Shall We Scrap the Sermon?

Beginning in this issue and continuing hereafter in the first issue of every month, CHRISTIANITY TODAYwill feature The Minister’s Workshop, dedicated to helping the clergy in sermon preparation. This section will alternate essays by Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood, dean of American homileticians and professor emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary, and Dr. Paul S. Rees, whose World Vision ministry to Christian workers has reached around the Free World. The feature will include abridgments of expository-topical sermons, outlines of significant sermons preached by leading ministers, and notable quotations (sometimes quotable) from the secular and religious press.—ED.

Sometime ago a writer in the Christian Herald contended that the minister’s 20-minute talk on the Lord’s Day is futile. This isn’t a day when people listen closely to pulpit discourses. The sermon could be scrapped, he suggested wryly, without doing any great damage to the Sunday worship service.

No one would be so foolhardy as to say that sermons are popular in these times, nor that some sermons would find an unhappy ending in File 13. However, the unpopularity of the sermon as such is not confined to our day. “Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon,” said Sidney Smith more than a century ago.

It might be rather distressing for a clergyman to consider that the word “preacher” appears but four times in the New Testament (King James Version); and in some versions and translations it appears less often. The word “sermon” does not occur in Sacred Writ. Yet, the primary business of the minister is preaching. In fact preaching, from a biblical viewpoint, is about as big a subject as prayer; it is probably bigger than teaching. The Gospels and Epistles assign it more stress than divine worship.

Jesus spoke in no uncertain tone: “Go, preach! Over and over the New Testament endorses this order. The theme of preaching is clearly set forth—Christ is to be preached, the Word, the Gospel, the Kingdom, the Cross.

Take from the Scriptures all the preachers, and their sermons whole and fragmentary, and you will thin the Book considerably. Noah and Nehemiah were preachers; so were the prophets. What Jesus said on the mount is a sermon—like it or not. What was Peter doing at Pentecost, Paul on Mars Hills, Phillip in Samaria? Were not the church fathers preachers?

“How shall they hear without a preacher?” demanded Paul. That seems a fair question? Will they hear through opera, the theatre, movies, television, novels? Will ritual alone give them the Gospel? Will science show them Christ, or sports bring in the Kingdom?

Paul puts a further question—“How shall they preach except they be sent?” Perhaps here is the high point of the matter. Perhaps not enough men are sent! Too many went—on their own accord. But the burning that filled the bones of Jeremiah was missing; no “woe” rang in their souls, as it rang in Paul’s. No judgment sat on the preacher’s tongue; no passion cried in his face; the look of the Lord was not in his eyes. He was a “minister,” a sermon-maker, a definer rather than a proclaimer. He was a philosopher, a poet, an orator, a scientist; but not a herald of heaven. The authority was missing, and the bugle of the Eternal.

The sermon is no longer important? Preaching is passé? What could Jesus have possibly meant when he ordered men to preach, and that he would be with them in that task, until the “end of the age”? Think of a world where no sermon had ever been preached? History would need to be altered so much! What if Moses, Amos, Jesus, and Peter had not spoken? Imagine having Paul, Savonarola, Luther, Wesley, Moody and Graham in a convention and saying to them, “Preaching is futile; sermons are outmoded!”

They changed social structures, shattered tyrannies, set the masses free from slavery and superstition, by preaching. Through the proclamation of the Word they saw millions of faces light up like a million neon-signs, faces once without a future in them. They witnessed hearts that had been bound to death rise triumphantly in life as Christ from a tomb. Tell that company that preaching was to be dropped on the refuse heap, to be replaced with only candle-burning, bell-ringing, “indirect” instructions, litanies and vespers? Or with youth centers for recreation, and ban-quests for the elders? With half a hundred committees, and unspirited “action” parleys?

“There was a man sent of God!” says the shining Chronicle. And some modern ministers will say, “What good is my 20-minute sermon on Sunday morning? All are bored. Many sleep!” Try telling that to John who came “to bear witness of the Light.” His was a strange dress, a stranger diet; his was a Judean boulder for a pulpit, a sky for a tabernacle, a muddy river for a baptistry. His messages were doubtless more than 20 minutes long. They were disturbing, and may have even sounded “dogmatic.” But somebody listened; everybody wasn’t bored, and few slept! But John was sent. He wasn’t a definer, he was a proclaimer. He had washed his soul in spiritual tides; through prayer he had confronted God; he had toughened his spirit through discipline. He harbored no thought of surrendering his granite pulpit for an “all-worship” service. Not even if angels lead the processionals and recessionals! He was resigned to the folly of the pulpit. He would deliver the sermon that was his death-knell. He would die in vast indignity, still in the holy office; but one thing he would know, when the final message was flung from his heart, when the deadly iron fell on his neck, that he was “a man sent from God … to bear witness to the Light.” Try telling him that your little 20-minute sermon is wasted on the desert air of spiritual eunni! Try telling him that a proper liturgy is more important than the proclaimed living Word of the living God!

Before we discard the sermon because of unresponsive congregations let’s have another look. We’ve heard a lot of the Judgment, justification by grace, and power of the Spirit wrapped up in some 20-minute talks! The Sermon on the Mount could be delivered in 20 minutes. You could preach Peter’s sermon at Pentecost in ten minutes. You wouldn’t need that long to give Paul’s message before Agrippa. One needs something more than time to proclaim God’s gospel; he needs the Spirit of truth. It wouldn’t take a pulpit giant to put together some of the sermons found in the New Testament. But they had something more than words. They had the Word, the sword of the Spirit. When he came to Corinth, Paul said that he came not with great expressions of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit’s dynamic, that men’s faith should stand in the power of God rather than in man’s knowledge. What he preached, he said, was Christ, and him crucified. And as for particular gifts and talents, Paul once said that he wasn’t much of a public speaker, at least in the eyes of some of his listeners. They dubbed him “contemptible.” But nearly 2,000 years later Time magazine said that Paul’s messages had in them “the bright ring of trumpets.”

“It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe,” said that preacher whose name is set among the stars. Preaching is not optional for messengers under orders. “Go, preach!”

African Fossil Called ‘Manlike’ And Dated 14 Million Years Old

A recent fossil discovery in Kenya, hailed as filling a “major gap in the story of human evolution,” mirrors afresh the tragic predicament of our scientific age.

First a word about the discovery. Two halves of the palate and a lower tooth of a primate hitherto unknown to science were unearthed in Kenya by British archaeologists Dr. and Mrs. L. S. B. Leakey. By applying the potassium-argon method of radioactivity dating to the encasing volcanic ash, the fossils have been pegged at an age of 14 million years. National Geographic Society, which sponsored the anthropologists and awarded them its coveted Hubbard medal, widely publicized the unearthing of “the fossil teeth of a unique creature with manlike characteristics.” The Society also quoted Dr. Leakey as saying “the fossil primate is emphatically not like man today. It would seem to be heading toward man, but it is not man.” He added that the creature seems to stand “between Proconsul and Zinjanthropus among primates, the order of mammals in which scientists include both man and apes.”

Every time field workers dig up a new batch of antique bones the secular press headlines the scientific assertion of “manlike” features. So the illusion is sustained that the essence of humanity lies primarily in anatomical structures whose similarity to animal forms narrows the distance between man and beasts.

Even a cursory reading of Genesis ought to set the interest in human origins on a sounder track. When man appears on earth, his distinguishing feature is his spiritual and moral likeness to God, not his physical likeness or unlikeness to the animals. The tragic story of human declension and destiny is tied up with the fact of man’s violated moral dignity. That tragedy is compounded in our day by the fact that on the one hand Free World science is struggling to maximize power against Communist agression, while on the other hand it offers little ideological resistance to the naturalistic evolutionary view of origins that undergirds dialectical materialism. This regrettable situation is now being compounded as huge government subsidies for scientific research enable speculative theorists simultaneously to promote their naturalistic evolutionary views.

The Gospel Of Anti-Rightism A New Ecclesiastical Fad

We could hardly believe it, but there it was—in the Methodist News press release for Arizona, Southern California and Hawaii. What surprised us was not its special attack on the national Christian Citizen committee, nor its attack on “right wingers” in general; indicting the political right coupled with silence about the left is, after all, standard headquarters formula in some denominations. The National Council of Churches reportedly employs a full-time staff member for answering right-wingers, but not left-wingers.

Our surprise was prompted by a statement by Dr. Grover Bagby, executive secretary of the Board of Education of the Southern California-Arizona Conference, discounting aspects of biblical Christianity along with radical political conservatism as quite irrelevant. On the edge of his attack on the Christian Citizen movement, Dr. Bagby disparages “ultra-conservative theological groups whose championship of the fundamentals of Christianity has long been confused with religiously irrelevant and dated features of the first century world view.”

It would help, of course, if Dr. Bagby indicated which of the historic Christian features he brushes aside in the name of modernity. One revealing element, we think, seems to characterize those who constantly attack the right wing (theological or political): they never face or meet its demand—on the basis of biblical theology—for transcendent principles and fixed truths.

Giant American Magazine Staggers At A Crossroads

A disquieting shock has come to American journalism. The Saturday Evening Post—which has appeared weekly since its birth in 1728 as Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette—has cut back from 52 to 45 issues a year as part of Curtis Publishing Company’s multimillion dollar cost reduction program provoked by staggering losses.

Once the Post was America’s richest and most widely read magazine. But television, travel, emergence of the paperbacks, and significant changes in the American home have transformed America’s magazine reading habits. For many readers the Post first started down skid row with its acceptance of alcoholic beverage advertising, a program the publishers are now extending also to the long-reigning Ladies’ Home Journal (established 1883), which has lost pre-eminence to McCall’s.

By concessions to the modern mood—reflected in the growing flux of ideas, the accommodation to pragmatic political philosophies lacking fixed principles, the widening latitude toward sex—many secular magazines now gain a temporary advantage but invite their eventual undoing. They cater to expanding appetites which they can satisfy only in a limited way. Magazines that nourish the interest of the beatniks are simply drumming up readership for Mad and Playboy while they alienate subscribers who still couple an awareness of cultural changes with respect for transcendent values and for truths that endure.

We’d like to see the Post enjoy a great comeback. America has plenty of room for a popular weekly magazine that mirrors and meets grassroots life at its best, that vindicates the highest in our national outlook, that gives heart to men and women in their sacrifices for freedom, and that invigorates each succeeding generation with wholesome purpose and participation.

American Christians Neglect 60,000 Students From Abroad

Is the church stressing a missions program abroad and “fumbling the ball” for outreach at home? J. Benjamin Schmoker of the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students recently startled missionary leaders with some sobering statistics.

Publicity for Russia’s Friendship University indicates that some 40,000 applications have already been received under the five-year fully financed plan for 16,000 students from underdeveloped nations. Meanwhile the United States has enrolled in her colleges approximately 60,000 students from abroad (as contrasted with only 9,000 in 1935).

Before World War II the program of bringing students to this country was essentially a responsibility assumed by the church. Today the secular trend has all but vitiated the church’s interest. A Stanford University study shows, for example, that 56 per cent of those coming to the U. S. for studies are Christians, but less than four per cent of these Christian students feel that they are finding Christian fellowship in the churches.

Fellowship entails communication. Sunday roast beef dinners are a beginning: but only a beginning. Americans may entertain and give to students from abroad: for understanding, they must also listen to them. To busy Americans, time for such fellowship is often sacrificially given, but no time can be better expended. These students are future leaders in many lands. Genuine interest expressed now can result in understanding communication on a national level at a later date. Even more important are spiritual results for Christ in this life and eternity.

In our complex society, few Christians will seize these opportunities unaided. The local church must give the vision; it must foster the contacts; it must encourage genuine Christian fellowship, vital in meaning. When possible, churches must work together to see that the need is met. International Students with headquarters in Washington, D. C., is one interdenominational agency assisting student nationals from other lands. American Christians and America’s churches are not without responsibility in this matter. “And the King shall … say …, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of … these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).

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