A Leadership cartoon a while back depicts a preacher showing a friend the pulpit of his magnificent cathedral. He gestures grandly at the organ pipes and stained glass and massive arches and says, “I love the home-field advantage.”
In the years since that cartoon, fewer and fewer preachers are finding much of a home-field advantage, in church or anywhere else.
If you’re hunting deer, you can’t shoot at rabbits. If you shoot at rabbits, you’ll never see a deer.
These days, preachers can’t assume loyal listeners. Preachers have to earn a hearing every time they speak. They have to compete with countless other media voices for the attention and allegiance of their hearers.
Stained-glass sermons have largely given way to street-level preaching. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Recently I’ve been working on a book about Billy Graham, the most listened to preacher in history—more than 80 million have heard him in person, hundreds of millions more via TV, satellite, radio, and film.
Billy learned his preaching at street level. In the 1930s, his early sermons were in jails and on the street corners of Tampa, Florida. Outdoor preaching was no picnic. He had to put up with sneering spectators or worse, such as the time he was punched by an enraged tavern keeper who considered an evangelist on the sidewalk bad for business.
Street-level preaching means communicating courageously and clearly. Another street-level preacher, Dwight L. Moody, put it this way: “A good many preachers say I am lowering the pulpit. I’m glad I am. I’m trying to get it down to the level of men’s hearts. If I wanted to hit Chicago, I would not put the cannon on top of this building and fire into the air. Too many preachers fire into the air.”
Likewise Billy, whose middle-of-the-night vision for a magazine of biblical conviction and social conscience spawned Christianity Today (and eventually led to the launch of Leadership), has been involved in all kinds of educational and ministry organizations. But his hallmark has always been his clear preaching and simple message: The world’s problem, and yours, is sin. Repent of your sin, accept Jesus as your savior, and you will be saved.
Over the years, Billy has been sorely criticized by some as “oversimplifying every issue,” but Billy is undeterred. He presses home his message with simple phrases: “The Bible says …” and “turn to Jesus.”
Historian Grant Wacker, writing in Christian Century, observed, “Clearly Graham himself, like most preachers, believes more than he says from the pulpit. But in the approaching darkness (or glorious light) of the end of history, there is, he insists, no time to trifle with subtleties or fuss about matters in dispute.
“The aim is as simple as it is profound: keep the big picture in view. Corny jokes, mispronounced words and butchered facts have harmed Graham’s reputation just about as much as they harmed Ronald Reagan’s or Lyndon Johnson’s before him—which is to say, except in Cambridge, Madison, and Berkeley, hardly any at all. Like most truly charismatic leaders, they all knew the power of a single, luminous vision that could organize the whole of experience.” Like a street light, street-level preaching’s big idea, in this case the transforming power of the gospel, illumines everything else.
I’m reminded of the observation, I think from German pastor Helmut Thielicke, that if you’re going to hunt deer, you can’t be shooting at rabbits. Because if you shoot at the rabbits along the way, you’ll never even see a deer.
This applies to street-level preaching, too.
I’ll give Thielicke the final word (from his book Between Heaven and Earth): “Every generation brings out particular emphases of the message, because every generation is sought out and met by God at different points, in different ways of putting the question, and in different needs. This is the reason why we cannot simply recite the famous old sermons in our pulpits, even though we know that Augustine or Luther or Wesley were far better preachers than we are. No, God wants to meet us on our streets. In our day, too, God wants to stand beside us and speak to us in our language.”
That’s our real home-field advantage.
Marshall Shelley is editor of Leadership.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
