Home Male Dominance Clergymen My Father's Funeral
You could be forgiven for thinking that Jesus could have saved a lot of time and trouble if he had summarized the Sermon on the Mount by saying, 'Blessed are the Speechmakers'. But he didn't.
I heard an interview a few years ago on the London Christian radio station. The interview was with a man who had been a Sikh but was now a Christian. His comments stuck with me. He said that as a Sikh he belonged to a community and family where everyone interacted and supported one another. He said that if a couple were going through a bad patch it would be more than likely that their parents would take the children and leave the couple alone to sort things out without pressure. He had friends and family who looked after each other. He left it all to become a Christian. And when he became a Christian, what did he get? Meetings! Meetings, meetings and more meetings!! And of course at every meeting there'd be some guy giving a speech. When the meetings were over he'd go home alone without the benefit of the community he had left behind when he became a Christian.
This page is not a joke. It is very serious business indeed.
We have looked at the development of church structures, starting with the Constantinian hijacking. We have looked at self-organizing systems in Complexity. We have looked at male dominance from a theological perspective. We have looked at clergymen. All rather pessimistic reading and thinking.
Now we take an inside look at the training of clergymen. This is not from any profound research, it is from my personal experience. I attended one of the larger evangelical theological seminaries in the United States and one of the mandatory courses was Preaching Clinic. The professor was a preacher who was well-known on the circuit and much in demand. So, I expected some good stuff.
Wrong. What we got was how to give speeches. How to do rhetoric. We were taught many of the tricks. A sermon had to have three points with alliterate headings and alliterate sub-headings. Like Prescription, Preparation, Presentation, which might be a sermon on how to teach people to give a message in a specific situation where they would have only one opportunity. Something like: How to give a sermon in a prison. You figure out what the people need. That's prescription. You get ready to give it. That's preparation. Then you give it in a way that the audience won't forget. That's presentation. Now, I got these three alliterate points just by going to the dictionary and finding them. You can now do the same and come up with three alliterate sub-points. Then you flesh it out and - presto! - you've got a sermon. Start with some humour, preferably self-effacing humour to loosen up the congregation. Then you give the alliterate points. Then you finish with a poem or a quote from a hymn.
We were told to keep a file of all the sermons we preached with the places, dates and occasions. Then, moving from church to church as our careers developed, we could dig out the old sermons, update them as required and give them all over again. And if you really wanted to save yourself some effort you followed the church calendar. The church calendar would give you your sermon topics for almost half the year, thereby substantially cutting the time you needed for preparation - or thinking.
And this is most of what you need to make a career as a minister. If you get really good then you will usually get hired by a big city church and they will have a ministry team. This means you won't have to do much other than preach. You'll have assistants to do the pastoral work. Not a bad life after all. And you'll soon be asked to join various committees around town. Keep your nose clean. Promote yourself well. Take a sabbatical to get your D.Min (Doctor of Ministry) and there you are - a Reverend Doctor! And don't forget there's a pension.
We had to preach a couple of sermons for the professor. One of the students must have spent ages preparing his. He spoke for about thirty-five minutes and his topic was prayer. Not before or since have I heard anything that remotely approaches the quality of this student's message on prayer. We were all touched by it and we were all greatly appreciative. Not the professor, however. The professor absolutely rubbished the student preacher. Not for the content. The content wasn't mentioned. But for the form. No alliterate points. He spoke beyond the twenty to twenty-five minute limit. The professor was merciless.
When it was my turn, I played the game. I had three points beginning with O. And three sub-points beginning with D. I OverDosed him, OverDosed him, OverDosed him. The rest of the class knew what I was doing and watched with amusement. I had spent five minutes preparing the message, ten minutes saying it. And when I finished I thought the professor was going to walk up and kiss me! He loved it. Totally bogus.
The student who spoke on prayer? He didn't go into ministry. He was a very sensitive man and I think the professor's rubbishing that day drove him away. Which was a real loss.
But does our church preaching work? This is a real question and not to be brushed aside. Another course I took was communications. We looked at various models of communication and went through various role playing exercises. All quite useful. However, one thing that has stuck with me is the professor of the communications course telling us that church preaching was the second worst method for teaching or for changing attitudes. In fact, he said, it had been shown that preaching in church only reinforces the attitudes the congregation brought with them. Two people sitting side by side with opposing attitudes were more than likely to leave the service after listening to the sermon even more entrenched in their respective attitudes.
It was years later in London when I got an illustration of this. A well-known preacher had preached on and off in this church for more than twenty-five years. At prayer gathering one evening I was in a group with a retired professional man who had been in the church for all those twenty-five years receiving some of the best preaching available anywhere. There had been a particularly horrific murder a few days before and that was mentioned before we went to prayer. I just shook my head in disbelief when the retired professional prayed, 'Lord, please make sure these men are caught and punished'. After twenty-five years of Bible teaching his attitude was only that of the state and the media.
And the worst method? Hang a blanket between the preacher and the congregation! That way there's no eye contact and no feedback.
Preaching in the New Testament is preaching the gospel outside, not safely indoors rallying or entertaining the troops. Like Paul in Athens which you can read about in Acts chapter 17. I have seen this kind of preaching in London. Once at Piccadilly Circus I saw an African man wearing a business suit fearlessly preaching Christ all by himself with an open Bible in his hand. Sent shivers down my spine. That's preaching. We need more of that. Any Reverend Doctors want to try?