Emergi-Center

You’ve seen these latest mutants of the health care industry sprouting up in residential areas, in city storefronts, in sites as convenient as a 7-Eleven store. They go by different names, but in essence they are hospital emergency rooms without the hospital. Now, instead of driving five miles to a hospital to fill out six forms in triplicate and wait in a crowded lobby for an hour while accident victims break in line ahead of you, you can drive to an Emergi-Center and have a finger stitched, a swollen ankle examined, or a stomachache diagnosed.

I like to think of the church as one of those Emergi-Centers: open long hours, convenient to get to, willing to serve the needs of people who drop in with unexpected emergencies.

I must confess, I used to bristle when I heard someone accuse Christianity of being a “crutch” religion, a faith to attract the poor and the crippled and those who couldn’t quite make it on their own. But the more I read the Gospels and the Prophets, the more willingly I admit to a “crutch” faith. Those who make such disdainful comments about Christianity are usually self-confident, successful overachievers who have made it by looking out for number one, without asking anyone for help.

Frankly, the Gospel has little to offer people who refuse to admit need. Repentance requires me to come before God and admit that he, not I, is best qualified to tell me how to live. (Perhaps for this reason Jesus singled out the wealthy as the group least likely to enter the kingdom of heaven.) Actually, though, self-confident overachievers make up a very small proportion of this sad, pain-filled world of ours.

If I pause and think just of the people in my neighborhood, I encounter a whole catalog of human needs: a family devastated by a brain-damaged child, a young woman’s messy affair and divorce, a homosexual’s promiscuity, a case of terminal cancer, a sudden loss of job. Those needs have reached the crisis level; every one of us struggles against the normal human condition of loneliness, pride, occasional depression, fear, alienation. Where can we take our minor scrapes and bruises, and our major fractures and gaping psychic wounds?

We can go to the church. As I read the letters to the Corinthians again, I note they contain in addition to the strong language some of Paul’s most intimate words of loving concern. I have a hunch that Paul prayed more and fussed more over that church than he did over some of the more stable congregations he left around the Mediterranean rim. Corinth was an Emergi-Center kind of church, and Paul wanted it to succeed precisely because the odds were stacked against such a cantankerous group.

As I think through the history of the church, I view with shame and sadness much that has happened in the name of Jesus Christ: inquisitions, Crusades, racial pogroms, abuse of resources. Yet in this one area-binding human wounds-the church has done something right. In the major cities of the U.S., the names of the largest hospitals very often include a word like Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist, or the name of a Catholic saint. Although many of those hospitals are no longer overtly religious, they began as a mission of a church that saw a need to reach out tangibly to a hurting world.

Overseas, the trend is even clearer. In a country like India, where only 3 percent of the population call themselves Christian, 27 percent of the health care is provided by Christians. Ask an Indian to describe a Christian, and he or she may well describe someone who saved the life of their child, or treated a member of their family. To give one example, in the research and treatment of a disease like leprosy, most of the major advances came through Christian missionaries. Why? For a time, only they were willing to devote their lives to work among the victims of leprosy.

We cannot all be doctors and nurses, and technologically advanced countries are taking care of health needs in other ways (such as Emergi-Centers). But some human needs are best met in a loving community of people with diverse gifts.

I saw this process at work in a suburban church I attended before moving to Chicago. It was a small church, not particularly distinctive-to most people just a pleasant building to drive by. But to one person, Deborah Bates, that church served as a full-purpose Emergi-Center.

Deborah’s husband left her with four children, a deteriorating house, and very little child support. He left her for another woman, and for many months Deborah turned to members of the church for shoulders to cry on as she tried to cope with her own feelings of guilt and rejection. She had practical needs too: a leaky roof, plugged-up sewer drains, a rattletrap car. Deborah required long-term care. I can think of twenty individuals from that small congregation who spent time painting, baby-sitting, doing house and car repairs.

One man hired her and trained her in a new career. A wealthy woman offered to pay for her children’s education. For at least five years Deborah was propped up by the “crutch” provided by members of the church.

I imagine the motley church at Corinth often had to function as an Emergi-Center, and in fact Paul tells us of one person who was healed in the church. Paul expresses shock and outrage at a man involved with his stepmother, “a kind [of immorality] that does not occur even among pagans!” Paul was ready to hand the man over to Satan. But that same man, many scholars believe, makes an appearance in 2 Corinthians 2. The church had “treated” him, and was now ready to forgive and welcome him back into the fold. The emergency treatment had proven effective.

God’s CTA Train

This particular metaphor has meaning only for me, so I must quickly explain it. Several years ago I began taking literature courses at the University of Chicago, at the extreme south end of the city. To get there, I rode a Chicago Transit Authority train some eighty-five blocks, then transferred to a local bus.

The train ride offered a complete cross-section tour of Chicago. Where I caught the train, English was often drowned out by Spanish or Greek or Polish. As we headed toward Chicago’s downtown Loop area, well-dressed Yuppies predominated. Both those groups, ethnics and Yuppies, got off before we reached the South Side. There, I saw only black faces as the train threaded its way through middle-class, then lower-class, and then combat-zone areas of the city.

I started noticing the churches out of the train window. Catholic churches dotted the ethnic areas, mini-cathedrals built in the European style, with domes and bell towers. The black areas had mostly storefront churches with exotic names: Beulah Land Today Missionary Church, Holy Spirit of Brotherhood Church, Water in the Rock Baptist. And finally, as we approached the University of Chicago, I could see the magnificent Gothic cathedral built by the Rockefellers.

On campus, I spent my time studying such writers as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Soren Kierkegaard, John Donne, and the Japanese Christian novelist Shusako Endo. After class, I would leave those imposing grey stone buildings and retrace my journey, starting this time in the slums and working my way back through the mosaic of neighborhoods.

Again and again I was struck with the enormous breadth of the church. It has contained within it minds like John Milton and John Donne, and Leo Tolstoy and T. S. Eliot, yet the gospel was entrusted, primarily, to simple peasants. Very likely, some of the early church leaders could not read or write. Jesus himself left nothing in writing for us to study.

The journey to and from the University on the CTA train symbolized for me two aspects of the church, and my need to learn from both. From Water in the Rock Baptist, I learn simple beauty-the humility and an eagerness to embrace the Spirit, the actual Spirit of God who is alive on this earth. And I also learn the mystery that an author like Kierkegaard or Endo represents, the awareness that none of us has fully figured out the message of the Cross or of God’s grace.

On God’s CTA train, the poor and the rich, the simple and the profound, and often unlikely companions rumble along together.

“God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong,” Paul told the Corinthians (1:27). Yes, and he also chose a few individuals like the apostle Paul, but even his daunting intellect proved no match for the reality of an encounter with God himself. The church, God’s church, is big enough, and small enough, to exalt the humble and humble the exalted.

God’s Locker Room

For most of the year, I win the battle against TV addiction. We have not replaced our sixteen-inch black-and-white set mainly because its terrible reception (three images of everything, fuzzy bands across the top and bottom) forces us to limit our viewing to programs we desperately want to watch. But each year, around the end of March, a mysterious force draws me toward the rite of spring known as the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.

No one should have to endure the pressure placed on those young athletes. At the age of nineteen or twenty, they perform before thirty million television viewers with the entire weight of the university, state, and their professional careers riding on every rebound. Somehow the crucial game always manages to tighten up in the last few minutes, and the season reduces to a few shots, usually free throws.

A young man approaches the free throw-line and bounces the ball nervously. At the last possible second, to rattle him, the opposing team calls time out.

For the next two minutes the free-throw shooter squats on the sidelines, listening to his coach, trying not to think about what all twenty thousand fans are screaming about: his upcoming shot. He has shot one hundred thousand practice free throws over the season, most of them falling in. But this one is different. If he makes it, he will be the hero of all heroes on his campus. If he fails, how can he face his teammates again? How can he face life? He returns to the free-throw line, his jaw clenched, his muscles taut, the tension of a whole career etched in the lines of his face.

Freeze that image at the free-throw line, and advance the videotape to a scene that appears two minutes later. You see the same young man, but this time standing, or rather jumping up and down, in the locker room. Champagne streaks his hair. His smile is so wide you wonder why the skin does not split apart. He is sweatily hugging his coach, his teammates, the team manager, the dean, everyone. He made the shot!

Those two contrasting images symbolize for me the difference between law and grace. Under law, my destiny rides on everything that I do. To please the crowd, the coach, the pro scouts-to please God-I have to make the shot. I can’t miss. If I miss, it will sear me forever. I have to make it. I can’t sin.

But where sin abounds, said Paul, grace much more abounds. According to the gospel, the outcome of the game has already been determined, and we are on the winning side. Thus church is not one more place for me to compete and get a performance rating. Like a victorious locker room, church is a place to exult, to give thanks, to celebrate the great news that all is forgiven, that God is love, that victory is certain.

One Final Metaphor

As I let my mind roam over various metaphors to describe the church today, I find so many possibilities. The church is God’s family, a place where acceptance is based not on looks or intelligence, but on spiritual heredity, a heredity granted to us by God’s own Son.

The church is God’s welfare office, an institution set up to heal the blind, set free the captive, feed the hungry, and bring Good News to the poor-the original mandate Jesus proclaimed.

The church is God’s theater, a gathering which, as Kierkegaard noted, reverses the normal roles of performance: In church, the congregation performs and the pastor prompts, with God himself as the audience for our worship.

The church is God’s neighborhood bar, a hangout for people who know all about your lousy boss, your mother with heart trouble back in North Carolina, and the teenager who won’t do what you tell him; a place where you can unwind, spill your life story, and get a sympathetic arm around your shoulder, not a self-righteous leer.

Yet after trying out numerous metaphors, I found myself returning time after time to the one Paul settled on as most accurate and appropriate: the church as Christ’s body. First Corinthians 12-14 adumbrates the themes that will appear in the later epistles. “The body is a unit,” Paul says, “though it is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, they form one body” (12:12).

The body holds together in perfect balance the polar forces of unity and diversity. The church comprises people of all shapes and sizes who nevertheless are made one in Christ Jesus.

I dare not start in on all the analogies that flow from that one sentence, for already I have written two books in collaboration with a medical doctor in order to explore the meaning of the metaphor. But to me the greatest lesson from the body is this: We, you and I, form the primary representation of God’s presence in the world. What is God like? Where does he live? How can the world get to know him? His Presence no longer dwells in a tabernacle in the Sinai, or in a temple in Jerusalem. He has chosen, instead, to dwell in ordinary, even ornery, people like you and me.

I look around me on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, and I see the “risk” that God has assumed. For whatever reason, he now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that is LaSalle Street Church, and every other such gathering under his name.

That is our calling in this confused and confusing world: to share in the representation of what God is like. The apostle Paul never seemed to get over the shock of that metaphor. He took the mundane issues at Corinth so seriously because he believed they reflected not only on Corinth, but on God. For the watching world, we ourselves serve proof that God is alive. We form the visible shape of what he is like.

When I look at that shape around me, I easily get discouraged. We form such a poor image of what God is like. And yet when I turn to a book like 1 Corinthians, I feel a sudden gust of hope. To whom was Paul writing those soaring words of chapters 12-14? To that motley group of earthy Corinthians-idolaters, adulterers, and the like.

By their nature, metaphors have the power to inspire pride in what we are, while also spurring us on toward an ideal of what we should be. I can see why Paul relied on them so much. No church I know today totally fulfills the promise of the metaphors I have mentioned here. And yet every church represents that promise and offers a whisper of hope. We all reveal some aspect of the shape of God’s body.

Philip Yancey is editor at large of Leadership.

Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

THE MAKING OF A PREACHER

Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley

If preachers are made, not born, what goes into the process? An interview with Fred Craddock

If someone asked you to fashion a great preacher, the product would probably not resemble Fred Craddock. Fred is not physically imposing, and he describes his voice as sounding like "the wind whistling through a splinter on a post." But Fred Craddock can preach. And he's equally at home delivering the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale or preaching to a rural Appalachian congregation. Perhaps that's why God, not a human designer, is the one who calls and fashions preachers.

Craddock's formal education came from Johnson Bible College, Phillips University, and Vanderbilt, his informal education from Disciples of Christ pastorates in Tennessee and Oklahoma and a lifetime of thoughtful observation. Since 1979, he has served as professor of preaching and New Testament at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia.

But Fred doesn't content himself with teaching about preaching; he preaches at least as often now as he did in the parish. It is his great love.

His workshops and sermons in Preaching Today consistently rank at the top of listener evaluations. He is sought out as a speaker, pastors flock to his preaching seminars, and his recent book, Preaching (Abingdon), has been given warm reviews.

Since Craddock has combined excellence in preaching with effectiveness in teaching others how to do it, LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley journeyed to Atlanta to discuss with him the craft of preaching.

Did preaching come naturally to you? Or has it been a struggle?

I didn't like my preaching when I began in my first parish. I was uncomfortable with the manufactured style I felt I had to put on. I felt if old friends or family members would come to hear me preach, they'd say, "Is that you, Fred? What's the matter? You don't sound like that any other time, so why do you shift into it in the pulpit?"

Even though I weighed only 120 pounds, I was trying to be the preachers I had heard as a child-big, impressive men-and I was coming up short.

That was painful, because I wasn't trying to sound manufactured. I studied hard. I felt my messages strongly. I believed what I preached. But I was trying to push it with a body that couldn't do it and a voice that didn't do it. That was discouraging. I thought of quitting rather than being a parody of the preacher I assumed I should be.

What did you do?

I started thinking, There must be a way for people without exceptional physical qualities to be heard, so how can I get anyone to listen to me?

Then I noticed that when I talked at church dinners and less-formal congregational occasions, I did better. People listened and remembered more. For instance, in the fellowship hall after a meal, I found myself using Scripture and people's experiences, telling anecdotes from my life, and bringing it home to the point of the occasion. But then in the sanctuary on Sunday morning, I'd manufacture something else that I thought a sermon must be.

So I thought, Why don't I move what I'm doing in the fellowship hall into the sanctuary? That initially brought some criticism from people who didn't call that preaching, but I felt I was being heard more. Finally I decided I didn't care whether they called it a sermon or not; it was working. If they got the point, if they wanted to talk about it more, then I was being heard.

It was another ten years before I thought about it theologically, since in the parish I was just trying to preach. But finally I decided my style wasn't just a concession to my weaknesses. I was moving the Word of God away from my lips to their ears, and that was worth doing.

So what you considered your idiosyncratic weakness could be a strength.

Yes. I was very retiring, very shy, as I began ministry. The most difficult thing for me was to go up to somebody, put out my hand, and say, "Hello. I'm Fred Craddock."

I had the feeling the answer would be, "Who cares?" I thought, Why should I impose myself on anybody?

That made preaching difficult, because in preaching, I'm an intruder-benevolent, but still an intruder. I'm still hesitant socially. There remains a kind of pain in entering a public arena-going to the pulpit and taking everybody's time.

But, again, it seems you have turned what might be a weakness into a strength. As a shy person, you measure your words more carefully.

Perhaps. I do think it makes me more receptive. I absorb things. My wife remarks, "People just talk to you!" It's true; people open up to me everywhere-on planes, at school, in homes.

I have a large interior world. I listen and receive, and out of that mix comes my own thinking. It's not something planned, but it provides me with a wealth of preaching resources. Understanding this has turned into an advantage what for a long time I lamented as a flaw. My oldest brother could walk into a room and take it over, and I once regretted lacking that charisma. But now I try to maximize my own silent strengths.

How else has your background affected your preaching?

It took me a while to discover the resource my father had been. We were poor, and there were few toys to play with. So in the evening, my father would tell us stories. Growing up, I discounted the value of stories, but when as a preacher I started struggling for a way to make my point and I discovered stories, I realized I was drawing on his resources-not the stories he told, but a legacy of the dynamics of storytelling. I began to bless him for what I had considered for twenty-five years to be worthless.

Then I started spending a lot of time with storytellers. There was one last blacksmith shop in town and a store where people gathered. There I listened to the older people tell stories. Then I would go home and try to sketch them out hastily on a piece of paper to figure out what made the effects and why they held my interest. By observation and reflection, I learned storytelling principles like restraint: holding things back, keeping things unresolved until the end of the story.

Where can pastors look today for models of good storytelling?

Garrison Keillor, who was on public radio's A Prairie Home Companion, is a good storyteller. Once in a while there's a standup comedian who tells comedy in parable form, especially Jewish comedians with rabbinic training, and quite a few of them have been trained as rabbis. While the content of their stories frequently is not all that worthwhile, their technique, the way they hold you off until the very end, is good.

I am constantly looking for authors-like Eudora Welty-who know how to tell a story. As a child I was often ill, and when I'd complain, my father would say, "You should arrange your life so that if you spend the rest of it in a wheelchair, it can be a good life." When I asked how to do that, he would give me a book.

I liked to read short stories, and to this day, I consider the short story a cousin to a sermon in the way it unrolls.

Sometimes I would record what older people said and ask myself as I replayed it, What makes this story interesting? The subject matter isn't all that important, but I follow the story. Then I thought, If you increase the importance of the subject matter to the kingdom of God, why can't you be just as engaging?

What good does preaching accomplish?

There's the obvious, the proclamation of the gospel. But because preaching is oral, it is also a socializing force. It gathers people. Written material is private; you hold it on your lap. But a word spoken in a room helps create community. People have a desire to belong. It does what hymns sometimes do; it reminds people of their roots.

Preaching also gives people something over against their lives. Many people don't like life to just move comfortably before them. In preaching one gets that keen edge of moral seriousness about life; it introduces larger dimensions. People feel their lives are so trivialized; when they hear a sermon, they see something much bigger than life. What they do with that is another matter, but they need to hear it.

Poor preaching is not so much false as it is little. Preaching should be bigger. To be a human being is to long for something larger than I am, and preaching provides that if it's good preaching.

What makes a sermon good?

One element is thematic control, and that theme has to be, for me, derived from Scripture. There are a lot of Christian things said that have no direct connection to Scripture, but a sermon that is not directly drawn from Scripture is orphaned, however bright or clever it may be. "By what authority do you say these things?" is the audience's proper question.

I need to study a text of Scripture until I am satisfied I know what the text is saying, so when I preach, I can say, "This is from that text through honest and prayerful engagement, not just from my own ideas. This is what the text is saying to us." Certainly a given Scripture text contains more than I can ever cover in a sermon, but my sermon should at least convey part of what the Scripture says.

Take the text, "Lord, teach us to pray." I may decide the thematic control here is, Prayer is something learned. That theme must hold together all the sermon material, however casual, humorous, or anecdotal. It's that theme that gives material permission to get into the sermon.

There's a direct relationship between constraint and freedom of imagination. If I know in particular what I want to say, I can think of more things to say. But if I know only in general what my theme is-say, for instance, I intend to preach on "prayer"-nothing happens; the subject is too broad, too general. My brain dulls. "Prayer is something learned" is a more manageable, more easily developed, theme. So thematic control is terribly important.

A second element of good preaching is appropriateness. The sermon needs to fit the congregation. I don't mean making concessions to what people want to hear, but the sermon should be appropriate in the same way that Jesus was. He answered the questions people asked, not other questions.

There's nothing more useless than the inappropriate. A good message to the wrong crowd at the wrong time may be full of truths, but they are not winged for the minds and hearts of those people.

You once said that "Good preaching not only speaks God's word to the people, but it speaks the people's words to God." What did you mean?

Another quality of good preaching is it evokes the best from the treasury of people's own Christian experience. If I can preach in such a way that you begin to say, "You know, that's happened to me. I've thought of that myself. I feel exactly the same way," if I can get you to the point where you can't remember if I said it or you thought it, then my preaching will be effective.

In my sermons, I try to include a high percentage of ideas the people have heard before, but to say them in a different way. In any sermon, 85 to 90 percent should be recognized by a congregation. That is, if you were in a black congregation, they would know when to say, "Amen! Preach it!" But I try to say it in a way that's fresh for me as well as for them.

If I deliver a message that's brand new to people, it can be as true and right as rain, but if they don't like it, they can dismiss it. But if I evoke a thought in them, and they say, "That's right! That's exactly right!" then the results are inescapable. The great unused resource in preaching is that roomful of folk who've been Christians for years and have experienced a lot of life. When a kid comes up to me and says, "Mr. Craddock, I have something you can preach," that's a high compliment, because I've made him feel the sermon is partially his.

How do you create an atmosphere where people feel they can share with you?

Part of it is by my appearance and my voice, I'm not a threatening person. I mean, when I walk into a room, it's like nobody walked in anyway! I'm not very intimidating.

Second, I try to project a sense of freedom. When I first started out, the intensity of my desire and passion pushed people away. Then a retired minister-he's dead now-said to me, "I have a suggestion. Before you leave the house in the morning, say a little prayer that the Lord will lead you and that you'll be effective. Then when you open the door to leave, say, 'Well, here goes nothing.' If you can do both of those, you'll be much more effective."

I thought he was being a little light. But once I accepted the truth of what I was preaching, my sense of the importance of things was mellowed by the fact that God is the one in charge. I just happen to be here. I started to see it as almost humorous that I was allowed to participate.

I never tell jokes in the pulpit, but I do use humor. I may read a Bible passage and then say, "Why in the world would anybody write this?" and then I give a couple of humorous responses. People begin chuckling, and then when I say, "It seems to me what Paul is really saying is . . ." they listen, because they've been thinking about it too.

What goes through your mind as you're preaching? Is there any overriding concern?

I want to show people that I am really interested in what I'm saying, that I believe in it. To me, the most fatal comment about preaching is not "It wasn't biblical," but "He preached as though nothing were at stake."

Indifference is deadly. People listen if they feel you really are invested; this is not a Great Books club where we're thinking of a few great ideas.

I present my sermon as an advocate. There's something for people to agree or disagree with. I'm not confrontive or combative, but people tell me sometimes it's on the way home or the next day when they suddenly realize, I think he was talking to me! It may be delayed. It may be indirect. But it's there: I feel keenly about my subject and I have invested emotion in it. Emotion is the way my body registers my values, so I become emotionally engaged in preaching. Then people become involved, too.

On some Sundays, the congregation seems more difficult to reach. What do you do when it looks like people aren't about to listen to you?

Sometimes in a service I'll see people who are sullen or communicating their boredom. When I see this arms-across-the-chest resistance, my first thought is, What are you doing sitting in the back corner refusing to sing?

But then I decide there's some reason those people are here. Their posture is to tell me "I'm not interested," but beneath it is another message, communicated even more clearly by their very presence: "Of all the places I could have gone today, I came here."

So I preach to that second message: "You came," not "What are you doing here resisting?" I try to identify the search, the desire that brought that person here when there are so many other places he or she could be.

Back in those struggling days when I was trying to find a way to preach, a young man in the congregation asked me, "Why do you speak to the worst person in the house rather than the best?" It was true; I had appointed myself as a kind of detective. I was always pursuing evil, using my sermons to root it out of people.

"You speak to the worst in us," he said. "We're here. We're searching. We're hungry. Take that as the place to start."

It hurt me to realize what I had been doing-my zest to go after the bad in people.

So now, when I see the resistant person in the corner, I think, But that person is here! He may have an ill-defined hunger, like standing in front of a refrigerator when you don't know what you want. But I'll just go ahead and put the food on the table. He might eat.

Resistance is there in any congregation. People resist good preaching and they resist poor preaching, and that's a compliment to the gospel. If I believe the gospel really effects change in people's lives, then why shouldn't they resist it?

Resistance, distractions in the service, people leaving-it used to bug me to death early in my ministry. I interpreted everything negatively: What's wrong? They didn't like that. Now I realize the person who leaves early may have a plane to catch. My job is not to keep everyone riveted to his or her seat. That's been very liberating.

But doesn't it affect you when your sermon is ignored-or taken lightly?

I do spend a lot of time studying, Grafting, praying, reflecting on a sermon, and therefore it becomes very much a part of me. My emotions and my passion are in my preaching, so for people to just drop in before the service and say, "Well, going to give us a good talk today, Fred?" is offensive.

I pray and worry and study all week, and somebody drives up with a boat behind the car on the way to the lake and stops off for forty-five minutes to say he's been in church. My temptation is to not speak to him.

I feel like saying, "When you are ready to listen, come back, but right now I don't really have anything to say to you."

A sermon belongs to the public, but in the process of preparing it, it becomes so personal that sharing it in public is like holding an open house in the prayer room; it just doesn't seem to fit. My inclination is to say, "Those who are interested, step inside, and let's talk," but I know I can't do that. I'm not a Gnostic; Christianity is not some secret sect.

The Christian faith is personal, but it can't be private.

That's right, and I have to fight the tendency to keep it private or available only to a committed few.

That same battle lingers after the sermon. I'm not effective making conversation at the door following the service. I expose my soul from the pulpit, and then somebody shakes hands with me and says, "Boy, that killed me yesterday when the fellow dropped the ball on the ten-yard line. Did you see that play?" I'm not ready to shift into that.

I honestly can't recall what I say sometimes after a service. If you made a recording of what I said to people at the door, it would probably be sadly comical. I need a little time to get debriefed, to kick a can down the road. I don't like to go to lunch with people immediately-maybe an hour or so later. I need to get reassembled, reoriented around people and away from the sermon.

How do you avoid worn ruts, saying what people have heard many times before?

Even when I'm looking over material I've preached before, or a passage they've heard before, I try to find a way to approach the same material from a different angle. Even though the way I once preached it was all right, I couldn't continue preaching it that way. I would get dull. I'd be hearing myself say clich‚s.

I don't really like to hear myself talk, so I play little language games to keep language fresh. I'll ask students, "Which of these is faster: out of the tree, from the tree, or down the tree?"

I may say, "What's your favorite word? How about isthmus?" or "What's the hardest word for you to pronounce?" Or I have them search for alternate images. Instead of saying "The squirrel ran across the road," say "The squirrel rippled across the road." If I use unpredictable words, my voice doesn't sound so bad to me.

By being sensitive to words, we stay alive to language. We're talking to the same people all the time, so we must keep our language alive.

As a homiletics professor, you'd better say yes, but we'll ask the question anyway: Is good preaching something that can be taught?

There is enough disappointment among teachers in this field, as in all teaching, that once in a while someone gets down on preaching and says, "It can't be taught!" But it can, because it involves art and skill, thorough preparation, the arrangement of material, nuances, insights into texts-a lot of things you can convey.

Granted there is a gift God gives that lights the lamp in a way that's different. You take no credit for that, but once I discover students' strengths, I can brighten them if only 1 or 2 percent. The gains are in the little things.

Are there elements that can't be taught?

No one can ever teach the self-investment, the self-disclosure, the testimonial dimension of preaching, what the New Testament calls witness.

If someone preaches sermons at arm's length or always in the third person, if there is no involvement, I can't inject the passion. I can decry and pray over that lack of passion, but if there's no oil in the lamp, I can't supply it.

Can you spot the good preachers in your classes?

Once in a while I can, but I've discovered there's something about going into the pulpit that draws out qualities in some of my students that I had no way of knowing were there.

Some of my students have the gift of gab. They are articulate; they won the debating contest in high school. But sometimes they seem to so trust in the horses and chariots of that verbal skill, when they get up in the pulpit it's just more of the same.

Then there's somebody sitting off to one side, taking notes, chewing on a pencil, and thinking. But when that person gets in the pulpit, it's like what is said of people who become president: once they sit in that chair, they grow and take on something of its size. Once they stand in the pulpit, it brings out deeper thought, deeper feeling, deeper conviction, deeper knowledge and study that couldn't be seen before.

Every year there's somebody I had pretty well written off who surprises me. I always look forward to it. I don't at all mind being wrong.

What help can you give to pastors who realize they are not great preachers but would like to improve?

Find out what your strength is-through listening to your preaching, conversation, consultation, attending workshops. The strengths are there. I find in people who are not great preachers such strengths as caring, a love of people, excellent minds, but they don't know how to maximize these strengths. Sometimes they have good material but just don't have a sense of timing.

Ministers come to me in workshops and clinics and say, "I'm kind of down on my preaching."

So I tell them, "Well, let's listen to some of your sermons. I'm not going to try to find your weaknesses and work on them. Weaknesses get too much attention. If you discover your strength and work from there, some of those weaknesses become lovable idiosyncrasies. And I work on just one thing. Why don't we work on the way you end your sermon."

They go to the library and study and come back with an even better conclusion. At the end of the week I say, "Let's play the sermon you brought Monday. Notice how you ended it? Oh, my goodness! We've helped the conclusion."

Or I may work on their storytelling. "Here's somebody named Sam Smith, and here's what happened to him as a child, as an old man, his first marriage, at work, and all. Let's arrange those pieces differently to achieve different results. Suppose we tell them this way, what does it do?" Pretty soon confidence is built. The person realizes, I'm really more capable than I thought.

Most preachers are more capable than they think they are, but they have been put, for a variety of reasons, into the category of mediocre. Some are not great preachers and won't be great preachers. They have other gifts. But there are little things I can do.

And if they improve one little aspect of their preaching, chances are the confidence they gain will help them improve other things.

Ephesians 4 seems to list pastor and teacher as one role. How do you see the two functions working together?

The role of pastor is larger than the role of teacher. It includes dimensions of caring for the flock that teaching would not adequately describe. But teaching is an important function of the pastor.

The most effective teaching is done by someone who has a pastoral relation to the people, because there's a ground of confidence or trust. When you bring up religion, you bring up a subject that's important even to casual acquaintances. If the person who brings it up is not care related, it can be offensive, distancing, alienating, counterproductive. But the true pastor can teach in a context of assent rather than suspicion. I know-and my wife can tell you-that my best preaching was when I preached each week to the same people.

Why?

I knew them. I was related to them in ways other than the teacher in the classroom.

Here I have a grade book. When I preach in chapel, it's Professor Craddock. When I guest preach, I am Professor Craddock, who represents theological education.

But when I preached in my church, I had buried the dead, I had married the young, I had counseled, I had been in the hospital. If a person is a good pastor, he does an exegesis of the congregation as well as of the text. He can close his eyes and tell you where the people sit on Sunday morning. Even a mediocre sermon to people who love you is great.

People say to me, "You must come hear our minister. He's marvelous." So I go, and when I hear him preach, homiletically it's perhaps a C+. But to their ears it's A+ because he had the wedding, the funeral, the crisis counseling. In that context, no one could preach any better.

Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

THE FAIR-TO-MIDDLING PREACHER

Mark J. Galli

Ordinary preachers may never dazzle, but most can learn to be pretty good.

I sliced my drive from the second tee, and the ball landed behind a group of oaks-not uncommon for a weekend golfer. My next shot had to cover at least 160 yards and land on the fairway to give me a chance at par. But there stood all those oaks, with few openings to the fairway.

On more than one occasion I had seen Jack Nicklaus hit through closely knit trees. I reasoned that if a pro hits through the trees, it must be the way to do it. I aimed at an opening and swung. My ball hit a tree and bounced back, landing a yard behind where it had originated.

Undaunted, I set up and aimed for that opening again. After all, that’s the way a professional would play it. This time the ball hit a branch and careened to the right. Now it was surrounded by oaks. After a few more desperation shots, I finally sank a putt that gave me a nine, not very good for a par four. But I was thankful to walk away with that.

I could have fared much better, however, had I not insisted on modeling my game after one of the best. Had I accepted my limitations as a weekend golfer, I could have chipped from the oaks onto the fairway just a few yards to my left. I would have sacrificed a stroke, but then my ball would have been in the clear, and I would have had a far better chance of completing the hole respectably.

In much the same way, “weekend preachers”-those of us who are not superbly gifted in preaching-can often preach better if we stop trying to model ourselves after the best.

High Hopes

I didn’t come by that realization easily. I entered the ministry with typical visions of grandeur. I had already anticipated how I would handle my success-giving all the glory to God, of course. But the more I preached, the more it became apparent that, to put it mildly, I was not superbly gifted. One pastoral evaluation, in fact, indicated the church elders thought I was a below-average preacher. That was no small shock for a man with glorious visions of himself. But it was accurate.

So I set out to change that evaluation. I attended a preaching seminar in which the virtues of storytelling in preaching were extolled. Preachers with national reputations were lifted up as models of storytelling preaching. By the end, I was thoroughly persuaded. After all, that was Jesus’ main method, and he certainly ranks as one of the best.

As I drove home I challenged myself, Well, if that’s how the best do it, that’s what I’ll do.

The next two weeks I preached extended stories based on the changing of water into wine and Nicodemus’s visit in the night. The third week, however, I couldn’t devote sufficient time to create another such story. I regretted having to deliver nothing but a typical sermon: introduction, point one, point two, point three, conclusion, with appropriate illustrations for each.

Yet as people filed out of the service, most spoke well of the sermon. One member, as she shook my hand, commented, “I’m glad we didn’t hear another cute story.”

Granted, two weeks is hardly sufficient to polish storytelling skills. Yet, that comment prodded me to reflect on the general course of my preaching. I quickly realized a storyteller I am not. The best preachers today may be great storytellers, but modeling myself after them was only going to make my preaching worse.

There are a number of other things the great preachers of our day practice-and teach-which, if followed by the average pastor, will put him or her even deeper into the woods. Perhaps we are better off sometimes to ignore or revise portions of their well-meaning advice.

Of course, some of their advice can be followed by any preacher with great benefit. Many recommend, for instance, spending an hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit. But then, many professional golfers recommend hitting four hundred balls a day on the practice tee. Most of us don’t think a lower golf score is worth forsaking our families (although sometimes one wonders . . .).

It’s relatively easy to improve your golf score from 115 to 110, but it’s incredibly difficult to shave the same five strokes from a 75. In most cases, it’s simply not worth the time and energy required. There is more to life than golf (I think).

And there is more to ministry than preaching. Most of us have little interest in becoming great preachers if it means giving up such things as hospital calling or performing funerals. Certainly many congregations would prefer having a loving pastor to having a polished preacher. Even if they want a pulpit star, not all of us are capable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t improve.

So, I proceeded to rebuild my preaching from the ground up. I ignored the advice on how to be great and simply learned to preach well within my limits. One year later the pastoral evaluation showed that the church considered my preaching above average.

This, then, is not a rags-to-riches story, but more like rags-to-Sears-Roebuck. I will never be noted or even footnoted in The History of Preaching in the Twentieth Century, but I have moved from being a fair-to-middling preacher to one whose congregation thinks he’s “pretty good.” Here are some of the ideas that helped me.

Pretty-Good Ideas

 Planning. Some planning is required, but let’s not overdo it. One West Coast preacher describes in his preaching seminars how he begins work on sermons three years in advance. I cannot imagine what my congregation will need to hear 156 weeks hence. Nor does my busy schedule permit such speculation.

However, I do save a great deal of time and worry with a little planning. Those who use the lectionary have their texts laid out well in advance. Those who don’t must lay them out. With a little planning, I can at least ward off Tuesday-morning panic: What passage this week?

I plan my preaching in a general way one year in advance. I choose an Old Testament book for the fall, a Gospel for the winter, and an epistle for the spring (my own version of the lectionary!). The summer is reserved for Psalms and Proverbs and sermon ideas that don’t fit neatly any other time.

Two to three months before I begin a series, I read through the biblical book once, then through two commentary introductions. Next, I list the texts and the general theme of each sermon. This prevents me from repeating themes, a common temptation in preaching straight through a book.

All this is general. I do not begin detailed work on a sermon until the week the sermon is to be preached. But this planning, which takes maybe four or five hours stretched over a couple of days, saves me ten to fifteen hours of decision making in the course of a series. It’s not as much planning as the best do, but it’s enough for pretty-good preaching.

 Time. Some sermon-preparation time is required, but, again, I don’t have the luxury to spend an hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit. Yet, we still can’t get around the fact that the more time invested in the sermon, the better it will be.

I have little patience with the idea of “quality time.” Certainly we can misuse time, but time only comes to us in quantities, and it takes quantities to exegete, outline, illustrate, write, revise, and practice a sermon. I don’t see how I can do all that in fewer than eight hours. However, I don’t see why I need spend more than twelve. I do have other pastoral duties.

 Exegesis. I gain time by not overdoing exegesis. Excess exegesis is often the particular temptation of recent seminary graduates. Perhaps they want to demonstrate facility with Greek and Hebrew, or with the latest scholarly conclusions. But more often than not, they are probably trying to follow the example of some of the great preachers of the day, many of whom dig exhaustively into each verse.

Whatever the motive, detailed exegesis can undermine a sermon. As a new minister, I vowed to translate the text and parse the verbs, to read widely on the passage and come to a thoughtful understanding of it. That meant I often spent close to eight hours in exegesis alone, and for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why my sermons came across so scholarly and abstract.

Most of my people don’t want a textual critique or a brilliant insight as much as they want the plain meaning of the text applied to their daily lives. After a brief study of the text in English, and the reading of two commentaries to check one’s biases, most preachers ought to be able to pick out the main thrust of the text. Lay people certainly can.

I try not to let that process take more than an hour and a half. Any more will steal time from outlining, illustrating, and writing-elements of preparation that make the sermon real to people.

 Expectations. I’ve decided to be satisfied with the satisfactory; I probably won’t reach the spectacular. As I write out my outline and reflect on illustrations, most often I am troubled. The outline isn’t as creative as it could be. I can’t seem to get point two to begin with another T! And often the illustrations seem a little worn, or simply fail in dramatic effect.

At such points I am tempted to rework the whole sermon, no matter what the cost. One week when preparing a sermon on the misuse of power, I devoted hours to reading Paul Tournier’s The Violence Within to give me that creative outline and powerful quote. I ended up with neither-and a sermon that fell far short in other areas as well.

Not every sermon can be church shattering. Not every illustration has to move the congregation to tears. As a “pretty-good” preacher, I must remain satisfied with the satisfactory.

 A manuscript. For some time I have believed that truly great preachers never preach from a manuscript. They’re so familiar with their sermon they can speak from notes, or even from memory. That gives them more freedom of expression and movement. It allows for steady eye contact and an intensity and immediacy not possible with a manuscript.

But when I preach without a manuscript, I spend most of my energy desperately thinking about what I am going to say next. My transitions are halting, and my ideas become increasingly blurry as I ramble on and on trying to say what is really quite simple.

Because of this weakness, I write out my sermons and preach from the manuscript. The writing process forces me to clarify ideas and smooth transitions.

The greatest advantage, however, is the revising. The longer I have been preaching, the more time I leave for revision. When I rewrite a sermon, many so-so illustrations become pretty good, and flat outlines take on life.

Recently, I preached a sermon that tried to bring home the meaning of covenant. In my first draft, and second and third, I sensed something was wrong. Only after my fourth revision did I notice the word covenant had been left out entirely, except for the introduction and conclusion. When I corrected it, the sermon became more focused, and therefore more forceful.

I felt free to use the manuscript in the pulpit once I admitted my limitations as a preacher. Now I don’t ramble. My transitions are smooth. My ideas remain clear. And the sermon doesn’t prattle on.

Yes, eye contact suffers, as does intensity. No, I’ll never have people raving about how I never use a note in the pulpit. But a manuscript does enable me to be a pretty-good preacher, which is better than the poor preacher I was.

 Practice. I’ve heard all sorts of advice about practicing in front of a mirror, but it has never worked for me. I find it hard to look at myself when I’m trying to preach. Besides, I have too much dignity to practice in the lavatory.

But I have found it extremely helpful to practice the sermon at least once from the pulpit. I still feel a little silly, especially when the janitor walks in, but in the pulpit I can try out when and where I will look and gesture. Then the next day it comes more easily.

I imagine great preachers probably don’t need to bother with something so contrived. They have a feel for the pregnant pause and the penetrating look. But I have a feeling most of us don’t have that sense and must resort to less-natural methods to improve.

 Evaluation. When the idea of having congregational members evaluate my preaching was first suggested, I bristled: “What do they know about preaching? They’ve not taken homiletics. They’ve not struggled with the text. Besides, the sermon is a Word from God, not a speech to be critiqued.” I could hardly imagine Charles Spurgeon soliciting advice from his congregation.

All of those objections were undermined, however, by one simple truth: I was not a very good preacher. Homiletics hadn’t cured me, and neither had experience. And I wasn’t the reincarnation of Charles Spurgeon. I needed to hear comments from the people I was addressing week by week.

So I asked a member to evaluate my sermons in any form she wanted, focusing on both style and content, and to do so for one month. In successive months I asked others to do the same. The process was invaluable. For example, I had been spending a great deal of energy and time making sure the sermon was absolutely clear, that it moved logically through the points and on to a conclusion. One of my evaluators, however, told me my sermons were “too clear,” meaning too rigid. From that point on, I was less anxious about sermon unity and more able to focus on the creative elements of the sermon.

 Experimentation. One of the characteristics of great preachers is their unique style. In reading through Spurgeon’s sermons, for example, I rarely find one that is not Spurgeonesque: penetrating exposition, filled with word images, forceful.

It seems the greats find their style early on, and once they find it, stick to it. My temptation along this line is twofold.

First, I tend to want to adopt a great’s style, and that just won’t work. Dietrich Bonhoeffer certainly was a forceful writer. Once I gave a sermon which, I see in retrospect, was modeled on his writing style. I considered it powerful and dramatic. I wondered why people didn’t pump my hand with gratitude after the service. When I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm or curiosity any longer, I walked up to a close friend and asked, “Well, how did it go?”

She replied, “I couldn’t keep my mind on your sermon,” and then to soften the blow added, “but your benediction really struck me.” Thanks a lot.

Second, I tend to adopt a safe style. But that safe style may not be my best form. The only way to discover my style, the one that will allow me to express my preaching gifts to their fullest, is to experiment from time to time. That’s why I don’t regret my attempt at storytelling, and why from time to time I return to it. As I try various styles, I come to grips with who I am not, and, more important, who I am as a preacher. That cannot help but make me a better preacher, if I am prepared to learn from the duds along with the winners.

 Breaks. Great preachers preach great sermons week after week. Great preachers can sustain interest through an extended sermon series. In fact, their congregations don’t take well to substitutes in the pulpit.

When I first began preaching, I was jealous for every Sunday. I even insisted on preaching the day of the Christmas cantata. I wanted to sustain the series I was building and demonstrate my ability to preach meaningfully week by week. Isn’t that what the pulpit giants do?

I have discovered, however, that weariness sets in when I am called to preach six or eight Sundays in a row. I struggle to form outlines, illustrations fail me, and I don’t have the energy to revise the sermon sufficiently. Consequently, many sermons suffer.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t take a vacation that often, but I can do other things that give me a break from preaching. Many congregational activities help: choral cantatas, youth Sunday, and the like. Christian drama groups can perform a sermon. Visiting missionaries can fill the pulpit from time to time. I’ve used occasional pulpit exchanges to interject variety into my Sunday morning routine.

Because of their wonderful gift, great preachers should rarely vacate the pulpit. Pretty-good preachers should do so regularly. It allows the congregation to hear others who may also be pretty good, and it gives the pretty-good preacher a much needed rest.

Staying Out of the Woods

To put all this another way, it may not be best always to follow the advice of the gifted, nor always to follow the supreme example. Whether playing golf or preaching, doing so may only put us deeper into the woods. If we are not superbly gifted, let’s simply take advice commensurate with our gifts. And that will be enough.

We need great preachers, and some preachers ought to be great. Some need to pursue the special talent God has given them, to make their preaching a fine art. Let those great preachers dazzle and move crowds to tears. If we fair-to-middling preachers can simply present the gospel clearly, even “pretty good” can fulfill the Lord’s purposes.

-Mark J. Galli is pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, California.

THE POWER OF PLAIN PREACHING

There are preachers who fill their sermons with things that give the impression they are learned men, although the hearers understand nothing of it. Often foreign languages are quoted, although probably not one person in the church understands a word of them.

Many preachers are more concerned to have the introduction shape up well and the transitions be effective, to have an outline that is artful and yet sufficiently concealed, and to have all the parts handled precisely according to the rules of oratory and suitably embellished, than they are concerned that the materials be chosen, and by God’s grace developed, in such a way that the hearers may profit from the sermon in life and death. This ought not to be so.

The pulpit is not the place for ostentatious display of one’s skill. It is rather the place to preach the Word of the Lord plainly but powerfully. Preaching should be the divine means to save people, and so it is proper that everything be directed to this end. Ordinary people, who make up the largest part of a congregation, are always to be kept in view more than the few learned people, insofar as such are present at all.

-Philipp Jakob Spener in Pious Desires (1675)

Leadership Summer 1987 p. 124-9

Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

WORKING SMART WITH SINGLES

Rick Stedman

Even a small church can make a big impact.

“Sure, we’d love to have a singles ministry. But we’re a small congregation. We have neither the numbers nor the resources to get one going. It takes a big church to be successful with singles.”

This pastor’s lament might sound familiar. I’ve uttered it at times myself. Small churches, and even medium-sized ones, would love to develop specialized ministries, but it doesn’t seem possible. The limited money, space, and leaders are already overworked in the other areas of church life.

The big churches, on the other hand, seem to have all the ingredients needed for instant success. The leaders of a large church in Southern California recently saw the need for a singles ministry. They asked one of their staff to begin a singles program, an assignment with which he was not very happy. He placed a simple note in the church’s weekly newsletter, listing the time and location for a planning meeting. Then he took a book to read in case no one came.

He had a surprise waiting for him: the meeting was packed. The church now has a singles group of almost two hundred members.

After hearing this success story, I was both excited and frustrated. With only a handful of singles in our church, the prospect of a booming singles ministry seemed dim. That large church had the critical mass to make things work. Our church had problems just keeping the few singles we had. We didn’t seem to possess what it would take for an effective singles ministry.

I was wrong. Some very fine singles groups have grown in rather small churches. In our own mid-sized church (Sunday attendance around three hundred), we have watched an active group develop. Other groups may be larger or more dynamic or faster growing, but our group shows what can be done in something less than a superchurch. We are proof that it doesn’t take a big church or a massive kick-off to minister effectively to today’s single population.

When at First I Don’t Succeed . . .

Being single myself, I was concerned about our church’s lack of a program for single adults. I knew something about singles’ needs, so I set out to plug our hole. That singles ministry had an inauspicious inauguration. Actually, disastrous might be a more honest description.

I launched that first attempt in 1984. It was difficult, but I was able to make almost every possible mistake. It was such a thorough failure, I nearly scared off our few singles rather than attracting new ones. After a handful of meetings with diminishing attendance, the group died a death of attrition. I was relieved to let it fold quietly. It just didn’t seem to be meeting any important needs.

About a year later, I decided to give it another try. It wasn’t that I was lacking things to keep me busy. Other outreach ministries to a prison and a rescue mission consumed our energies, too. But I had had enough time and distance to give the first effort a postmortem. I decided the failure was not from lack of potential or need-both were still evident in our community-but from a faulty approach. Since the need remained, I was willing to give singles ministry one more shot.

I counted thirty singles in the church. Twenty-five, I discovered, were not interested in a special ministry for them. The remaining five planned, prayed, and proceeded.

Two years later the group is working. One visitor asked me one morning, “How many years have you been doing this?” When I told him less than two, he was shocked: “You do all right for rookies!” Another woman who has attended told us, “I wish I had known this group twenty years ago. I wouldn’t have felt so wrong all these years being single.”

Although only three from the original planning team are still active, our Sunday morning meetings number around seventy-five singles, with a total active roster of about 125 and another 150 who are occasionally involved.

Of all these singles, only ten came from our church. Many of the singles who come from the community have made commitments to Christ. Several have joined our church, and others attend the group but belong to other churches. Still others are discovering God’s love for the first time in their adult lives. And, yes, some attend just because they like the social atmosphere.

I’ve learned a great lesson: You don’t need lots of singles to produce a viable singles ministry. Nor do you need a big budget. You don’t even need to be a big church. Almost any church can make a ministry to single adults work.

The Winning Edge

What you do need is an approach that communicates to singles. That was probably our greatest discovery from our first dismal failure. Our mistakes in the first round were instructive, though painful.

Simply by correcting our mistakes, we stumbled upon a few basic keys to success with single adults.

 Start with a planning team. A leader’s initial strategy decision is simple: Don’t do this alone. The first time around, I went solo. The singles said they were busy, and I believed them. I thought, Okay, I’ll do whatever it takes, and they’ll appreciate being served. I named the group, planned the socials, and led the meetings. I set up the chairs, made the coffee, and cleaned up. My car still smells like coffee from the full pot that tipped over on the way to a meeting.

As anticipated, they enjoyed the service. The unanticipated corollary, however, was that they felt unnecessary. They felt no ownership. They referred to it as “Rick’s Group”-and they were right.

Rick’s Group died. Few felt any loss.

During my period of mourning, I decided the next time I would find others to share the leadership load. In my second try at singles ministry, only four people agreed to join me on a planning team, and all four were rather hesitant. I promised them success. I threatened them. I even thought about paying them!

It bothered me that I was the only positive one-and I was faking it. I suppose we were all afraid of failing again. But I swallowed my fear and lurched ahead.

The planning team met four times, initially, to evaluate our purpose, our target group, and the methods to reach them. After brainstorming our methods, we divided the work. Various members took on responsibilities like coordinating socials, welcoming newcomers, preparing advertising, and keeping finances straight. We kept the jobs for each person specific and manageable, such as: Plan one social every three months.

This original group functioned well. We’ve had turnover, as can be expected, and the job responsibilities have changed over time. But I have been able to keep my hands off many aspects of the operation of the group, such as planning and executing the socials. I’ve also made sure to share the “up-front” leadership. I’ve encouraged women to join the men in visible leadership roles to provide female role models for the other women.

Ideally a planning team is composed of five to eight open-minded, positive, and committed Christians, but you can probably start with three good souls. If possible, they should be busy singles with careers. These responsible leaders know how to get things done, and they draw other singles to the group.

In our tentative efforts, we discovered a beautiful thing: The only way a singles group will grow is through the networking singles do in their communities, workplaces, and circles of friends. Once our small nucleus caught a spark of excitement and began to share a sense of ownership, the potential group contacts increased greatly. And with greater contacts come additional resources, creativity, and respectability.

Shared ownership was our first step toward effective singles ministry. We found we couldn’t treat a singles group like a youth group. Youth need sponsors, lots of direction, and limited responsibility. Adults need and are ready to assume high levels of ownership and responsibility. Team ministry provides tremendous opportunities for growth, both in the team members’ lives and in the group itself.

 Make singles ministry a priority. In my first attempt, I tried to squeeze the group into the fringes of my schedule. This was a mistake. The singles felt squeezed.

My evenings were so filled with church events and meetings that any attempt to schedule a new social seemed impossible. In addition, I was in the habit of scheduling home visitation calls one to two weeks ahead. The singles’ needs and crises did not fit my orderly calendar. I finally realized something was wrong when I overheard one single say to another, “He might be able to help you, but you will be lucky if you can catch him. I usually feel guilty asking him to take time for me.”

Singles ministry does take time, lots of it. The singles had questions needing answers and crises demanding responses. Planning meetings, discussion meetings, socials, and preparation were all time consuming. So the second time I made it a priority in my ministry.

That was tough. To squeeze the time, I had to abandon our struggling college program, and that was not my most popular decision. When college students would visit the church and ask, “What activities do you have for us?” I felt guilty telling them we had nothing.

But I had to decide where to pump my efforts, and singles seemed to offer the best possibility of return on those efforts.

Making singles ministry a priority did contain a pleasant surprise. My priorities communicated something vital to the singles: their worth. Most of our singles had felt strongly at some time that they were unimportant to someone (namely, the ex or the unrequited love). In making them our church’s priority, we were in effect telling them they were important.

The wonderful result was that they, in turn, decided to make the group a priority in their lives. Priorities are contagious.

 Focus on discussion meetings, not socials. We began by centering the group around social events. I presumed that since our church already sponsored many study groups, what singles needed most was social opportunities. Once a month seemed sufficient.

Our first get-together was fun and well-attended. The second social, an outing to a theater, maintained fair attendance. A dinner party the next month was fun but lost money. A trip up the coast to Hearst Castle was the final straw. Although eight signed up for the trip, only two showed. The empty space in our fifteen-passenger van made me painfully aware that our singles ministry was not growing. Even more troubling was the feeling that little actual ministry was taking place. I felt more like a recreation leader than a minister.

Finally we concluded that socials were simply not enough. While it was true that our church offered many fine learning opportunities, singles needed a place of their own to discuss issues unique to them. Socials didn’t provide the substance needed for Christian growth, and they lacked the consistency needed to form a group identity.

In our second effort, we decided to anchor the group with a weekly discussion meeting. Other groups have tried meeting less frequently, but few have found it successful. Infrequent meetings make it difficult to develop momentum or form friendships, and nearly impossible to remember meeting dates. I was surprised to learn that many singles do not live by pocket calendars. They can remember “every Tuesday” or “every Sunday,” but “every third Wednesday” is just too difficult.

Furthermore, with weekly meetings they are less likely to allow schedule conflicts to occur. Not all singles will make every meeting, but at least they will not be confused as to which night or which week the group is meeting.

Our group has found Sunday morning the best time for the discussion meeting. It conflicts with few social and work schedules, and people can attend worship after the meeting. Other groups find a midweek evening most workable. But whatever the planning team decides regarding time or day, the every-week schedule is crucial. Anything less will hamper the ministry.

We found meetings work best with a discussion format rather than a lecture or classroom model. Singles have a lot of acquired wisdom-“tribal knowledge” they can use to help one another-and they have a need to express their opinions and feelings.

We usually start with a provocative question about a topic relevant to singles to break the ice. For instance, when our topic was “change,” I asked, “What is the biggest change or the most difficult change you have had to deal with lately?” Then I had the group break into circles of four or five to discuss the question. Another time I had each person turn to another to discuss an instance in which they felt left out by being a single.

After this initial small-group discussion we’ll reassemble. I ask, “Who would like to share?” I usually don’t have to wait long for volunteers. Then I may introduce the topic and lead the singles in a large-group discussion. Finally we break into groups again to deal with specific questions that focus on biblical material and how it applies to their lives. We often give specific passages to read and discuss.

In this manner we’ve covered topics like sexuality, the right to remarry, dealing with conflict, the need for forgiveness, our search for intimacy, and our use of power. Our group is usually ready to tackle about any subject as long as it is relevant and people’s opinions are treated with respect.

We still have socials once or twice a month. Orchestra performances, theater nights, picnics, beach trips, costume parties, dinners, softball, and volleyball have gone over well. These complement our discussion meetings, but they aren’t our major focus.

 Meet off the church grounds. This strategy item usually gives church folks the most trouble. After all, since we’ve got this great building, why pay for rental space?

Because many singles are afraid of churches.

Negative feelings abound due to poor childhood experiences or bad experiences during separations or divorces. I ask older Christians to imagine how they would feel attending a punk rock concert. That gives them an idea how many singles feel about attending church: they fear they will not fit in or find people like themselves. Whatever the reason, some singles are hesitant to enter a church building to attend a singles group.

The best solution is to meet away from the church facilities. Such a meeting place provides an informal, nonthreatening setting that serves as a bridge to the church-a bridge that many of our singles have used.

Of course, there are problems with renting meeting space. It costs money. It creates childcare difficulties. It means we must cart our coffee, chalkboards, and other materials back and forth each week. It means a lot of extra work. But it’s worth it. Many of our singles have told me they would not have come to our group had it been held on church property.

Initially, the only place we could find to rent was the cocktail lounge at a local restaurant. Not many people frequent bars on Sunday mornings, so the manager gave us a deal. It worked great.

The group pays for itself. When we pass a basket during the discussion time, I’ll say, “If this is your first time with us, you’re our guest; we don’t expect you to pay anything. But if you’re brave enough to come back a second time, we’d like you to help support what we’re doing!”

The lounge charged us $2.50 a person, and that included coffee and a sweet roll. Now in a recreation center, we can rent the facility, provide coffee and doughnuts, and cover our advertising and program expenses for $2.00 a head. That’s affordable, and besides, singles usually have money for what they really want.

I was surprised to learn that meeting in a lounge made advertising easier. The singles in town knew their way to the Howard Johnson’s cocktail lounge! What’s more, they felt comfortable there. It was not unfamiliar turf for many.

Theologically, I loved it. There was a kind of missionary feeling to it; we were bringing the Good News of God’s love for single adults right into their territory. Eventually as we grew in numbers, we had to leave the bar and rent a local auditorium. Oddly, I wish there were a bigger bar in town that we could rent.

 Advertise well. Our first grand fiasco in singles ministry was advertised only through the church newsletter and bulletin. Of course, then only church people knew about the group.

For our second attempt we decided to advertise to the local community. This is probably the one thing we have done best, and it continues to pay off. As we began to use the many community advertising resources, a whole stream of singles came to us.

Our local newspaper publishes church information and special events at no cost. We send announcements of our group’s topic, time, and meeting place each week, and every Friday they appear on the religion page. Many singles have come to us because of this news item.

Other great publicity outlets included radio stations that played public service announcements, and other organizations such as ski clubs that printed our publicity in newsletters or posted it at meeting places.

We printed thousands of business cards for group members to pass along to their friends or acquaintances. Handing out a business card is a familiar practice, easily commandeered for our publicity purposes. Sometimes the cards passed through three or four hands before a person actually attended. Hand-to-hand publicity was complemented by word-of-mouth promotion through the singles’ grapevine.

The point is that the word got to where the singles are found. We discovered hundreds of interested men and women in our community who wanted to find a group like ours.

. . . Try, Try Again

After our first failure, I was afraid to try again. But I’m glad now that we did. Almost in spite of ourselves, a vibrant ministry has developed. It’s now an important part of our community, our church, and my own life.

Jim would say so, too. Having grown up in a rather formal church, he decided at eighteen that it wasn’t relevant and dropped out. He got married. Then he got divorced. He read in the paper about an activity we were having, so looking for friends to ease his loneliness, he came.

On his way out, Jim said, “Hey, this was great: nice people who like to have fun too!” The next week he began coming to our Sunday morning meetings. It took him a while to figure out that no one else was using swear words during our discussion times, but the lessons began to sink in. He became caught up in the discussions; he felt they related to his life.

After a few weeks he got up the nerve to attend church with us. It was his first time in twenty years. Within about three months, Jim had become a Christian and an important part of our group. We’ve often heard him say, “This singles group is the best thing that has happened to me in my adult life.”

We’re ordinary people in an ordinary church without a big budget or a vast pool of saintly singles from which to draw-yet singles ministry is working for us. And that has happened with only a handful of people willing to assume a small degree of leadership.

Even when the largest resource is a previous wealth of mistakes, ministry can blossom.

Rick Stedman is associate minister of First Christian Church in Thousand Oaks, California.

 

Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Sex Ed for Grownups

Christians who once fondly admired Surgeon General Everrett Koop are upset about his anti-AIDS sex education policy (CT, Apr. 3, p. 34). Their primary concern is legitimate: Does teaching sex in public schools attach inappropriate values to otherwise technical information?

In measuring the prospects of avoiding non-Christian values in public school sex education, we feel a bit like Blaise Pascal as he remarked during his struggle to affirm the existence of God: “Seeing too much to deny and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state.” We are assured by the fact that historically, public schools have augmented Christian values such as honesty, fair play, hard work, and commitment. Perhaps the same could even be true of the schools’ treatment of sexual values as well.

Yet evidence suggests public school support of Christian values has slipped drastically in recent decades. The track record on sex education is even more dismal. From our point of view, sex education has not been successfully taught in public schools.

So we are left with the question of how to teach children about sex—a question exacerbated by the alarming truth about AIDS.

The surgeon general’s recommendations regarding sex education are good ones. Christian values are not compromised, and may even be promoted. But much additional work must be done by Christians to clinch the positive identification of Christian values to sex education.

First, those values must be taught even more forcefully in our homes. If the school’s specialization should be technical information, it is up to Christian parents to attach the proper values. The surgeon general’s call may not be the ideal solution. But if, as in this case, the law is powerless to insert Christian values into the sexed curriculum, then we must support the next best thing: parents teaching their children about God’s gift of sexuality.

Second, the church must play an equally active role. But the focus of our church sex-education programs should be aimed not so much at the children of our churches, but at the adults. After all, we don’t need to turn our Sunday schools into factions competing with sex-education classes at school. Nor should the church be required to do what the parents have neglected to do (although the church can certainly support and augment the parental role). Instead, the church should teach parents how to talk with their children about sex; how to create a comfortable atmosphere in the home that promotes good learning.

As schools try to combat AIDS by teaching children about sex, the value-laden voice of Christian families and churches must be raised. Contrary to his critics, such a voice will not be disharmonious with Surgeon General Koop’s programs. But it is the only thing that can elevate the lessons of the perfunctory classroom lecture to the realm of love and grace—the arena where sex blooms and flowers.

By Terry Muck.

Work over Welfare

One lawmaker with a strong interest in revamping our approach to helping the poor is Sen. Paul Simon, Democrat from Illinois. Earlier this year, his book Putting America Back to Work was released, and in March he introduced legislation that outlines a Guaranteed Job Opportunity Program to help the unemployed without putting them on welfare. Simon, a five-term member of Congress and the son of a Lutheran minister, recently talked with CHRISTIANITY TODAY about the theological roots of his concerns.

As a Christian, is your public service concern for the poor different from that of a politician who addresses these issues from a secular perspective?

My parents gave me a scriptural base for my concern. My father took Matthew 25 very seriously—“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.” I can’t say that my perspective is dramatically different from someone of the Jewish faith who hears, in Isaiah and Amos, the same admonitions to be concerned about the poor.

The churches used to talk about the “worthy poor”—those who deserve to be helped. Then, in the sixties and seventies, God’s free grace was emphasized. Are we turning back to requiring people to deserve what they get? Is this theologically sound?

The concept of grace applies to the process of salvation rather than to our application of faith to life. It is proper to encourage people to work. But I don’t like the phrase “worthy poor.” That has a basically untheological premise to it. I don’t know that you can speak about worthy poor and unworthy poor any more than you can about worthy rich or unworthy rich.

Some people think that if we leave the poor alone, they will be forced to learn responsibility. Do you agree?

The difficulty with that argument is that in fact you deprive people of years of their lives. It is very interesting that when social security was passed, half a century ago, the average American lived to be 58 years old. We now live to be 74.5 years old. Through a series of changes—primarily through leadership by the government, but also by the government and the private sector working together—we have made our air and water cleaner, we have pursued medical research, we have done a great many things to lengthen life.

One of those changes, for example, is food stamps. Now I recognize food stamps are not particularly popular, but they have improved the nutritional base of the poor tremendously, and that has added to life. To deny people these things really does something, at least from my perspective, that is not in line with Christian thinking.

You don’t think that safety-net programs keep people from taking responsibility themselves?

I don’t know very many unemployed people or people on welfare who wouldn’t much prefer to be working. It is one thing to give pious sermons about taking responsibility; it is another thing to see that an opportunity is there.

We have 23 million functionally illiterate adult Americans. It becomes very tough to get a job when you can’t read and write. We have a lot of citizens who can’t speak English. That becomes very tough. If you’re handicapped, it’s tough to find work. I just saw statistics for employable blacks with disabilities. Their unemployment rate is 82 percent! You can’t just say, “You be responsible; you go out and get a job.” It becomes almost impossible for many of these people.

That’s where your Guaranteed Job Opportunity Program comes in.

Yes, and it would apply not only to those on welfare. One of the mistakes we make is that we don’t help people until they become paupers. Under my program, if you’re out of work five weeks, you would be eligible for assistance, for a temporary job, four days a week. The fifth day, you have to get out and try and find a job in the private sector.

If poverty cannot be eliminated, how can we Christians know when we’ve done enough to fight it?

It cannot be eliminated any more than murder can be eliminated or disease can be eliminated. But I don’t want to set a point where we say we’ve done enough to stop disease or murder. We keep assaulting the problems. I would add that it’s pretty hard to read the prophet Amos, for example, and believe he would not be standing up and saying we ought to be more responsible in being of assistance and giving opportunity to the less fortunate among us.

By LaVonne Neff, a free-lance writer and editor living in Downers Grove, Ill.

Russia’s “Gift” To The West

Soviet poet Irina Ratushinskaya, 33, spent four years in labor camps, much of the time alone in cold, damp cells. Though ordered not to write poetry, she scratched out verses with matchsticks on bars of soap, committing the verses to memory before washing them away. In all, she memorized some 300 poems.

Ratushinskaya was released last October, two days prior to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. She regards herself as a gift to the West.

Recently she addressed an audience at Wheaton (Ill.) College. Mark Elliot, director of the college’s Institute for the Study of Christianity and Marxism, noted that in Russia writers are revered, much like sports heroes in this country.

Elliot said U.S. sports writers trivialize the meaning of courage “as they speak of injured players courageously stepping to the … scrimmage line. But how can we compare the foam-padded bravery it takes for a superstar to face six-and seven-figure contracts … with the reckless integrity of character it takes to face imprisonment for writing … the unvarnished truth?”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY talked with Ratushinskaya about her faith and her native land.

How long have you been a believer?

I turned to God as a little girl. After our lessons our teachers wanted us to sit still for two hours more and listen to antireligious propaganda: “God does not exist.” It was the first time I didn’t believe my teachers. I wondered why grownups speak so much about those things which do not exist.

How did your faith sustain you when you were in prison?

I knew they would try to break me, to ridicule me. I expected hunger and cold. I did not know if I could go through this without denying my faith. I could not have succeeded without God’s help. People prayed for me. Sometimes I felt it, physically, although it sounds strange because I was alone. All of a sudden I felt warmth and joy. And I knew someone was praying for me.

What would your advice be to a friend facing Soviet imprisonment?

I would say to this friend, “The only way not to lose your dignity is not to obey the KGB’s idiotic orders. Never say or write something you disagree with. And always remember that, however bad your circumstances, other people are going through worse. When you help others you forget your own hardships.”

What can ordinary Soviet citizens do to change the system?

Most of our people don’t have communist ideas. We are tired of such life, tired of promises. We see we are not free. It is hard for Westerners to understand a society where people, from childhood to old years, are forced to lie, are afraid to speak freely, are afraid to trust even their relatives. People know if they protest someone sent to a labor camp, they will be sent to labor camps themselves. Changes will occur only when the people find within themselves the strength not to be afraid and not to obey orders blindly.

What is your evaluation of the new Soviet policy of glasnost, or openness?

The changes are more in newspapers and TV than in the lives of Soviet people. Many more prisoners of conscience are still behind bars than have been released. There have been more promises than facts. But I don’t want to forecast the future. I want freedom for my people, and I hope the day will come.

What is your opinion of official visits U.S. Christians make to the Soviet Union?

I don’t know why, but the West usually leaves the KGB the choice of who participates in these visits. These visits don’t allow foreigners to speak freely with Russian people. It is a very good thing to exchange believers. But why not speak with those believers who have been through all the hardships and didn’t deny their faith?

My Lord, what can I say that’s not been said?

I stand beneath your wind in a burlap hood.

Between your breath and pitch-dark plague-dark cloud—

Oh Lord, my God!

At my interrogation, what will I say

If forced to speak, to face the country’s way—

Deaf, mute, in the body’s rags, bruised nearly dead—

Oh Lord, my God!

How will you dare to judge?

Which law is true?

What will you say when I come, at last burst through—

Stand, my shoulder proppedm against the glass wall—

And look at you,

And ask nothing at all.

—Irina Ratushinskaya

Translated by White Hadas and Ilya Nykii

North American Scene from June 12, 1987

OBITUARY

Cornelius Van Til

Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til, 91, professor emeritus of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, died April 17 following a lengthy illness.

Van Til, who was born in the Netherlands, emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 10. Although he held degrees from Calvin College, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Princeton University, Van Til said studying “was not easy.… Having grown up on the farm [near Highland, Ind.], I was used to weeding onions and carrots and cabbages. It was hard to adjust to classroom work.…”

He pastored a Christian Reformed Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, in 1927 and 1928, and taught apologetics at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1928 and 1929. He served as professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary from 1929 until he retired in 1972. His published writings include The New Modernism; The Defense of the Faith; and Christianity and Barthianism (all published by Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Co.).

Van Til is perhaps best known for his development of a new approach to the task of defending the Christian faith. He focused his apologetic on the role of presuppositions; the point of contact between believers and unbelievers; and the antithesis between Christian and non-Christian world views. Two of his best-known students are Carl F. H. Henry, former editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and the late Francis A. Schaeffer, whose books popularized some of Van Til’s ideas.

NATIONWIDE

Record Prison Population

The number of inmates in federal and state prisons reached a record high last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Since 1980, the prison population has increased by 66 percent, to a total of 546,659. The increase for last year was 8.6 percent, the highest annual increase since 1982.

The number of women inmates has grown at a faster rate than the number of men, with a current female prison population of 26,610. Seventeen states reported they are holding prisoners in local jails because of prison overcrowding. State correctional institutions are estimated to be operating at between 106 percent and 124 percent of their capacities, with federal prisons operating at 127 percent to 159 percent of their capacities.

TRENDS

Declining Divorce Rate

The nation’s divorce rate fell to 4.8 per 1,000 people last year, dropping to the lowest level since 1975.

Jeanne E. Moorman, of the U.S. Census Bureau, cited two trends as possible causes of the recent leveling of the divorce rate: couples are older when they first marry; and social attitudes toward maintaining marriages are changing. “There seems to have been a period when divorce was the easiest answer,” Moorman said. “Now there is more of a feeling that people should try harder, should work more at it. Marriage is important, and we should not be giving up so easily.”

In addition, she said, “marriages that occur later seem to be more stable marriages, and the consequence is the stabilizing of divorce rates.”

In a study published earlier this year, Moorman and fellow statistician Arthur J. Norton found that divorce was most likely for women who first marry while still in their teens and for those who give birth within seven months of marriage.

NOMINATED

Eastern College President

Roberta Hestenes, director of Christian formation and discipleship at Fuller Theological Seminary, has been named president-elect of Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Hestenes is the first non-Baptist to be nominated as president of the college, which is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches U.S.A. When she assumes the post in August, she will also become the first woman to head an evangelical liberal arts college in the United States.

In a related development, Robert Campbell, general secretary of the 1.5 million-member American Baptist Churches, was named president-elect of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Previously both the seminary and the college were headed by Robert Seiple, who is leaving to become president of World Vision U.S.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Appointed: Ronald J. Sider, as executive director of two related organizations: Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA,) a nonprofit educational group, and JustLife, a political action committee. He replaces Bill Kallio at ESA and Jack Smalligan at JustLife, both of whom will resign in September. Sider said he sees his new posts as an opportunity to “pull together a critical mass of Christian leadership in a sane, balanced, biblically consistent prolife attempt to influence public policy.” He will continue as professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Died: J. Edwin Orr, 73, president of the Los Angeles-based Oxford Association for Research in Revival, professor emeritus of the history of awakenings at Fuller Theological Seminary, and a recognized authority on revival and spiritual awakenings; of a heart attack, April 22, in Asheville, North Carolina.

Ordered : Effective July 1, all foster-care agencies that do business with New York City must begin providing contraception and abortion services in group foster homes. The order, upheld last month by a federal district court judge, includes foster homes run by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. John Cardinal O’Connor has said repeatedly that he will withdraw 2,500 beds from the foster-care system if the archdiocese is forced to provide family-planning services.

World Scene from June 12, 1987

THE NETHERLANDS

Euthanasia Gains Ground

Voluntary euthanasia causes the deaths of an estimated 5,000 people each year in the Netherlands, the highest figure of any European country, according to the Associated Press.

Dutch law sets a 12-year maximum prison sentence for euthanasia. But in recent years courts have passed only suspended sentences on doctors who follow mercy-killing criteria adopted by the Royal Dutch Medical Association. Those criteria allow mercy killing by a physician at a patient’s “well-considered” request in cases of “unacceptable suffering.”

The government of Premier Ruud Lubbers plans to submit legislation this year that would legalize voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill patients suffering unbearable pain, if physicians and family members agree. An opinion poll commissioned by a Roman Catholic broadcasting station found that 76 percent of the Dutch population favors limited legalization of mercy killing.

WORLDWIDE

Increased Food Supply

The worldwide food supply has increased for the second consecutive year, according to Food Outlook, a publication of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO.)

“The ‘1986 cereal output is a record,” the report states, “[and] cereal stocks will rise sharply in 1986–87 for the third consecutive year.” Contributing to the increased production of cereals is a 2 percent rise in aggregate food output in developing countries, where poverty and hunger are the greatest.

“Nine of the [African] countries which suffered profoundly from the hunger crisis are expected to have a 4 percent increase over last year’s record harvest,” said Robert Parham, director of hunger concerns for the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission. Ethiopia’s crop yields are projected to be 40 percent higher than in 1984 and 1985, but still below predrought levels. In addition, the FAO report warned that harvests are threatened in Africa and parts of Asia by infestations of locusts and grasshoppers.

“Despite the increased food supply, an estimated 730 million people around the world remain hungry each day,” said Parham. “Increased productivity does not necessarily mean increased availability.”

ARGENTINA

Legalized Divorce

Argentina’s Senate last month adopted legislation legalizing divorce and remarriage in the predominantly Roman Catholic country. The nation’s House of Deputies had already approved the legislation.

Last year, Argentina’s Supreme Court struck down a provision in the marriage laws that barred persons from remarrying while their original spouses were alive (CT, Jan. 16, 1987, p. 58). Argentina had been one of only seven countries that prohibit divorce.

The new law will allow divorce by mutual consent after a couple has been separated at least one year. Divorce at the request of one marriage partner will be possible after a separation of at least three years. Public opinion polls indicate that at least 70 percent of the Argentine population favors legalized divorce.

WORLDWIDE

More Methodists

Methodist churches around the world have grown by nearly 5 percent since 1981, according to the World Methodist Handbook.

The handbook, published by the World Methodist Council, says there are some 54 million Methodists around the world. That figure includes the membership of the 298 World Methodist Council-member bodies, as well as Methodist churches outside the council. The largest membership gain was reported in Africa, up almost 23 percent since 1981. North American membership increased about 1.7 percent. In contrast, Pacific region churches dropped about 21 percent, and European Methodist churches reported a loss of nearly 8 percent.

MEXICO

Religious Strife

Three people who were pursuing membership in a Baptist mission have been killed in the mountain village of Santiago Atitlan Mixe in southern Mexico, according to Baptist Press. Several members of the Baptist mission have fled the village.

A newspaper in Oaxaca, the state capital, said the killings were “at the hands of the municipal authorities” of Santiago Atitlan Mixe. Government authorities in Oaxaca said the persons responsible for the killings would be punished.

Religious strife in the village began in late March when police entered a Bible study meeting and arrested Mexican Baptist missionary Esteban Lorenzo and several members of the mission. Lorenzo was released from custody in April after being beaten and forced to sign a document stating he would never return to the village. No formal charges have been brought against the others arrested. The Oaxaca newspaper reported that 28 adults and 11 children are in Mexican jails because of religious persecution.

GREECE

Winning One, Losing One

The Greek Parliament has dropped a legislative effort to give the government a voice in appointing members to councils of the Greek Orthodox Church (CT, May 15, 1987, p. 56). But it stood by a decision to take over some 370,000 acres of forest and agricultural land owned by Greek Orthodox monasteries and convents.

That move was opposed by the church and by World Council of Churches General Secretary Emilio Castro. Greece’s Socialist government said it will turn the land over to agricultural cooperatives.

Ideas

Submitting to Freedom

Philip Yancey

Columnist; Contributor

The Book of Hosea is about adultery; no one who reads it can avoid that. Hosea’s wife, the adulteress named Gomer, reinforces the verbal message by graphically reenacting the story of Israel’s infidelity to God.

Yet, mysteriously, three-fourths of the way through the Book of Hosea there appears a remarkable passage on parenthood. For 10 chapters God has likened Israel to a woman who first wed him and then sold herself to other lovers. He expressed the jealousy and rage and hurt of a wounded lover. But in chapter 11 the tone dramatically shifts.

“When Israel was a child, I loved him,

and out of Egypt I called my son.…

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,

taking them by the arms;

but they did not realize

it was I who healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness,

with ties of love;

I lifted the yoke from their neck

and bent down to feed them.”

An image leaps into my mind from a videocassette of a young girl learning to walk. The mother is on her knees, coaxing forward her young daughter, who has both hands extended and is rocking perilously from side to side. The camera lurches wildly in the father’s excitement. Both parents are grinning from ear to ear. Their daughter can walk! They play the tape over and over.

Like that, like a doting parent, God taught his people to walk. He expresses a feeling of nostalgia in this passage from Hosea, recalling the joy of parenthood. “How can I give you up, Ephraim?” he suddenly cries out in a stab of pain. “How can I hand you over, Israel?” His heart is changed within him; his compassion is aroused.

What can account for this tender passage in the midst of an adult story of seamy prostitution? God is borrowing from the two deepest human relationships, parenthood and marriage, to express his profound feelings for his people. As I puzzled over the extraordinary mixing of these images in Hosea, I settled on one word, dependence, as the key—the key to what they have in common and the key to how they differ.

For a child, dependence defines the relationship. A baby depends on parents to meet every need, and parents learn to perform distasteful chores—staying up all night, cleaning up vomit, teaching toilet training—for they sense the child’s dependence, and they love the child. With no parent to care for her, the child will die.

But such a pattern must not last forever; a good parent gradually nudges the child from dependence toward independence. My friends taught their daughter to walk, rather than pushing her around in a large carriage for life, although they knew full well she might one day walk away from them. Some parents, sadly, fail this test. I know a mother who keeps her 37-year-old son at home; she pockets his paycheck at the end of each week and insists that he ask her permission to go out. Anyone can sense their lack of health. In parenthood, dependence should flow toward freedom.

Lovers reverse the flow. A lover possesses freedom and yet chooses to give it away. “Submit to one another,” says the Bible, and any couple can tell you that’s an apt description of the day-to-day process of getting along.

The romanticist Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this in a sonnet just before her marriage to Robert:

And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword

To one who lifts him from the bloody earth—

Even so, Beloved, I at last record,

Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,

I rise above abasement at the word.

Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth.

In a healthy marriage, one submits to the other voluntarily, out of love. In an unhealthy marriage, submission becomes part of a power struggle, a tug-of-war between competing egos.

God grieves in Hosea because Israel had disrupted the flow of dependence in both relationships, as a child and as a lover. God had nurtured Israel in the wilderness in order to bring her to adulthood and the freedom of the Promised Land.

But she seized that freedom and like a rebellious child—like Gomer—flouted it by running away from God. She never learned the meaning of marriage; she never learned to give herself voluntarily, in love, to God.

Looking back, the apostle Paul saw the entire history of Israel as a progression from childish dependence to freedom. (The law was a “schoolmaster to lead us to Christ,” he said in Galatians, and, a few chapters later, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”) The nation of Israel never learned to handle freedom, and Hosea records the deep sadness of God who wanted a lover, but found only a child. God had to revert to the method of a parent: punishment.

The pattern of dependence can, I think, teach us much about God’s design for the human race. As I read Hosea and its striking mixed metaphors, I had to examine my own life.

Do I prefer the comfort of a “childish” relationship with God? Do I cling to legalism as a form of security, and a delusive way of getting God to “like me better”?

Is my love for God conditional, like a child’s? If things go poorly, do I want to run away, or yell “I hate you!”? Or is it more like a marriage partner’s—the old-fashioned kind of marriage, in sickness or in health, for better or for worse, till death us do part (or, in this case, till death us do join)?

The progression in the Bible, and especially in Hosea and its mixture of images, teaches me what kind of love God desires from me: not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but rather the mature, freely given love of a lover. Although both loves express a form of dependence, there is a vital difference between the two—the difference between parenthood and marriage, between law and Spirit.

Philip Yancey: A Philip Yancey column that ran from 1985 to 2009

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