To-day’s Great Opportunity for the Pulpit

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 34, 3 November 1928, Page 17

To-day’s Great Opportunity for the Pulpit

An American Preacher on Modern Needs

“It is pathetic to observe the number of preachers who commonly on Sunday speak religious pieces in the pulpit,’ utterly failing to establish real contact with the thinking or practical interests of their auditors. No bag of tricks can make a preacher, but if I were to pick out one simple matter of method that would come nearer to making a preacher than any other, it would be the one to which this paper is devoted.—Dr. Fosdick, in “ Harper’s Monthly Magazine.”

(( <g VERY sermon should have for its main, business the solving of fl some problem—a vital, important problem, puzzling minds, burdening consciences, distracting lives—and any sermon which fl thus does tackle a real problem, throw even a little light on it, and help some individuals practically to find their way through it, cannot be altogether uninteresting,” writes Dr. Harry E. Fosdick, America’s great preacher, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine. He adds :— “ Within a paragraph or two after a sermon has started, wide areas of any congregation ought to begin recognising that the preacher is tackling something of vital concern to them. He is handling a subject they are puzzled about, or a way of living they have dangerously experimented with, or an experience that has bewildered them, or a sin that has come periously near to wrecking them, or an igeal they have been trying to make real, or a need they have hot known how to meet. One way or another, they should see that he is engaged in a serious and practical endeavour to state fairly a problem which actually exists in their lives and then to throw what light on it he can. “ Any preacher who even with moderate skill is thus helping folk to solve their real problems is functioning. He never will lack an audience. He may have neither eloquence nor learning, but he is doing the one thing that is a preacher’s business. He is delivering the goods that the community has a right to expect from the pulpit as much as it has a right to expect shoes from a cobbler. And if any preacher is not doing this, even though he have at his disposal both erudition and oratory, he is not functioning at all. :■ “Many preachers, for example, indulge habitually in what they call expository sermons. They take a passage from Scripture and, proceeding on the assumption that the people attending church that morning are deeply codcerned about what the passage means, they spend their half-hour or more on historical exposition of the verse or chapter, ending with some appended practical application to the auditors. Could any procedure be more surely predestined to dullness and futility? “Who seriously supposes that, as a matter of fact, one in a hundred of the congregation cares, to start with, what Moses, Isaiah, Paul, or John meant in those special verses, or came to church deeply concerned about if? Nobody else who talks to the.public so assumes that the vital interests, of. the people are located in the meaning of words spoken two thousand years ago. “ Somehow or other, every other agency dealing with the public recognises that contact with the actual life of the auditor is the one place to begin. Only the preacher proceeds still upon the idea that folk come to church desperately anxious to discover what happened to the Jebusltes. The result is that folk less and less come to church at all. “ This does not mean that the Bible has either lost or lessened its value to the preacher. It means that preachers who pick out texts from the Bible and then proceed to give their historic settings, their logical meaning in the context, their place in the theology of the writer with a few prac-. tical reflections appended, are grossly misusing the Bible. “ The Scripture is an amazing compendium of experiments in human life under all sorts of conditions, from the desert to cosmopolitan Rome, and with all sorts of theories, from the scepticism of Ecclesiastes to the faith of John. It is incalculably rich in insight and illumination. It has light to shed on all sorts of human problems now and always. “What all the great writers of Scripture, however, were interested in was human living, and the modern preacher who honours them should start with that, should clearly visualise some real need, perplexity, sin, or desire in his auditors, and then should throw on the problem all the light he can find in the Scripture or anywhere else. No matter what one’s theory about the Bible is, this is the effective approach to preaching. The Bible is a searchlight, not so much intended to be looked at as to be thrown upon a shadowed spot.... ' \“ Week after week one sees topical preachers who turn their pulpits into platforms and their sermons into lectures, straining after some new, intriguing subject; and one knows that in private they are straining after some new, intriguing' ideas about it. One knows also that no living man can weekly produce first-hand, indepenfient, and valuable judgments on such an array' of diverse themes, covering the whole range of human life. And, deeper yet, one who listens to such preaching or reads it knows that the preacher is starting at the wrong end.

“He is thinking first of his ideas, original or acquired, when he should think first of his people. He is organising his sermon around the elucidation of his theme, whereas he should organise it around the endeavour to meet his people’s need.- He is starting with a subject whereas he should start with an object. His one businesses with the real problems of these individual people in his congregation. Nothing that he says on any subject, however wise and important, matters much unless it makes at the beginning vital contact with the practical life and daily thinking of the audience.”

After developing this theme Dr. Fosdick gives a practical example as follows:—

“When a preacher deals with joy, let us say, he ought to start not with joy in the fifth century B.C. nor with joy as a subject to be lectured on, but with the concrete difficulties in living joyfully that his people actually' experience. He should have in mind from the start their mistaken ideas of joy, their false attempts to get it, the causes of their joylessness, and their general problem of victorious and happy living in the face of life’s puzzling and sometimes terrific experiences.

“This is a real problem for everybody, and the sermon that throws light on it is -a real sermon. But that real sermon must do more than discuss joy—it must produce it. All powerful preaching is creative. It actually brings to pass in the lives of the congregation the thing it talks about. So to tackle the problems of joy that the whole congregation goes out more joyful than it came in—that is the mark, of a genuine sermon."

“As I watch some preachers,” Dr. Fosdick concludes in Harper's Monthly contribution, “swept off their feet by the demands of their own various organisations, falling under the spell of bigness, and rushing from one committee to another to put over some new scheme to enlarge the work or save the world, I do not wonder at the futility which so often besets them. They are doing everything except their chief business, for that lies inside individuals.

“In one sense, all good preaching and ail good public speaking of any kind must be individualistic—it must establish vital contact with individuals.

“ A man who on Sunday morning starts in to solve the economic question or the international question as though his people must have come that day of a purpose to hear him do it deserves almost any unpleasant thing that can happen to him. He may be a Ph.D. in psychology, but I doubt whether he knows enough about the way men’s minds do actually act to be a successful grocers’ assistant.

“His special business as a Christian preacher with economic and international questions is profound and vital, but in so far as he sticks to his last his Interest as a minister is distinct from anyone else’s and it calls for an approach of his own. The world’s economic and international situation is not alien to our personal problems. It invades them, shapes them in multitudinous ways; it undoes in us and around us much that the Christian should wish done and it does much that the Christian most should fight against.

“Let a preacher, therefore, start at the end of the problem where he belongs. Let him begin with the people in front of him, with what goes on inside of them because social conditions are as they are, with the economic and international reasons for many of their unchristian moods, tempers, ideas, and ideals, with their responsibilities and obligations in the matter, and in general with the tremendous stake which personal Christianity has in those powerful social forces which create the climate in' which it must either live or die.

“ Such preaching on social questions starts, as it should start, with the individuals immediately concerned, establishes contact with their lives, and has at least some faint chance of doing a real business on Sunday.

“ Every problem that the preacher faces thus leads back to one basic question: how well does he understand the thoughts and lives of his people? That he should know his Gospel goes without saying, but he may know it ever so well and yet fail to get it within reaching distance of anybody unless he intimately understands people and cares more than he cafes for anything else what is happening inside of them. “ Preaching is wrestling with individuals over questions of life and death, and until that idea of it commands a preacher’s mind and method, eloquence will avail him little and theology not at all.”