Page 3607 – Christianity Today (2024)

Pastors

Jamie Buckingham

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though old the thought
and oft exprest
‘Tis his at last
who says it best.
James Russell Lowell

A significant part of preaching to convince is the skill of making a sermon breathe life through illustrations. Paul borrowed from philosophers and prophets; Jesus drew heavily from the Old Testament writers. Some were credited and others not. How’s a preacher to know where to plant the verbal footnote? And what’s fair game to steal — credited or not?
Preachers are rightfully wary of signing their name on another’s illustration. No preacher wants to appear phony or unoriginal when worshipers recognize an unnamed source.
Jamie Buckingham, senior minister of Tabernacle Church in Melbourne, Florida, knows the value of the appropriated thought in his preaching and writing. He has also wrestled with the subtle distinction between a pirate and a parrot, between larceny and license.
The following chapter helps preachers draw the ethical distinction in their own sermons, so their illustrations convince their congregations of something greater than their preacher’s pilferage.

When I bought my Apple IIe Word Processor, I discovered the capabilities of split-screen programming. By pushing the right combination of buttons, I could look at two things simultaneously. The top, for instance, could show data typed in earlier, while the bottom remained blank.

I asked my instructor how this could be useful.

“It is used primarily for plagiarism,” he said candidly. “By putting someone else’s material on the top screen, you can then rewrite it.

“It’s done all the time,” he winked.

I thought of the mess Alex Haley got in when he was accused by an obscure writer of having stolen his material — word for word — to be used in Roots. Too bad Haley didn’t have a split screen.

I almost did the same thing with one of my earlier books. I copied material I thought was a taped interview but turned out to be material my secretary had copied from someone else’s book. Horrors!

Now my computer instructor tells me I’ll never have to face that problem again. With my split screen I can change just enough words that I never have to worry about going to jail.

But a question remains: Is it right?

It is the same question preachers face. For if plagiarism is an occasional problem for writers, it is a weekly problem for preachers.

For instance: Should pastors feel free to preach others’ sermons? If they do, must they give credit for them?

And what about telling stories they’ve heard other people tell — and taking credit for the stories themselves?

To a certain degree, all of us preach other people’s stuff. After all, as Solomon once said, there’s not much new under the sun. Besides, so many in the pulpit today have to preach far beyond what they are creatively equipped to do. Using other pastors’ sermons would be a great help. In fact, preaching sermons already preached by great pulpiteers would teach the rest of us a great deal about homiletics.

On the other hand, it makes me feel slightly uneasy to endorse something like this — which in many other realms would be considered plagiarism — without having a very good basis upon which I could do so.

Of course, in the strictest sense of the word, everyone plagiarizes. In fact, the preceding paragraph was plagiarized from the letter written me by Terry Muck, editor of Leadership, when he first suggested I write on this topic. I lifted it, word for word, and doubt if he or anyone else would have known the difference had I not called attention to it.

This brings up one of the primary reasons for not giving credit. Most speakers hate to break the flow in the middle of a message. It’s much easier to keep going than to confuse the hearer with a score of footnotes plugged into the actual text.

But courtesy calls for gratefulness — as long as it can be given without distracting. Recently the leaders in our church have been studying Richard Foster’s excellent book Celebration of Discipline. I heartily agree with much of what Foster has written and wish I had said it first. But for me to stand in the pulpit and take credit for what originated with him not only would be theft — it would be foolish. I would be quickly spotted carrying stolen goods. I would lose far more credibility (at least in the eyes of my leaders) than I would gain in the eyes of others who might be impressed with my brilliance.

Therefore, it is far easier to say, “I learned something this last week while studying Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline.” Now I am free to take off on whatever tangent I wish. At the same time, I have pointed people back to the genesis of an idea. If they return to the spring to drink — as I have drunk — they, too, may come up with original thoughts, just as I did.

In my early days of preaching, I relied heavily on books of sermons and — perish the thought — books of sermon illustrations. Since a powerful experience with the Holy Spirit in 1968, I have not had to fall back on those. I discovered I had been preaching leftovers, while the Lord had set before me a banquet table from which I could feed the people. (This, by the way, is perhaps the strongest argument against preaching someone else’s material. If it is not your own, if you have not experienced the truth you are preaching, how can it minister life to those who hear it?) But the spring inside me that flows with eternal truth sometimes gets clogged with debris. My pump, then, is often primed by the sermons of others, written, taped, or heard in person.

A preacher friend once joked: “When better sermons are written, I’ll preach them.”

To that I say, “Amen!”

In fact, I hope I am one who will write the better sermons — and that he will not only preach them but improve on them as he does. It is a humbling honor to know that something I originated is now in wider circulation because it is being told from various pulpits where I could never go.

There is a danger, however, in taking someone else’s first-person experience and telling it as though it happened to you. This danger is especially acute in this day of mass media, when some of the people sitting in your congregation may have just heard the author tell the same story on national TV or may have just read the book you swiped your story from. (Incidentally, those folks will not call you a plagiarizer when they get in the car and drive home after church. They’ll call you a liar.)

Sometimes, of course, it works in the other direction. I remember when Charles Allen came to preach in the little South Carolina town where I was pastor of the Baptist church. I had read all of Allen’s books of sermons — and preached most of them.

Some of our folks went down to Main Street Methodist to hear Dr. Allen. One of them came back and told me, “You’ll never believe it, but that lanky old Methodist is preaching your sermons. He even told one of your stories last night and didn’t have the decency to give you credit.”

I held my breath until the week was over and Dr. Allen was safely out of town. At that time I was having enough trouble hiding other things without it being discovered I was stealing sermons as well.

The question is not whether we use material that originates with others. Of course we do. The question is whether we should give credit or not.

Sometimes we don’t want to give credit. The author may be someone who has a bad reputation — or whose works might lead people astray. In such a case, I find it easy to say, “Although I certainly don’t recommend the ideas of Hugh Hefner, I was intrigued by an interview in last night’s paper where he said …”

On the other hand, giving credit often strengthens the message. It lets your people know you are reading — and listening. In short, it adds authenticity. Even though Richard Foster is a legitimate scholar in his own right, he is relatively unknown. Therefore, when he quotes Saint John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or his fellow Quaker Elton Trueblood, it adds credibility to his scholarship. In fact, had he not quoted so widely, many of us would not have read his books.

I am impressed when I attend a mainstream Protestant church and hear the speaker quote a charismatic or Roman Catholic — and give credit. I am attracted when I hear a Pentecostal quote a traditional evangelical. It lets me know the person is hearing what God is saying to the rest of Christendom. In short, the credits often mean as much as the material quoted.

“I was listening to a Charles Swindoll tape last week, and he told of the time …”

“I wish all of you would read Henri Nouwen’s book The Wounded Healer. In the chapter on ‘Ministry to a Hopeless Man,’ he describes a fascinating encounter between …”

“A few years ago Leadership magazine interviewed Dr. Richard Halverson, chaplain of the U.S. Senate. In the interview …”

Perhaps the original material grew out of something informal, such as a staff meeting or home Bible study. If the originator of the idea is local, that is even more reason to give credit and thus encourage the person.

“Last Monday night in our home church meeting, Brooks Watson pointed out something he had learned a number of years ago in engineering school.…”

“In our staff meeting Art Bourgeois touched my heart when he began praying for …”

Giving credit, instead of distracting from your sermon, often leads your listeners into the situation. They wait eagerly to hear what you have gleaned from others.

Courtesy demands a certain amount of credit, and ethics demands you not retell a story as if it happened to you — unless it really did. If you’re afraid the audience will think you stole a story when you didn’t, a simple technique will get you off the hook. All you have to say is: “In his book Where Eagles Soar, Jamie Buckingham confesses the difficulty he had demonstrating physical love to his aged father. It brought to mind a similar experience I had with my own dad.…” From that point on, the story is yours, even though it might sound identical to the one I wrote about.

All preachers have a way of picking up cute phrases, vivid word images, clever bits of dialogue, even snappy one-liners they heard or read from someone else. Certainly Billy Graham didn’t coin the phrase “The Bible says,” but at least for this generation, he made it popular.

Such snatches are below the threshold of requiring attribution. But there is a level that enters the forbidden zone of plagiarism. It happens when we take credit for something valuable which is not genuinely ours.

Recently I heard a preacher at a ministerial convention tell an uproariously funny story of being invited to speak at a strange church and discovering, upon arrival, that it was a drive-in church. His congregation was a large field full of automobiles. He had no eye contact and no way of knowing if anyone was laughing at his jokes. His final dismay came when the pastor whispered in his ear that it was all right to give an invitation for people to accept Christ. He could even pray for the sick. If the people blinked their headlights, they had been saved. If they tooted the horn, they had been healed.

(“Yes, dear brother, I see those headlights out there.”)

I don’t remember the point he was making, but his story was great. As we were leaving the auditorium, I overheard one pastor say to another, “I just got my illustration for next Sunday.” I didn’t ask, but I doubted seriously if he intended to give the original preacher credit for the story.

But for that matter, it doesn’t make much difference. Back in 1974, Kenneth A. Markley, a Rosemead Graduate School psychologist, published the original story in his book Our Speaker This Evening (Zondervan). Dr. Markley, however, had not mentioned the horn blowing. That was added by the preacher to spice up an already good story and perhaps clear his conscience of being a plagiarist.

I wondered, walking away from the auditorium, how many preachers would add yet another twist — maybe turning on the windshield washers if you wanted counseling or releasing the hood latch if you wanted to donate to the visiting speaker’s missionary fund.

Professional writers have strict guidelines concerning plagiarism. One definition is found in A Handbook to Literature by Thrall and Hibbard (Odyssey, 1960):

Literary theft. A writer who steals the plot of some obscure, forgotten story and uses it as new in a story of his own is a plagiarist. Plagiarism is more noticeable when it involves stealing of language than when substance only is borrowed. From flagrant exhibition of stealing both thought and language, plagiarism shades off into less serious things such as unconscious borrowing, borrowing of minor elements, and mere imitation.

Writers and musicians understand this. But while they can copyright words and notes, they cannot copyright an idea. It is in this area that the blacks and whites blend to gray, and each preacher must determine the difference between what is illegal, merely unethical, or permitted.

I remember asking a colleague if anyone ever plagiarized his sermons. He said, no, he’d never said anything worth repeating.

On the other hand, why would anyone publish a book of sermons if he didn’t want them used?

Corrie ten Boom used to say that everything she had written or said was public property. She didn’t want credit. She felt the glory should go to God, who gave her the ideas in the first place. She also felt copyrights were of the Devil. On occasion, her publishers had to hold her down, or she would have given carte blanche permission for anyone to reprint her material without even asking, much less paying a permission fee.

But Tante Corrie was a unique breed. She never did understand why someone would publish something “to the glory of God” and then get upset when another of God’s servants used it without giving the author credit. After all, she used to say, that’s why we put it in print in the first place — to be used.

On the other hand, she was always giving others credit. When she and I wrote Tramp for the Lord, I had to struggle to keep her from naming everyone she had ever talked to about an idea.

Perhaps that’s a good rule to follow: Everything we say is free, and we expect nothing in return. For everything we borrow, we try to give credit — not because credit is due, but because God has a way of blessing honesty.

- More fromJamie Buckingham

Jamie Buckingham

Pastors

Mark Littleton

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

An illustration is like a row of footlights that shed light on what is presented on the stage. If you turn the lights onto the audience, they blind the people.
Haddon Robinson

The greatest convincer preached with stories — a woman’s lost coin, treacherous renters, faithful servants. The simple stories communicated to depths that profound propositions would never reach.
Even the gospel itself is a story — a living (and dying and living again) illustration.
What preachers gather and swap and treasure like stamp collectors, they also want to use effectively: their sermon illustrations. But how? How can a preacher know when enough yarns have been spun? At what point does an entertaining illustration bully the text out of the spotlight? When is an illustration demanded? And when does one demean?
Mark Littleton is a Christian communicator who has asked those questions and arrived at some answers — answers he utilized in his former pastorate at Berea Baptist Church in Glen Burnie, Maryland, and answers now used in his writing ministry. Having made the common mistakes and learned from them, he offers his observations in the following chapter.

Anyone who must preach two different sermons on Sunday and a third on Wednesday, plus teach, give children’s sermons, and offer “a few words” here, there, and everywhere, knows the power of good illustrations. They bring fresh air to musty monologues. They grab the heart as well as the head. They help apply truth to life.

That’s why I collect, make up, steal, borrow, and beg them from everyone. My three-by-five card file of illustrations is so cherished I keep a picture of it in my wallet to show friends.

“Get a load of this baby,” I say. “Beautiful tan finish, full of laughter and babble, always ready to raise a smile. Everything from anecdotes to zoology. Of course, there are the occasional messes and 2 a.m. feedings, but it’s all worth it.”

Even more crucial then keeping the box full is the problem of use: How do I match the right illustration with the right situation? Too often we hear a good joke and instantly begin sniffing for a place to tell it. Any time will do, so long as it occurs in next Sunday’s sermon. We fall into the pit of depending more on our stories than the power of God’s Word and Spirit to hold the listener.

At that point, our illustrations block rather than bring understanding. After all, there is a difference between the almost right illustration and the right one. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

Getting the Right Illustration

Three questions are useful in determining an illustration’s efficiency:

Does my point need an illustration? I’m the type who’s terrified of being boring, so I’ve learned to think in analogies and anecdotes. Sometimes I overdo it. If the people understand my point and don’t need further clarification, why use up my ammo? No need to shoot dead geese. My temptation is that if I’ve got a good story, I want to use it now, and if I’ve got two good stories, quotes, or poems, I want to use them both. (Once I got lost in one point with five illustrations. It was fun but foolish.) Life is too short and sermons too long to heap on the burning coals.

So in preparing a sermon, I simply ask, “When I struggled to understand this idea, did I have to create an illustration to explain it? Did I find myself saying, ‘For example …’?” This almost always happens when I have something abstract, cerebral, or theological at hand.

Recently in a sermon from Ephesians on “redemption through his blood,” I wanted to make the point that not even “good” people are acceptable candidates for heaven on the basis of their goodness. The natural question was “Why not?” All sorts of abstract answers swirled in my head, but I needed to distill the vaporous abstractions into something my size. My mind roamed over all kinds of things — personal experiences, quotes, analogies.

Finally, I remembered a friend’s bargain with his children, who resisted eating their vegetables. He and his wife decided to let the kids have one “most-hated” vegetable they would never have to eat. But they had to eat the rest without argument. Mealtimes improved noticeably.

Suppose God gave us all one most-hated commandment and allowed us to ignore that one in heaven. We would, of course, have to obey the rest. Heaven with people just one law less than perfect would be no better than earth. This analogy made the need for redemption clear to me and, hopefully, to the congregation.

Another way to determine whether a point needs illustrating is to try it out on a friend, spouse, or fellow minister. “Do you understand this point?” If our explanation leaves them cold, start searching for illustrations.

Many times, however, a point is clear, and illustrations only clutter the issue. Often the Bible provides its own word picture to explain the truth. Added ingredients, like day-old manna, can turn wormy and stink, spoiling the impact of an already powerful message.

What is my purpose or goal for this point? What do I want to do with an illustration? Consider some legitimate purposes — and some scriptural examples.

1. To clarify a point — Jesus’ parables of the lost coin and sheep.

2. To show a real-life application — much of the Sermon on the Mount.

3. To convict of sin — Nathan’s parable to David of the poor man’s sheep.

4. To inspire and move to action — the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan.

5. To convince someone of truth — Paul reminding the Athenians of “the unknown god.”

6. To make truth memorable — Jesus’ unique sayings, such as the camel passing through the eye of a needle.

Pinpointing my purpose helps me see what I want the illustration to accomplish. If I want to convict of sin, I am not going to use a light, inspirational story. I must speak in specific terms of sins people in my congregation may not be aware they are committing. Several times I have confused people by telling something funny in the midst of a serious point, and everyone got off track. A serious illustration would have been much wiser.

What kind of illustration best suits my purpose? To answer this third question, I consult my files, library, friends, and memory for quantity. Then I select the best one on the basis of quality. That is one reason I believe in gathering illustrations by the bale. Quantity usually yields quality.

Certain general categories fit certain purposes. For instance, analogies and made-up stores are often excellent to enlighten. Object lessons, anecdotes, cross-references, and word studies are also good.

Sometimes, on the other hand, something light is necessary. In one sermon I wanted to say our world would never have peace until Jesus returned. I knew some people would take a dim view of that. I needed something light but enlightening. I tried a story about a dour Englishman seated on a train between two ladies arguing about the window. One claimed she would die of heat stroke if it weren’t opened. The other said she would expire of pneumonia if it didn’t stay closed. The ladies called the conductor, who didn’t know how to solve the problem. Finally, the gentleman spoke up. “First, open the window. That will kill the one. Then close it. That will kill the other. Then we will have peace.” Everyone in the congregation, regardless of political stripe, could appreciate the story.

To move people to action, several ingredients are necessary. First, the proposed action must be clear. That means many quickie examples of how to do what you are asking. Often, this is preceded by “like.” “Like when your mother-in-law says …” Second, the illustration must end with a clear exhortation. Give an example of a person who responded correctly. People need positive illustrations of what they’re to do.

To convict a congregation of something — sin, personal need, lostness — there is a different route: The listener must identify with the illustration. Personal experiences are valuable here as well as situations and roleplays — anything that involves people with the story.

For instance, I wanted my congregation to see the need for trust in God even when they don’t know all the hows and whys. I told about my diphtheria/tetanus shot when I was seven years old.

“It won’t hurt,” the doctor assured me. “Just keep thinking It’s not going to hurt, and everything will be OK.”

But it did hurt. My arm was still sore the next day, and I demanded an explanation from my mother. Why did I have a sore arm?

She couldn’t explain the physiological causes of my pain, nor could she explain to my satisfaction how the vaccine could prevent diphtheria. Finally she said, “Mark, I know you don’t understand, but you do know I love you, and this shot was something we had to do to protect you.”

Because I trusted my mom, I was able to accept the pain.

The people in the congregation could identify — most had experienced the same feelings. Deep inside, they knew the difference between trust and understanding — and that trust sometimes must precede knowledge. But the illustration brought to the surface what they already knew down deep.

In order to convince, an illustration must have authority. Sources with unquestioned authority — scientific reports, research, statistics, quotes from well-known people — may not absolutely prove the point, but most people find them convincing.

Finally, if the purpose is to make a point memorable, other elements are crucial: simplicity, uniqueness, usefulness, truthfulness, and most of all, vividness. An Arab proverb says, “The best speaker is he who turn ears into eyes.” In fact, I recall reading that proverb only once, but because of its vividness, it stuck.

Consider some of these memorable expressions that I never tried to memorize but were instantly nailed to my mind. From Haddon Robinson: “A mist in the pulpit is a fog in the pew.” Howard Hendricks: “You can’t build a skyscraper on a chicken coop foundation.” Tony Campolo: “I’m sick and tired of people playing a thousand verses of ‘Just as I Am,’ who come down just as they are, and go out just as they were.”

Using the Right Illustration

Simply placing the right illustration with the right point is not enough. Good preparation includes good declaration. Here are some suggestions for serving illustrations hot.

1. Don’t waste time getting into the story. Get in and get out. Don’t overexplain, apologize, or make other unnecessary comments such as “I found this perfect illustration the other day …” Such comments challenge the listener to prove us wrong rather than to wait eagerly for the story.

2. Make sure the people know what you’re illustrating. Too often they remember the illustration and forget the point. Why? We don’t rivet the point to the illustration by repeating it before and after.

3. Make sure your illustration doesn’t overshadow your point. Many ripping good stories rip up the house and the sermon. All the people get is a good laugh.

4. Be excited about the illustration. If I’m not convinced it’s interesting and worthwhile, the audience won’t be. If I can’t generate enthusiasm about the material, I can hardly support it with the luster of a convincing rendition. Rather, I rend it to shreds.

5. Make sure it’s believable and true. On one occasion, when I had converted a devotional-guide story to first-person, my father remarked, “It sounded bogus to me.” Some speakers say that putting yourself into a story, whether you really were there or not, is legitimate. But it can also create distrust. I have heard several well-known preachers use anecdotes I’ve read in old illustration books. They tell them as though the experience happened to them. Their credibility is destroyed.

6. Make sure people will identify with the illustration. Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said that if he came away from a play exclaiming, “That was me!” it was a success. When I see myself in it, that often indicates a potent illustration.

7. Be sure of your facts. One night I referred to a book and said the author had died recently. A student in the group nearly shot out of his seat. “Good grief! I just heard him last week at seminary. You mean he died over the weekend?”

I choked, looked for the door, and confessed, “I think I got the name wrong.” Where’s the grave? I wanted to crawl in.

8. Be visual. Visual speaking creates pictures in the listeners’ minds. It uses sharp verbs and nouns, few adjectives. Lots of color and specifics. No fuzzy generalities, just hard slabs of meaning.

Illustrating sermons is one of preaching’s most gratifying and challenging tasks. If an illustration is too big for its britches, it tends to break a sermon. If it’s too little, the sermon comes across with the clout of a feather. But the right illustration, used well, makes preaching not only interesting but effective.

- More fromMark Littleton

Pastors

William Kruidenier

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

As the nineteenth-century German theologian Tholuck said, “A sermon ought to have heaven for its father and the earth for its mother.” But if such sermons are to be born, heaven and earth have to meet in the preacher.
John R. W. Stott

Billy Graham preaching in an elevator would be a little overwhelming, but Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood” teaching in the Los Angeles Coliseum might tend to underwhelm. The number of listeners determines much about the style of preaching. What flies with one group flops with another.
How you convince a handful differs from how you sway a crowd. Even the optimum content for a sermon will vary with the size of the congregation. Some subjects work best in the give-and-take of a group; others shine in mass meetings. Certain techniques lend themselves to a midsized crowd; others to an intimate setting. Skillful preachers select their subjects and techniques with an eye to the audience.
This is the subject William Kruidenier explores in the following chapter. Kruidenier is pastor of Emmanuel Christian Fellowship in Atlanta, Georgia. His analysis helps put dimensions on an often-perplexing question: Why do some sermons work better than others?
And, even better, he offers suggestions for designing sermons suitable for the various occasions.

On any given Sunday, whenever a sermon seems to fall short of what we’d hoped for (realistically or otherwise), we quickly look for a reason. Our notes (or manuscript) were flawed. We didn’t deliver the message powerfully enough. We didn’t get enough sleep the night before. The sanctuary was too hot. Or too cool. People just aren’t as hungry for spiritual growth as they should be.…

I think there is another explanation, perhaps more common than many of the above. It has to do with the match-up between the message and the group.

One helpful insight of the past decade is that not all groupings in a church are the same. Thinkers in the area of church growth have pointed out that when you gather the saints on Sunday morning, you have a celebration. In medium- and large-size churches, the individuals don’t all know each other personally, but that is not the focus; they are rather caught up in worshiping God.

Break into groups of anywhere from twenty to a hundred, and you have a congregation — people who know one another and view themselves as a special band (e.g., a choir, a “minichurch,” a permanent Sunday school class). The fellowship is lively, the relationships mainly horizontal. (Smaller churches maintain this closeness even on Sunday morning, which, in fact, is one of their assets.)

To take a quantum leap in intimacy, however, limit the numbers to ten and call for serious commitment and accountability. This is the cell.

A fourth kind of group is the class, where people gather not primarily to worship, fellowship, or grow personally, but to learn a new skill or body of information. An elective course on evangelism or the Pentateuch is a good example. The focus is on the content, and any worship or fellowship is a by-product.

Most of us are familiar with this. But only recently, as I’ve been immersed in the challenge of starting a new church and thinking through its formative structures, have I faced what all this means for homiletics.

Making the Good Match

Each kind of group has its own dynamics. What works in one setting will not necessarily succeed in another. But all too often, I have failed to match my proclamation with the dynamic of my particular audience. I’ve just stood up and done the single specialty I was taught in seminary: expository preaching.

What happens when parishioners hear expositions of Galatians on Sunday morning, 2 Timothy on Sunday night, and something from the Old Testament midweek, all in the same basic style?

They rarely sense that the pastor’s message is for now — for this group, this moment in time. They go home with a vague feeling of If you’ve heard one sermon, you’ve heard’em all. So why go to another service for more of the same?

Here is another problem. Suppose in the worship (celebration) service, I come to a text that mentions the training of children. From the pulpit I go into detail on techniques of child discipline; I even venture some comments about spanking. Many young parents who are listening appreciate the information — but go away frustrated because they weren’t able to raise their hands and ask follow-up questions. Meanwhile, the nonparents present (middle and older adults, singles) gaze out the window.

Certain types of scriptural truth raise certain needs in an audience that can be met only in certain group settings. That is why I have come to adopt the following guidelines:

Texts Appropriate for the Setting

Before opening the Bible, first ask, “What is the focus of this group?” If celebration, it is God. If congregation, it is social fellowship and kinship in Christ. If cell, it is personal growth and accountability. If class, it is skill or information.

Next question: What portions of Scripture originally spoke to these kinds of needs? Some obvious examples:

The Psalms, Romans 9, parts of the Major Prophets, and others lifted the attention of the original readers to the transcendence of God. Thus they make excellent choices to be expounded in celebration or worship services.

In contrast, much of the Pauline corpus dealt with problems in the Christian community. Proverbs and many of the Minor Prophets also speak to community issues. These can be used to promote the same results in a congregation-sized group today.

For the cell, where personal religion is the focus, books such as James, Proverbs, and the life of Christ from the Gospels are highly appropriate. They concentrate on personally living out the faith. They convict us; they promote self-analysis and confession.

The class works best when a task attitude is established: “We’re going to survey Romans,” or “Let’s learn the best way to do a word study in personal Bible investigation.” This is not a license for boring teaching. But it does allow us to speak more technically, less personally than in the other three groups.

Truths Appropriate to the Group

This is not entirely in line with my seminary homiletics classes, which urged me to discover at all costs the main thought of any passage of Scripture (in the mind of the original writer) and then convey that same thought to my listeners. While I was always encouraged to know and read my audiences, I was not taught very effectively how to apply the Scriptures on the basis of what the group dynamic would allow.

Some truths from a passage will connect with a particular group like lightning hitting a radio tower, while others barely sputter over the front edge of the podium. The preacher’s task is to select those that will strike hard and fast.

If I am working through the Book of Romans and come to chapter 8, verses 26-30 (“The Spirit helps us in our weakness.… We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.…” etc.), I can emphasize different aspects depending on the group.

Celebration: the sovereignty of God over his creation

Congregation: a lighter, less theological, more humorous treatment, full of instances from my life and others’ of how God’s sovereignty has worked itself out in daily and family living; a “hang-in-there” message

Cell: a hard look at my personal attitudes and actions when the situation demands that I depend on God’s sovereignty; counsel, exhortation, confession, forgiveness, a time of building and healing

Class: here I tackle the thorny subject of predestination from the perspectives of biblical, systematic, and historical theology.

Planning the Appropriate Response

Just as each of the four groupings has a different focus, each is different when it comes to response. The preacher does well to think this through ahead of time.

In the celebration event, my chief end is to bring individuals (both Christians and non-Christians) into contact with a transcendent, personal God. That means they need an opportunity to respond to him in repentance and faith. If I do not provide that before the end of the meeting, it is incomplete.

So there must be ways for non-Christians to meet Christ as Savior and Lord. There must be ways for Christians to repent of waywardness. Some of the methods to accommodate these are invitations, staffed prayer or counseling rooms available at the close, and allowance for individual responses such as hands raised in prayer or praise. These all show that we have not forgotten the goal of a celebration service: to bring men and women into contact with God.

My presentation in such a service is necessarily a lecture (one speaking to many without dialogue). In a congregationsized group, however, this should never be true. In a true congregation, the people know each other well and have developed the social skills of communicating with one another. This greatly aids the learning process if we take advantage of it. Therefore, we structure to allow discussion, dialogue, and even disagreement, so the body of Christ can hammer out the application of the Word to their lives together.

A well-designed congregation group, over the long run, is probably the most effective evangelism agent among the four types. It lets non-Christians hear and observe a loving community of Christians dialoguing together about Christ and their relationships to him. After the meetings, social interaction over refreshments or a meal lets the Word continue to be a stimulus for discussion.

The structure of a cell meeting must be the most flexible of all, since we never know what personal needs lurk behind the members’ masks of contentment. A properly structured cell group gives the Spirit of God freedom to leave the teaching outline after only the first point is covered if it raises a need in someone’s life. The cell leader can — and should — say, “Let’s pick up here next week,” whenever an unforeseen but worthwhile diversion comes along. This is acceptable pedagogy.

The class, of course, cannot just hand out information; it must discern whether the skill or content is being comprehended. Laboratory practice sessions (for students to use skills) or else quizzes (to measure retained information) must complement the teaching of the Word in a class group.

Specialists for Each Kind of Group

One of the discouragements we pastors bring on ourselves is attempting to excel in all four group situations. We assume that, having completed our training in homiletics, we ought to be consummate communicators at any level of group dynamic in the church.

Not so. Certain personality types and sets of gifts or abilities function much better in certain group situations than in others, and even seminary graduates are not exempt from this fact. We all need help discerning which roles in the body of Christ we might best fill. Then we could benefit from separate training, both exegetical and homiletical, tailored to the group dynamic best suited to us.

Far more lay teachers as well can be trained for local-church effectiveness if we align our training more closely with the needs and focuses of group dynamics.

Beware of Cross-Mixing Techniques

The above discussion is not meant to say that worship can occur only in a celebration service, fellowship in a congregation, growth and accountability in a cell, and instruction and training in a class. But it does say these goals are the easiest to accomplish in the various settings.

There are times when it is good to attempt to worship in a cell, or to encourage one another on Sunday morning. But such mixing should be done intentionally and intelligently, not accidentally. We must understand first what the best setting is for such a practice, and not expect as great a result if we choose to go ahead in a less than optimum context.

The Necessity of a Lucid Style

A desire for clearness sometimes leads to neglect of polished speech. One author, when dealing with speech of this kind, says that there is in it “a kind of careful negligence.”

Of course, we agree that the highest priority should be placed on clarity. What advantage is there in speech that does not lead to understanding? Therefore, good teachers avoid all words that do not teach; instead they must find words that are both pure and intelligible.

This is true not only in personal conversations but much more in the case of public speech. In conversation anyone has the power of asking a question; but in an oration all faces are turned upon the speaker, and it is neither customary nor decorous for a person to ask a question about what he does not understand. On this account the speaker ought to be especially careful to give assistance to those who cannot ask it.

How can one tell if further explanation is needed? A crowd anxious for instruction generally shows by its movement if it understands. Until some indication of this sort is given, the teacher should discuss the subject over and over, and put it in every shape and form and variety of expression. As soon, however, as the speaker has determined that he is understood, he ought either to end his address or pass on to another point.

Speak Clearly But Not Inelegantly

True eloquence consists not in making people like what they disliked, nor in making them do what they shrank from, but in making clear what was obscure. Yet if this is done without grace of style, the benefit does not extend beyond the few eager students who learn no matter how unpolished the form of the teaching. There is an analogy between learning and eating: the very food without which it is impossible to live must be flavored to meet the tastes of the majority.

Accordingly, Cicero has said, “An eloquent man must speak so as to teach, to delight, and to persuade.” Then he adds: “To teach is a necessity, to delight is a beauty, to persuade is a triumph.” Now of these three, the first (teaching) depends on what we say, the other two on the way we say it.

For the fastidious (those who care not for truth unless it is put in the form of a pleasing discourse), a superior teacher must learn the art of pleasing. And yet even this is not enough for those stubborn-minded men who both understand and are pleased with the teacher’s discourse but derive no profit from it. For what does it profit a man if he both confesses the truth and praises the eloquence, yet does not yield his consent?

We need to say here that some truths need only be believed. To give one’s assent implies nothing more than to confess that they are true. Some truths, however, must be put into practice and are taught for the very purpose of being practiced. It is useless to be intellectually persuaded of those truths (and, indeed, to be pleased with the beauty of their expression) if they are not learned to be practiced.

Using the Right Style

Although teachers of biblical truth are speaking of great matters, they should not always use a majestic tone. When instructing, they should use a subdued tone. When giving praise or blame, a temperate tone is appropriate. When, however, the teaching calls for action, we must speak with power in a manner calculated to sway the mind. Sometimes the same important matter is treated in all these ways at different times: quietly when being taught, temperately when its importance is being urged, and powerfully when we are forcing a mind adverse to the truth to turn and embrace it.

For example, there is nothing greater than God himself. Yet teaching the doctrine of the Trinity calls for calm discussion. It is a subject difficult to comprehend, and our goal is mainly to understand as much as possible.

But when we come to praise God, what a field for beauty and splendor of language opens up before us! Who can exhaust his powers to the utmost in praising him whom no one can adequately praise?

And if we are challenging our hearers to worship God, then we ought to speak out with power and impressiveness, to show how great an honor this is.

We have many examples of the three styles right in Scripture. We have an example of the calm, subdued style in the apostle Paul, where he says:

My brothers, I am going to use an everyday example: when two people agree on a matter and sign an agreement, no one can break it or add anything to it. Now, God made his promises to Abraham and to his descendant. The Scripture does not use the plural “descendants,” meaning many people, but the singular “descendant,” meaning one person only, namely, Christ. What I mean is that God made a covenant with Abraham and promised to keep it. The Law, which was given four hundred and thirty years later, cannot break that covenant and cancel God’s promise. For if God’s gift depends on the Law, then it no longer depends on this promise. However, it was because of his promise that God gave that gift to Abraham. (Gal. 3:15-18)

And because it might possibly occur to the hearer to ask, “If there is no inheritance by the Law, why then was the Law given?” Paul himself anticipates this objection and asks, “What, then, was the purpose of the Law?” And he answers his own question:

It was added to show what wrongdoing is, and it was meant to last until the coming of Abraham’s descendant, to whom the promise was made. The Law was handed down by angels, with a man acting as a go-between. But a go-between is not needed when only one person is involved; and God is one. (Gal. 3:19-20)

In the following words of the apostle, we have the temperate style: “Do not rebuke an older man, but appeal to him as if he were your father. Treat the younger men as your brothers, the older women as mothers, and the younger women as sisters, with all purity” (1 Tim. 5:1-2). And also in these: “So then, my brothers, because of God’s great mercy to us I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship that you should offer” (Rom. 12:1). Almost the whole of this passage in Romans is exhortation in the temperate style of eloquence.

The majestic style of speech differs from the temperate style chiefly in that it is not so much decked out with verbal ornaments as exalted by mental emotion. It uses nearly all the ornaments that the temperate does but without needing them as much. For it is borne along by its own energy; the force of the thought, not the ornamentation, makes the real impact.

The apostle in the following passage is urging that for the sake of ministry we should patiently bear all the evils of life. It is a great subject treated with power, and the ornaments of speech are not wanting.

In our work together with God, then, we beg you who have received God’s grace not to let it be wasted. Hear what God says:
“When the time came for me to show you favor,
I heard you;
when the day arrived for me to save you,
I helped you.”
Listen! This is the hour to receive God’s favor; today is the day to be saved!
We do not want anyone to find fault with our work, so we try not to put obstacles in anyone’s way. Instead, in everything we do we show that we are God’s servants by patiently enduring troubles, hardships, and difficulties. We have been beaten, jailed, and mobbed; we have been overworked and have gone without sleep or food. By our purity, knowledge, patience, and kindness we have shown ourselves to be God’s servants — by the Holy Spirit, by our true love, by our message of truth, and by the power of God. We have righteousness as our weapon, both to attack and to defend ourselves. We are honored and disgraced; we are insulted and praised. We are treated as liars, yet we speak the truth; as unknown, yet we are known by all; as though we were dead, but as you see, we live on. Although punished, we are not killed; although saddened, we are always glad; we seem poor, but we make many people rich; we seem to have nothing, yet we really possess everything.
Dear friends in Corinth! We have spoken frankly to you; we have opened our hearts wide. It is not we who have closed our hearts to you; it is you who have closed your hearts to us. I speak now as though you were my children: show us the same feelings that we have for you. Open your hearts wide! (2 Cor. 6:1-13)

The Necessity of Variety

It is not against the rules to mingle these various styles. Although in most speeches one style will predominate, every variety of style should be used, consistent with good taste. For when we keep monotonously to one style, we fail to retain the hearer’s attention. But when we move from one style to another, the discourse has more grace even though it tends to last longer.

Each style has distinctives that prevent the hearer’s attention from cooling. We can bear the subdued style, however, longer without variety than the majestic style. The mental emotion necessary to stimulate the hearer’s feelings can be maintained only a short time. Therefore we must avoid trying to carry the emotional pitch too high or too long, lest we lose what we have already gained.

Mingling the Various Styles

Now it is important to determine what style should be alternated with what other, and the places where any particular style should be used. In the majestic style, for instance, it is almost always desirable that the introduction should be temperate. And the speaker has it in his discretion to use the subdued style even where the majestic would be allowable, in order that the majestic, when it is used, may be the more majestic by comparison.

Further, whatever may be the style of the speech or writing, when knotty questions turn up for solution, the subdued style is naturally demanded. And we must use the temperate style whenever praise or blame is to be given, no matter what may be the general tone of the discourse.

In the majestic style, then, and also in the subdued, both the other two styles occasionally find a place. The temperate style, on the other hand, occasionally needs the quiet style. But the temperate style never needs the aid of the majestic, for its object is to gratify, not excite, the mind.

If frequent and vehement applause follows a speaker, do not suppose that only the majestic style has been used. This effect is often produced both by the accurate distinctions of the quiet style and by the beauties of the temperate. The majestic style, on the other, frequently silences the audience by its impressiveness and calls forth their tears.

For example, when at Caesarea in Mauritania I was dissuading the people from that civil, or worse than civil, war they called Caterva (for it was not fellow citizens merely, but neighbors, brothers, fathers, and sons even, who, divided into two factions and armed with stones, fought annually at a certain season of the year for several days continuously, everyone killing whomever he could), I strove with all the vehemence of speech I could command to root out and drive from their hearts and lives an evil so cruel. It was not, however, when I heard their applause but when I saw their tears that I thought I had produced an effect. For the applause showed that they were instructed and delighted, but the tears that they were convinced to stop.

Watch and Pray

But whatever may be the eloquence of the style, the life of the speaker will count for more in securing the hearer’s compliance. The man who speaks wisely and eloquently but lives wickedly may, it is true, instruct many who are anxious to learn (though, as it is written, he “is unprofitable to himself”).

But they would do good to many more if they lived as they preach. For some people seek an excuse for their own evil lives by comparing the teaching with the conduct of their instructors. They say in their hearts or even with their lips, “Why do you not do yourself what you bid me do?” They cease to listen with submission to a man who does not listen to himself, and in despising the preacher they learn to despise the word that is preached. The apostle Paul told Timothy, “Do not let anyone look down on you because you are young, but be an example for the believers in your speech, your conduct, your love, faith, and purity” (1 Tim. 4:12).

And so our Christian teacher, even though he says what is just, holy, and good (and he ought never to say anything else), doing all he can to be heard with intelligence, pleasure, and obedience, will succeed more by piety in prayer than by gifts of oratory. So he ought to pray for himself, and for those he is about to address, before he attempts to speak. When the hour comes to speak, he ought, before he opens his mouth, to lift up his thirsty soul to God, to drink in what he is about to pour forth, and to be himself filled with what he is about to distribute.

Thus the Holy Spirit speaks in those who for Christ’s sake are delivered to the persecutors; why not also in the teachers who deliver Christ’s message to those who are willing to learn?

- More fromAurelius Augustine

Pastors

Calvin Miller

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strengths on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness.
E. M. Bounds

If conviction is the goal of preaching, what are the legitimate and effective means to that end?
Abraham Lincoln said, “When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.” Exuberance has its attractions, but zealous preaching also packs liabilities. Flailing limbs may so dominate the pulpit that the preacher’s zeal upstages the sermon’s intent.
On the other hand, pastors able to weave a literate spell with smooth oratory want to do more than impress a receptive crowd. The art of preaching is not intended to displace the aim: hearts moved to believe in Christ and follow his ways.
According to Calvin Miller, combining zeal, art, and results is no recent quandary. Even Old Testament prophets faced the dilemma. Miller, pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha and a popular author, strives to make both art and zeal serve his preaching and writing purposes.

The Book of Jonah is the tale of a reluctant preacher. Jonah’s message, as we have come to know it, is: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jon. 3:4).

A brief eight words. Surely there is more: some clever and imaginative introduction lost in the oral manuscript. There must have been iterations, poetry, and exegesis. But they are gone, and those eight words are all we know.

Such a miniature message seems anticlimactic. Even the king of Nineveh had more to say than Jonah (see vv. 7-9). But the lost sermon was preached and bore a stern word of necessity. Verse 10 states its effect: “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”

The results of sermons in the Bible seem to be of great importance. This is true of either Testament. Acts 2:40-41 speaks of the dramatic results of Peter’s Pentecostal sermon, and a few days later we are told, “Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand” (Acts 4:4). While Jonah omits the statistics of his sermon, Luke was careful to note Simon’s.

Preaching in the New Testament seems to emulate the authoritative style of the Old Testament prophets. Ever cloaked in other-worldly authority, preaching became the vehicle the early church rode into the arena of evangelizing the Roman Empire. As common people of Galilee once marveled at Christ’s authority in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:28-29), so the authority of Scripture-based sermons became the defense — sometimes the sole defense — of the men and women who pressed the strong alternative of the gospel.

No Time to Waste

From John the Baptist to the end of the New Testament era, the sermon, like the church itself, flamed with apocalyptic zeal. The prophets had preached strong declarations of the direction of God in history. Following Pentecost, the sermon was possessed of a new spiritual union, where the preacher and the Holy Spirit were joined. The sermon, like Scripture, was breathed by the Spirit. Because of a direct alliance with the Trinity, the preacher had the right to speak with God’s authority, demanding immediate action and visible decisions. This “right-now” ethic saw the sermon in terms of the demand of God. When God demanded decisions, they could be tabulated as soon as the sermon was finished. Sheep could immediately be divided from goats.

The specific message was delivered by those who possessed the call. The rules of primitive homiletics were not defined. The sermon was the man; the medium, the message. The product was instant and visible. Faith could be tabulated by those who cried in the streets — when they saw their hearers accept the message, submit to baptism, and show up for the breaking of bread and prayers.

Following the first head counts in Jerusalem, the fire of evangelism spread, pushed on by the hot winds of Greek and Aramaic sermons. Congregations sprang up as sermons called them into being. Without institutional structure, programs, or buildings, the church celebrated the simple center of worship — the sermon and that which the sermon created: the company of the committed, the fellowship of believers.

The sermon was not celebrated as art, though doubtless, art may have been an aspect of delivery. Art was not so important in the panicky apocalypticism of Century One. Zeal, not art, raged in the bright light of Pentecost. The sermon was the means of reaching the last, desperate age of humanity. One needed not to polish phrases or study word roots — the kingdom was at hand, and there wasn’t time to break ground for a seminary. Church administration went begging. On the eve of Armageddon, committees and bureaus were unimportant. There was only one point to be made. All human wisdom was one set of alternatives: Repent or perish.

This was also Jonah’s sermon: Repent or perish. Like those of the New Testament era, his was not a notable document. The sermon was the workhorse of urgent evangelism.

Jonah’s sermon was powerful simply because it was not ornate. He who cries “Fire!” in a theater need not be an orator. Indeed, he is allowed to interrupt the art of actors. It is not an offense to the years of disciplined training to be set aside for the urgent and unadorned word: “The theater is on fire!” The bearer rates his effectiveness on how fast the theater is cleared, not on the ovation of the customers. The alarmist is not out for encores but empty seats. His business is rescue.

The Book of Jonah concerns such reluctant and apocalyptic preaching. The royal family sitting at last in the ashes of national repentance illustrates how effective his urgency was.

This zealous declaration is the Word of God as it is preached today in growing churches. Those who would speak an artistic word must do it in churches already built. Further, those who admire the Fosdicks and Maclarens — and they are to be admired — must see that their artistry would be passed by in the slums of London, where Booth’s drums and horns sounded not a “trumpet voluntary” to call men and women to the queen’s chapel but the “oom-pah-pah” of the cross. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” was an urgent question that nauseated Anglicans even as it intrigued the poor and downtrodden of England with its zealous demands.

What did Booth say? Who knows? Who cares?

What did Whitefield say? What Billy Sunday? What Finney, what Wesley, what Mordecai Ham? To be sure, some of their sermons survive. But essentially they viewed their preaching not in the Chrysostom tradition but the tradition of the Baptizer of Christ: “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:7-8), or Simon Peter, who cried, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation” (Acts 2:40).

The Coming of Art

Here and there were men like Jonathan Edwards who combined the best of literary tradition and apocalyptic zeal. But there was a real sense in which Edwards, the Mathers, and the other Puritans supplied a pre-soap-opera generation with a cultural center. The better their apocalypse, the higher the other-world fever of their gospel contagion. Their fiery tirades began to resemble the spirits of a matador, and the amens were the enthusiastic olés, where the champion was not Jehovah but the preacher. Kate Caffrey writes in The Mayflower:

A strong style was favored — in 1642 John Cotton recommended preaching after the manner of Christ, who, he said, “let fly poynt blanck” — and the hearers judged each performance like professional drama critics. Two sermons on Sunday and a lecture-sermon or weeknight meeting, usually on Thursday, were the custom, with fines of up to five shillings for absence from church. Only those who wished need go to the weeknight sermon, which was accompanied by no prayers or other teaching. Yet they were so popular in the sixteen-thirties that the General Court of Massachusetts tried to make every community hold them on the same day, to cut down all the running about from one town to the next. The preachers protested that it was in order to hear sermons that people had come to New England, so the court contented itself with the mild recommendation that listeners should at least be able to get home before dark.
Even condemned criminals joined in the vogue for sermons. On March 11, 1686, when James Morgan was executed in Boston, three sermons were preached to him by Cotton and Increase Mather and Joshua Moody (so many came to hear Moody that their combined weight cracked the church gallery), and the prisoner delivered from the scaffold a stern warning to all present to take heed from his dread example.
Sermons were so important that it is impossible to overestimate them. Hourglasses, set up by the minister, showed the sermons’ length: a bare hour was not good enough. People brought paper and inkhorns to take copious notes in a specially invented shorthand; many thick notebooks filled with closely written sermon summaries have been preserved. The meeting house rustled with the turning of pages and scratching of pens. Sermons were as pervasive then as political news today; they were read and discussed more eagerly than newspapers are now.

These intellectualized, zealous Massachusetts Bay sermons were celebrated by sermon lovers throughout New England. In these meetinghouses the sermon grew in performance value. And yet the zeal and urgency were viewed as part of the performance.

The tendency remains. Now the zealot is a performer and the sermon a monologue celebrated for its emotional and statistical success. The burden is urgent but also entertaining. The preacher feels the burden of his word as the fire-crier feels the pain of his office. But he feels also the pleasure of its success, which is his reputation.

Ego being the force it is, the urgency of the cry often becomes a secondary theme. Artistry eclipses zeal.

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville tells us of Father Mapple’s sermon on the Book of Jonah. Listen to Mapple’s artistic treatment:

Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land’; when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten — his ears like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean — Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

But perhaps Father Mapple’s art can afford to be more obvious than his zeal: he is preaching in a church already there and is not delivering urgency but a sermon on urgency!

How Shall We Then Preach?

For years I have felt myself trapped in this quandary. Growing a church causes me to speak of redemption, frequently and earnestly. My sermons often sound to me too Falwellian or Criswellian or Pattersonian, my sermons more zealous than artistic. It is their intent to draw persons to Christ, in which pursuit my church is engaged.

But you may object, “Is it only the sermon that builds your church? Do you not use the manuals and conventional machinery of the church and parachurch?” Yes. There have been mailing programs, and such radio and newspaper ads as we could manage. In fact, has not the sermon become second place in the church? Bill Hull once said in a denominational symposium:

Let us candidly confront this chilling claim that the pulpit is no longer the prow of the church, much less of civilization, as Herman Melville visualized it in Moby Dick. Ask any pulpit committee after months of intensive investigation and travel: How many pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention are even trying to build their careers on the centrality of preaching? … Subtle but excruciating pressures are brought to bear on the minister today to spend all of the week feverishly engineering some spectacular scheme designed to draw attention to his church, then on Saturday night to dust off somebody else’s clever sermon outline (semantic gimmickry) for use the next morning.

Is this not so? To some degree, I think it is.

But there are some of us who don’t want it to be. We feel called to do the work of an evangelist and believe urgency can have some class and be done with some artistry and/or enlightenment. For years I have listened to the sermons of Richard Jackson, pastor at North Phoenix Baptist Church, with great debt to his example. After he finished a long series on the Passion passage of Saint John, I had seen the Cross in a new light. During more than a year of sermons from that Gospel, more than six hundred were added to his church by baptism. Perhaps Pastor Jackson has taken the burden of urgency to the Greek New Testament and the credible commentators and has emerged to say, “Here is enlightened urgency.”

Perhaps Swindoll has done it with certainty. Perhaps Draper did it with Hebrews in his commentary. The sermon by each of these, I believe, is a declaration of urgency that at the same time takes giant strides toward homiletic finesse.

A secular parallel commends itself, again noticed by Bill Hull:

With disaster staring him in the face, Churchill took up the weapon of his adversary and began to do battle with words. From a concrete bomb shelter deep underground, he spoke to the people of Britain not of superiority but of sacrifice, not of conquest but of courage, not of revenge but of renewal. Slowly but surely, Winston Churchill talked England back to life. To beleaguered old men waiting on their rooftops with the buckets of water for the fire bombs to land, to frightened women and children huddled behind sandbags with sirens screaming overhead, to exhausted pilots dodging tracer bullets in the midnight sky, his words not only announced a new dawn but also conveyed the strength to bring it to pass.
No wonder Ruskin described a sermon as “thirty minutes to raise the dead.” That is our awesome assignment: to put into words, in such a way that our hearers will put into deeds, the new day that is ours in Jesus Christ our Lord.

I am not talking about dogmatism. Dogmatism is authority-sclerosis. It is an incessant filibuster — never mute, always deaf! Talking is easier and much louder than thinking. The growing church too often cannot celebrate new truth, for it is too long screaming the old ones. The familiar is the creed, the unfamiliar is liberalism and dangerous revisionism. The thinking person off the street may want to ask questions and enter into dialogue, but he finds that trying to ask a question is like shouting into the gale or trying to quote the flag salute at a rock concert. His need for reasons seems buried in the noise.

I have always applauded Huck Finn for deciding to go with Tom Sawyer to hell than with the fundamentalist Miss Watson to heaven:

Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I wasn’t particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn’t say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble and wouldn’t do no good.
Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and, she said, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.

The logic of the streets is doubly plagued by such images. Why would a robust, open-minded Christ so love an overcorseted, dispeptic, neurotic Scripture quoter as Miss Watson? Hell, for all its fiery disadvantages, seems a quieter and kinder place than her heaven.

It is not that saying “Thus saith the Lord” is wrong, and yet we are all drawn by the counsel of a friend who says, “Let us look together at what the Lord saith”! When we become more authoritarian in dialogues, we need to be sure we are really speaking the mind of God and not merely strong-arming our own agenda in another’s more mighty name.

What Matters Most

Still, as crass as it sounds, unless the preached word encounters and changes its hearers in some way, artistry and enchantment cannot be said to have mattered much. The sermon must not at last be cute, but life changing. As Somerset Maugham said of certain writers, “Their flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step.”

When the sermon has reasoned, exhorted, pled, and pontificated; when it has glittered with art and oozed with intrigue; when it has entered into human hearts and broken secular thralldom — when all of this has been done, the sermon must enter into judgment at a high tribunal. Like the speaker who uttered it, the sermon must hear the judgment of the last great auditor. If, indeed, every word is brought to God, one can imagine the last great gathering of the sermons of all ages — the march of the cassettes past the throne. Every word tried … a thousand, thousand sermons — indeed, a great multitude which no man could number: Peter Marshall, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Apostle, Peter Piper, Peter Paul, Popes, Carl McIntire, Oral Roberts, Robert Bellarmine, John R. Rice, John Newton, John Hus, Prince John — a thousand, thousand words from David Brainerd to Origen, Tertullian to Swaggart, Jack Van Impe to Arius, all at once replying to one issue: Which sermons really counted?

The God who is the ancient lover of sinners will cry to those sermons at his left hand, “Why did you not serve me? Why did you not love men and women enough to change them? You took their hearts, commanded their attention, but did nothing to change them. Be gone, ye cursed sermons, to Gehenna — be burned to ashes and scattered over chaos — for better sermons would have called chaos to unfold itself in strong creation.”

- More fromCalvin Miller

Calvin Miller

Pastors

Tim Timmons

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

To stand and drone out a sermon in a kind of articulate snoring to people who are somewhat between awake and asleep must be wretched work.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The apostle Paul wrote, “How can people hear without someone preaching to them?” Tim Timmons wonders, “How do we make them even want to hear?”
No preacher wants to preach to empty pews or vacant stares.
In our day, we cannot assume the sermon will fall upon willing ears. In some circles, sermon is a dirty word. “Don’t preach to me!” is practically the motto of a generation. Gone are the days when the great sermons were broadly read and discussed. Today, preachers must capture the ears of the crowd if they will be heard at all among the cacophony of compact discs and co*ke commercials.
Timmons, immersed in the life of Irvine, California — the capital of Southern California chic — has spied out the unpromising land of secular life. At South Coast Community Church, swirling, shifting, unsettled secularity surrounds him. He knows the shuttle buses run to Disneyland and Newport Beach rather than his church. So why would anyone come to hear his preaching?
Timmons has found a method. And people do flock to hear him preach — people who could be polishing their convertibles or jogging under graceful palms or enhancing their year-round tans.
This first chapter tackles a question prior to any convincing the preacher might accomplish: “Why should they listen to me?”

A fellow attended a special evening service at the church but sat near the door. After the speaker had droned on for some forty minutes, the fellow got up and left. On the way out, he met a friend coming in. The man asked, “Am I very late, Zeke? What’s he talking about?”

“Don’t know. He ain’t said yet!”

In every speaking situation, what matters most is this: Did the audience get the speaker’s point?

I know no greater misery than sensing the audience isn’t listening to me. It makes me so nervous I talk faster, pound the pulpit or raise my voice, and seem flooded with perspiration from every pore! In 1971 a friend, Rabbi White, invited me to speak to the national officers of the Jewish Defense League. Now the J.D.L. is no tea-and-crumpets group. They tend to get physical. What’s worse, Rabbi White asked me to speak on “Why I Believe Jesus Is the Messiah!” I can think of at least three million better ideas.

To be honest, nothing worked that day. As I spoke, they seemed to size up my body thinking, One grenade should do it. They had no intention of listening.

After many experiences of saying too much to people who listen too little, I have made it my life’s goal to talk so people will listen. From my experience with secular audiences and Christian congregations, I carved out an approach I call the “AHAAAA! Method of Communication.” (That’s because my aim is to move the audience to an “AHAAAA!” response.) The method has six steps:

Define Your Audience

No speaker is more effective than the one who knows and relates to an audience, yet few things are more difficult. As we emerge from our theological training stuffed with “all the answers,” it’s very easy to preach answers to people not asking those questions. And until I know the questions, the answers don’t matter.

When requested to speak, I ask five basic questions:

First, who is my audience (age, sex, background, prejudices)?

Second, what are their questions (thoughts, feelings, struggles, pains, needs)?

Third, which of those questions shall I address?

Fourth, what is God’s answer to this question?

And fifth, how much time do I have?

These help me relate to my listeners, whether for a series of messages or a one-shot opportunity.

When I first moved to California, I delivered one of my most memorable messages to a community group. I was so impressed with my intellectual prowess. I traced the line of despair à la Schaeffer. I made monkeys out of evolutionists à la Wilder-Smith. I proved humanism inhuman à la Montgomery. I dazzled them with my footwork — dazzled them to sleep. Why? Simply because I was so into my “answers” I forgot to get into their questions.

How does one discover the questions? The most effective way I know is to live with people. I enjoy this most about the pastorate. I live among those I pastor and those I want to reach. For years I stepped all around people to go speak here and there. But for the last ten years I have been living with people in my world. There’s a big difference.

This means thinking with them, reading what they are reading — best sellers, self-help books, insight books, psychological books, magazines, newsletters, and anything else I can get my hands on that will help me understand people. I want to know their struggles and pains — their questions. Once I understand their questions, I can package relevant biblical answers for distribution.

Another helpful activity is to speak frequently in secular situations. If my aim is to reach my community, I can say yes to Rotary, Kiwanis, Exchange Club, Junior League, P.T.A., and many other civic organizations that constantly seek speakers. Taking advantage of these opportunities forces me to think about this kind of audience. It’s a great exercise in analysis.

I must also play with them. Just as Jesus went to the “sinners,” so we must go where people need the Lord — the health club, tennis club, YMCA, racquetball court, or country club. Community soccer, baseball, basketball, and football programs are always in need of volunteers. Coaching soccer and baseball each year gives me close contact with several entire families for a season.

Fourth, I must counsel with them. By this I am not insisting on a line-up of appointments. However, if I talk so people listen, I will stir up more and more questions, and they will seek further help. Here I grapple with people’s pain — their lost-ness. Nothing escorts me into reality more quickly than being eyeball-to-eyeball with a family’s seemingly impossible situation. When I’m standing in the midst of a hemorrhage, my spiritual Band-Aids seem to shrink a bit.

I think of my task this way: If I don’t relate to my world, my world will never relate to my God.

Determine the Handicaps

I’ve found three ongoing handicaps that tend to keep us from talking so people will listen. If we are not aware of these handicaps, we will not work on them. And if we don’t, they will virtually silence our message.

The first is that the world is listening to everything else. There is no such thing as a captive audience. Competition nearly overwhelms people; they suffer from overcommitment and overchoice. In my community, people have almost stopped signing up for things in advance; they just show up — if there is nothing better to do.

Our world also suffers from the greatest religion of all — confusionism. People are confused about right and wrong, relationships, the future as well as the past. They are also confused about identity, the mystery of intimacy, and their struggle with inadequacy. And for the most part, the Bible isn’t recognized as a primary authority. It’s just another voice in the confusion.

To overcome this handicap, we must offer clear, pertinent answers to the world’s greatest needs. The Bible must be demonstrated as a relevant, down-to-earth message of healing.

The second handicap is that the church is talking to itself. We create evangelistic programs and air them on Christian stations. We write evangelistic articles and print them in Christian magazines. We publish evangelistic books and sell them only in Christian bookstores. We have evangelistic meetings and hold them within the four holy walls of the church facility. Then we are shocked when the world doesn’t listen.

We must take this handicap seriously. If we are to be salt and light interrelating with people in our world to bring them to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, we must prepare and present our life-changing message for those who need it most. We have been judging the world and talking to ourselves when we really ought to be judging ourselves and talking to the world — in ways they will listen.

The third handicap is that the speaker is in a box. It seems every Christian group has its “holy huddle.” Their whole purpose is to hold on until Jesus returns. They are not interested in talking so people will listen, because they believe no one ever will listen. Such people will embalm our ministry if we let them. We must love them, care for them, and listen to them, but never allow ourselves to be managed by them.

Another box is formed by our influential professors and past mentors. The first few years out of seminary I found myself still speaking, writing, and counseling for my professors. It was as if they were still with me, looking over my shoulder and evaluating me. This blurred my primary audience.

Defeating this handicap means being managed only by God, not the “holy huddle” or past professors. Then we are freed to respond to the real audience.

Direct the Angle

With my audience and handicaps in mind, I next choose my subject matter and aim it appropriately. Jesus always directed what he wanted to say toward his audience. To the woman at the well, the angle was the water of life. To the blind man, it was the light of the world.

In a world riddled with problems, we must not teach the Word of God without angling our teaching toward those desperate problems. Alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, child molestation, crime, suicide, and disease are all epidemic, and Christians are not sealed in a mayonnaise jar against them. To get the “AHAAAA!” response from our congregations, we must direct the angle of our message toward their problems.

Develop Your Attitude

The more I speak the more I realize that people tune in to my attitude before they listen to anything I have to say. They catch my attitudes about two things: myself and humanity.

If I affect a pious sanctity, they are unable to identify and will not listen. But when my attitude is genuinely down-to-earth, the barriers come down. My vulnerability is vital to getting people to listen. They must be able to trust me.

People won’t miss my attitude toward humanity in general, either. I want my audience to know I care for them no matter what. That’s hard to resist. I want to express this attitude: I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that’s OK, because there is hope to become OK through a personal relationship with God.

At a tennis club one day nearly two years ago, my scheduled opponent didn’t show up. Another match was arranged for me. We introduced ourselves and moved to our respective back lines to warm up.

Suddenly the man said, “What was your name again?”

“Tim Timmons.”

He dropped his racquet and moved toward the net. I met him there. With a finger pointing into my face, he asked repeatedly, “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!”

Finally he blurted out, “I’m going to tell you: I’m the p*rno king of Orange County! What do you think of that?”

I could tell he was waiting for me to pull a big, black Bible out of my sports bag and tear into him.

I put my finger up into his face and said, “Let me ask you something. Can you play tennis?”

He gulped and eventually mumbled, “Yes.”

“Then get back there, and let’s play!” I said. We went at it. I prayed in that instance for victory (a Grade A miracle) and surprisingly, my prayers were answered.

When he shook my hand at the net, his first words were “What times are your services Sunday?” He began attending, and in six months, he retired from the p*rnography business. About eight months later he placed his faith in Jesus. What a thrill to watch all this! Because he bought my attitude toward him and life in general, he was willing to listen to my message.

Deliver Your Appeals

At this point, the audience is ready to listen. Now what will they hear?

We must appeal to them, and our appeal must be dynamic. While the audience is a crucial determinant of what to present, our intended appeal is the pivotal factor in how to deliver a message. The appeals we make are the basic connectors between us and our audience. If executed properly, they enable us to break down the invisible wall between us.

The nature of these appeals makes the difference between true persuasion and shameless propaganda. Persuasion moves people to change on a long-term basis in view of great reward. The shift is genuine. Propaganda moves people to change on a short-term basis, usually producing great regret. It’s the skilled art of the con man hyping his audience for an instant, with no one to fix the wreckage.

Every time I stand up to speak, my listeners ask one foundational question: Why should I listen to you? And within this question are three subquestions:

Can I trust you?

Do you care for me?

Do you know what you are talking about?

Unless I answer all three adequately, I greatly hinder any opportunity for true persuasion. On the contrary, if I answer each of these well, I have the best opportunity to communicate dynamically and truly persuade.

The question Can I trust you? amounts to Are you a good person? Have you experienced what you’re talking about? What are you really selling? My audience wants to know my ethical appeal.

Ethical appeal is not easily put on. You either have it or you don’t. It is normally based on a good track record. People can smell it. Those who have it smell good; those who don’t smell bad. And audiences are sniffing away, because they must pick up the scent of ethical appeal before they will respond.

In the recent Billy Graham Crusade in Anaheim, California, I was challenged again by his incredible ethical appeal. He really doesn’t have to say much (though he does), nor does he have to say it in a dynamic way (though he does). He overwhelms his audience with his long track record of ethical appeal.

The second subquestion, Do you care for me? is a short way of saying, Are you interested primarily in your own well-being or mine? Do you mean what you say? Are you actually committed to it? Are you excited about it? My audience wants to know my emotional appeal. Do I really care for them, or am I just going through the motions? People sense enthusiasm and intensity. Emotional appeal becomes contagious, and the audience has a tough time resisting it.

Over the years I watched Richard Halverson demonstrate vibrant emotional appeal to his congregation in Bethesda, Maryland. Each Sunday he expressed his true excitement and affection for his people. He told them how much he loved them and appreciated the privilege of being their pastor. He had one of the most beautiful love affairs with his congregation I’ve ever seen.

Third, Do you know what you are talking about? Do you make sense? Do you have evidence? Is that evidence fair? Who are your authorities? My audience wants to know my logical appeal. This does not mean telling all I know about a subject, but it must be clear that I know much more than I am telling. Logical appeal helps an audience understand truth more clearly and persuades them that it makes enough sense to act upon it.

I have found it extremely effective to appeal to secular authorities as part of my logical appeal. There are biblical examples of this technique, especially Paul’s use of Greek poets in his Acts 17 address in Athens. Using the Word of God as a foundational authority, it’s easy to find widely accepted secular references that state the same truth. This does not make the biblical truth more true, but it does lead your audience from the secular authority they already accept to your ultimate authority they may or may not already accept.

Probably the clearest example of all three appeals in action is in 1 Thessalonians 2:1-13. Paul approached his audience “not … from error or impurity or by way of deceit … nor with a pretext for greed.” (Ethical appeal — Can I trust you?) He also approached them “as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.…” (Emotional appeal — Do you care for me?) Having laid this foundation, his logical appeal was successful; he says, “When you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God.”

That’s what I want as a response to my communication. This is what I mean by “AHAAAA!” — an ethically, emotionally, and logically satisfying response to God’s truth.

Do Application

Application becomes natural if it follows the preceding steps. As a speaker, I simply must not ignore the action-steps that flow out of a message. I have heard it said that 5 percent of an audience are innovators, 15 percent are adapters, and 80 percent are adopters. If this is even approximately accurate, most of our audiences will not act on their own. They need simple action-steps they can adopt to apply truth.

I test my action-steps with a three-point quiz:

First, are they realistic? Can people actually do them? Would I do them?

Second, are the steps relational? Is anybody else committed to them? Without a dimension of relational accountability, most applications of truth seem to have a built-in fizzle factor.

Third, are my action-steps responsible? Do they lead people toward greater personal responsibility? I don’t want to leave any room for my audience to blame others or count on them unduly for help.

After all is said and done, more is said than done. Our task as pastors is to close that gap between talking and walking. The most effective gap-closing method I know is to talk so more people will listen, moving them toward a satisfied “AHAAAA!” response.

- More fromTim Timmons

Pastors

Gordon MacDonald

A Sunday morning encounter led to an irresistible illustration.

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Young Striped Skunk in roadside ditch

The cure for dullness in the pulpit is not brilliance but reality.
P. T. Forsyth

The common people are captivated more readily by comparisons and examples than by difficult and subtle disputations. They would rather see a well-drawn picture than a well-written book.
Martin Luther

In preaching, the best time to hook a congregation is at the outset. The moment is ripe. Catch it, and thoughts travel with you; lose it, and minds dim like lights in a brownout.To begin a sermon with spark is half the battle. And a well-chosen illustration can ignite that spark. Sometimes the illustrations practically write themselves. Those are the blessed Sundays. Other times, the dread monster, Sermon Block, rears its ugly head, scaring away any great beginnings—or even mediocre ones for that matter—and we wonder if we can get anything across before the congregation signals one by one that the lights are on but no one's home.When he was pastor of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, Gordon MacDonald saw a desperate skunk that provided the perfect illustration for his sermon one Sunday.

I was driving to church when I first saw the skunk in the middle of Grant Street, a quiet thoroughfare in my hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts. Skunks are a common sight in the early morning hours, but this one was different. It was violently careening back and forth from one curb to the other, blinded and crazed by what seemed to be a box jammed over its head.

I looked closer. The skunk had apparently raided someone's garbage can during the night, found a cocoa box with a few grains of chocolate in the bottom, and decided to pursue what refreshment remained. But greed had gotten the best of the animal when it stuck its nose far inside, and now the box had become a self-made prison.

This strange encounter with the skunk happened early on a beautiful Sunday morning, the sort of day that makes New Englanders glad they didn't relocate in Florida. If I felt a bit groggy that morning, it was because I'd struggled through one of those sleepless nights experienced by all preachers who aren't quite sure the Sunday morning sermon has jelled enough to be confidently delivered to a discriminating congregation.

Although I felt confident that I had something substantial and biblical to say, I was alarmed about the introduction. The fact was that it hardly existed. I had been unable to develop one that made sense. It was a preacher's version of "writer's block."

My fear was based on years of preaching experience, which have taught me that some sort of "key" is needed to open the doors of people's hearts. You can't simply stand up and say, "This is what I have on my mind today," and then expect anyone to be overwhelmed with curiosity.

That "key" can take many forms: a startling question, a humorous comment, the recollection of a common event, or a familiar story. Whatever key the speaker selects, it has to be provocative because it must break through all sorts of resistances set up in the minds of preoccupied, fatigued, and perhaps even bored people. That fact of preaching life was making me feel desperate that morning when I drove up Grant Street and met the skunk.

I stopped my car and spent several minutes amused at the skunk's predicament. I even entertained the notion of getting out of the car and relieving the skunk of its burden. But a smarter side of me concluded that the terrified animal might misunderstand my motive and act in the time-honored manner of all cornered skunks. As I watched from the safety of my car, he grew more exhausted and finally slowed his frantic pace, slinking off to one side of the road to ponder his untenable situation.

I drove past the skunk—on the other side of the road—and felt a faint sensation of guilt. Perhaps it was the kind of feeling that might have needled the priest and the Levite in the biblical story who, while traveling down the road to Jericho, chose to ignore a mugged man lying in a ditch. I also had my religious duties that morning, and I couldn't see how I could help the skunk anyway.

When our morning worship service began a couple of hours later, the boxed-in skunk was all but forgotten. Here I was, just 20 minutes away from presenting an important challenge to the congregation, and I didn't know yet how to seize their attention.

What made matters worse for me was that this was the first Sunday of our annual missions emphasis, and my objective in the sermon was to reaffirm our responsibility to share our faith and material resources with the poor and needy. I needed no one to remind me that when it is a matter of people and money, you had better be able to do a superior job of persuasion.

Like it or not, that skunk was coming to our church. Well, in story form anyway.

As the worship service went on, I became more and more distressed. It was uncharacteristic of me, I told myself, to be on the verge of entering the pulpit not knowing exactly how the sermon was to be launched. What had gone wrong in my preparation? Had I missed something God had wanted me to see or think through? Perhaps I'd failed to prepare the right sermon entirely.

It was during the offering when the plight of the skunk reentered my mind. What had happened to him? I wondered. And what would have happened to me if I'd tried the Good Samaritan routine?

Suddenly ideas began to converge. My imagination kicked in. Like it or not, that skunk was coming to our church. Well, in story form anyway.

A minute later I was at the pulpit. I described what I'd seen on Grant Street a few hours before. I pictured the delight the skunk must have felt when he first found the cocoa box in a garbage can—and his frustration when he tried to reach the treat inside. But the hole was narrow, unaccommodating to a skunk's mouth. As the story progressed, the congregation was hooked. Even the children were hanging on every word. Everyone picturing the skunk straining to get his tongue through the hole in the top of that cocoa box.

Then I described the unhappy result: how the skunk discovered to his horror that he and the box were suddenly inseparable. That's when I drove up—with the skunk out in the street, running amuck, desperate to free itself.

I waited for several seconds. It's the sort of self-imposed silence that makes a nervous speaker impatient. But the pause is important—listeners can let the words sink in like a soft rain until they all saw it and the laugher began. Everyone was involved—exactly what an effective introduction is supposed to do.

When the laughter ended, I went on, "You can now appreciate the fact that I was faced with a momentous moral dilemma."

You could almost see the wheels turning as they all thought through the implication of the comment. And then, an explosion of laughter; everyone got the point almost at the same time.

The "moral challenge" was obvious. They could smell a no-win situation. And that is the stuff of which humor is usually made.

I suppose they also laughed because something told each listener that there was enormous symbolism in the story. They were caused to think of even greater predicaments in which we all eventually find ourselves—similar moral challenges carrying even greater risks of involvement.

The congregation was thinking with me now. A mental key had been turned, and all of them wanted to see how the preacher was going to use it.

With an opening tale as good as that one, the rest of any sermon, if properly prepared, can move swiftly for a preacher and even the congregation. In this case, the one thing that remained was to make sure the account of the skunk was properly linked with the overarching truth.

The purpose of the sermon had been to challenge the people to understand that caring for one another and for the people of the world who are oppressed and deprived is not only necessary, but probably involves sacrifice. And it might be something that cannot be done without personal risk. "These were the sort of things that had been going in my mind when I asked myself if I shouldn't do something for that skunk on Grant Street."

The congregation was thinking with me now. A mental key had been turned, and all of them wanted to see how the preacher was going to use it.

But there was a final question to ask as the congregation was thinking through the potential cost and casualties involved in caring. It became time to break that tension. So I said, "Now some of you are probably wondering what happened to the skunk."

The laughter said that was exactly what they had been wondering.

"The answer is simple," I said. "I don't know. Perhaps the police came and shot it." There were groans of dismay. "Perhaps someone braver came along and attempted a rescue. And perhaps," again I paused, "the skunk is up in the woods still facing a dangerous situation."

You could tell that the congregation had become quite sympathetic, and it grieved them to think that he was dead or that he remained in trouble.

Thus I posed this final question: "Why do you and I find it relatively easy to sympathize with a poor animal in a defenseless situation yet too often ignore human beings in a similar predicament?"

The question burned into each of us. What were we to do about a world that included a lot of wounded and hurting people whose predicaments were a self-contained prison? They were the ones we had to consider rescuing with our love, our energy, our resources. We could not afford to pass them by. With that, the sermon was over.

If I'd not been able to bring that skunk to church in story form, where would that sermon have ever gone? His plight had become my main point, and because of him, people began to think about caring in a new light.

The sun was noon-high as I drove back down Grant Street after the worship services. When I reached the place where I'd met the skunk earlier in the morning, I slowed down just a bit to see if he might still be around. He wasn't.

I wonder what I would have done if he'd still been there. Would I have reciprocated the favor he paid me by coming to church in my sermon? Would I have been more caring about him the second time around? I never had a chance to find out.

- More fromGordon MacDonald

Gordon MacDonald

Pastors

Bruce Rowlison

Most couples are open to building the best marriage possible; my aim is to coach them toward that goal.

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Young couple in love walking in the summer park holding hands, filtered image

A psychologist once said to me bluntly, "Don't send me any more premarriage counseling. The couples aren't in crisis. They don't want to work on their relationship. They just want to get married. They are less in love than they are in heat. You keep them, Pastor."

I don't agree with his conclusion, but that conversation forced me to question my premarital ministry to couples.

Gradually I began to see myself as more of a coach than a counselor. A coach discovers and points out skills already there, then tries to motivate people to increase those skills and gain new ones. In premarital counseling, I find couples open to building the best marriage they possibly can; my aim is to coach them toward that goal.

Still, the couple's affection for each other is so intense it does periodically block the rational. They seem to float above my office couch, rather than sit comfortably on it. But in spite of all their anxiety and impatience, meaningful things happen in our times together.

Establishing a Relationship

I begin by building a friendship. I'm convinced learning increases as trust and respect are established. Plus, my God is personal. He knows me by name. So, I spend time getting acquainted.

Right at the beginning I tell them, "In order to personalize your wedding, I need to get acquainted with you both. Hopefully, the information we share will build our friendship, and I expect our relationship to continue beyond the wedding."

I begin with positive, easy questions: How did you meet? What have been some of the most enjoyable times you've had together? How did you come to the conclusion that this is the one you want to marry?

I'm beginning to collect information on their relationship skills, attitude toward marriage, and openness to my input. The quality of this time often determines the effectiveness of our sessions. I acknowledge and honor their right to pass over a subject they are uncomfortable discussing with me at this stage. (Who wants to be lied to anyway?) I tell them I consider it a privilege to share in this pivotal point in their journey, the beginning of their married life.

After establishing rapport, I begin to ask the more difficult questions, such as, "Which of you felt the most discomfort in coming to see me, and why?" I ask them to describe their visits with each other's families, because those are often the most stressful times in courtship.

Seeing Eye to Eye

I'm now ready to move toward some agreement for the rest of our time together. My transition question is, "Before we go any further, I need to check if you have some expectations of our time together. What are your special interests or needs, so I'm sure to budget time for them?" I listen as much for what they don't expect as for their expectations.

Then I often give a 60-second synopsis of who I am, what I have been through in life, what skills I have that might be helpful to them, and where I'm weak: "I'm not a psychologist. I'm a pastor. A lot of my work has to do with marriage. I have skills in listening and clarifying. I don't try to change people's personalities. So relax. I'm not good in money management, but we have a banker and two realtors in the church who will help you free of charge. Here are some options for us to work on in our times together. You pick three or four, and I'll pick three or four, and we'll have a good time together."

Among my list of options:

misconceptions of love and marriage
games that can increase friendship
practical issues in marriage (money, sex and affection, role expectations, values, religious faith, power and freedom, communication, and nurture)
romantic love
Christian marriage

I believe in offering choices because it shifts responsibility to them. In my early years, I left the office exhausted while the couple departed bored. They had watched me do marvelous things for ninety minutes: lecture on sexuality, supply money management insights taken from a speech by a well-known economist, administer probing quizzes and diagnose the quality of their relationship. But I've changed my style to become the coach who helps them do the work.

I don't even administer psychological tests and inventories any more. I am not against testing. I simply find that such instruments tend to raise the couple's anxiety level, and one of my goals is to reduce any sense of threat so they can deal with their actual needs and worries.

Misconceptions

One "test" I do give is called "Misconceptions of Love and Marriage." I make a game out of it; I laugh and overdramatize it. I tell them I won't give them the answers unless they tie me to the chair and threaten my life, because the purpose is to stimulate conversation, not right or wrong answers. In this test they are supposed to mark various statements as true or false:

Loneliness will be cured by marriage.
Crying is something to be avoided in marriage.
Getting angry is better than being critical.

The list contains 25 such statements.

Amazing things happen in these moments. They laugh. They disagree openly. They get nervous. They show frustration. They reveal expectations. Sometimes they begin to ask for information. But my goal is for them to do the talking. I stimulate their conversation. As a pastor trained to correct wrong thinking, I have to bite my tongue here. Later I will teach them, but now, through their conversation, I get an immediate feel for how naive or informed they are.

If I'm working with a couple struggling to articulate feelings, or with a couple where one person dominates the conversation and the other grunts or nods, I shift our direction and suggest we play another game. I have some toys that represent real-life things, such as Monopoly money, a plastic telephone, a baby doll. They reach into the bag, pull something out, and state what the item means to them or how they feel about it. One man took out the telephone, threw it across the room, and exclaimed, "I hate the thing. It's always interrupting my time with people." The nonverbal communication becomes more animated as well — the way they handle each object, facial responses, glances, and gestures. I've been amazed at how these simple toys help couples relax and begin to talk more openly.

Practical Issues

I spend the bulk of my time on "practical issues in love and marriage" to prepare couples for the early adjustment stages of marriage. I want them aware of some of the complexities, conflicts, and struggles. I ask each person to pick a section of this topic, and I begin with the one the least-verbal partner selected.

I try to fill these moments with humor and anecdotes, employing hypothetical situations to watch for their responses. I might say, "The basic approach to money in my family, growing up, was to save. We never had much, but out of our meager resources we were disciplined to save something. The problem was, we never knew what we were saving for. The terms 'rainy day' and 'emergency' were used frequently but never defined. We were glad we weren't like neighbors across the street who 'always fought about how they would invest.' Does this ring any bells with you?"

Another goal of mine is to model openness on topics that have been taboo previously, such as sex, money, or anger.

If they respond strongly to any one point, I concentrate on that area. I draw them out, ask if they would like more information, listen actively, give feedback, point out resources in the church family to help them.

Affection and sexuality.

I spend a lot of time on affection and sexuality. I start by sharing a statement by David Hub-bard that I have found to be true: "Remember, men and women, because of Genesis 3 and the sin in the Garden of Eden, everyone you meet will be confused sexually and have a problem with idolatry." I point out I fall into that category, as do family members, doctors, parents, and friends. We all struggle to find accurate sexual information. So, where do you find information on sexuality? What is sexual love? What will you do if one of you is more highly sexed than the other? I ask lots of questions and hold back information until I perceive eagerness or receptivity on their part.

I find the affection and caring/intimacy side of sexuality is often neglected and misunderstood. An area of tension even among Christians (perhaps especially among Christians) is the issue of what is one person's right to know about the other's sexual past. I don't try to press my ideas on them. My greatest concern is that they agree about how much candor they can expect from each other.

Another factor increasingly affecting sexuality today is traumatic sexual experiences such as rape or incest. Gently raising that issue and reassuring them that professional help is available may be my greatest contribution to their sexual compatibility. I hope to lead them into a deeper level of communication than they have previously experienced.

A Lutheran friend acts as a priest at this point in his coaching. He receives confession, pronounces absolution, and sets them free for a new direction in life. Sometimes he anoints with oil. Often he cries with them. He is continually amazed at the visible change this effects in couples.

If the couple is new to the church, I ask them to articulate their formative church's views on marital roles. Role expectations — the meaning of headship and submissiveness, the need for increased emotional support, the level of financial support expected — are being debated fiercely in the Christian community today. I find this a major area where modern marriages are exploding. Who determines the roles? How well are they articulated? What happens if roles change with the coming of children or sickness? I try to be pointedly practical.

Values.

To break the question-answer pattern, I treat the values area more creatively. "Draw your family crest," I tell them, "selecting symbols that represent what was important to you growing up." In another exercise, I give them colored cards and ask them to write their values on them, red for nonnegotiable values, yellow for important but modifiable ones, and green for flexible ones. The values deal with such issues as types of occupation, whether and when to have children, and family life.

"I must have passion in marriage," one woman said, leaning forward with her jaw firm.

"What constitutes passion for you, and what are some things that arouse it and things that kill it?" I responded. "Do you know where that need comes from and why it is so intense?"

When she answered, I asked her fiancé what he heard her say. I then asked, "Are you both willing to commit money, time, and energy to that value?" These understandings or misunderstandings prove crucial to a marriage.

Religious faith.

If they don't select the religious faith section, I do. I spin life stories of how different religious journeys develop or clash. I encourage them to share their faith adventure with me. This is an area where couples are often vague and mystical. They tend to romanticize. So I press for concreteness: "How often do you expect to go to church?" "Tell me about the last time your fiancée said, 'I'm sorry. I was wrong. Will you forgive me?'"

Power and freedom.

This is the area in which I have made the most misjudgments. I send couples to a Christian counselor, saying, "The man is a tyrant." Then I'll sit in on a session with the couple and the therapist, and he'll say, "She is in total control. Did you see the way he jumped when she coughed? Did you see him stop talking when she frowned at him?"

I'm not hesitant to admit inadequacy in any section where I'm weak. I'll give them names of Christian counselors as resources. I can't do all things for them, and it is wise to tell them that.

Communication.

This is one area in which I try to secure a promise from them. I say, "You promise God in the wedding service that you will love each other. To preserve communication, will you promise each other you will have a weekly business meeting to check out your calendar and emotional well-being? And will you commit to two mini-honeymoons yearly, even if they are only overnight?"

Nurture.

Mutual nurture is my special emphasis. I am amazed at how few people have articulated how they want to be nurtured (even those married ten and twenty years). We tend to nurture a spouse in the way we want to be nurtured. But our approach to nurturing can aggravate the spouse we intend to lovingly support. The wife, who might be nurtured by exercise, may be always buying jogging suits, stationary bicycles, tennis shoes, and racketball equipment for her spouse, who hates athletics and loves his night at home by the fire with a good book. My aim is for couples to respect each other's nurture needs, even if they don't understand them.

I know I can't resolve all these practical issues for a couple, but I can raise their awareness of them. I can open the issues and tell them help is available. Later, if conflicts increase, I hope they won't be paralyzed and do nothing until the problem reaches a catastrophic level.

I give homework assignments to check a couple's motivational level. Outside assignments also help information move from their heads to the gut. I assign couples the task of looking up some Bible passages that teach about marriage and writing one sentence about each passage. I intend this launching into the Scriptures in a general way to impress them with the reality that God designed marriage for specific reasons and has exciting things to say about how marriage works best. We'll talk later about the passages. One of my goals is for them to experience God's love and presence in their relationship.

The Meaning of Christian Marriage

I shift next to the area of contract and covenant in marriage. I explain how psychologists today argue that every marriage has a contract, perhaps implied if not written out or discussed, and usually both parties perceive the contract differently. I take them through an actual contract of a couple who are friends of mine. Again, I make a game of it, asking them where they think the marriage almost blew apart.

In my experience, this is the most potentially explosive portion of our time together. "I have the right of access to your schedule," one woman fumed as she and her fiancé formed their contract in front of me.

"No way!" he shouted back. "I go where I want to go and do what I want to do just like during our engagement."

"Unacceptable," she replied. "That is not a marriage." They argued a few more minutes and then jumped up and left my office never to return — and never to marry. I often reflect on how important it was for them to discover that polarization before they made their big step.

I don't want to leave any couple at the contract stage. The sacred bond of covenant transcends the legal ties of marriage. So we discuss at length God's commitment to their union and how it symbolizes to a non-Christian world the commitment of God to his people.

Agreeing on the Service

I end my time with a couple by going through the wedding service line by line. I have gathered copies of five different vows, from high church to contemporary. I ask them to select the ones that best express their theology, taste, and feelings. Rarely has a couple said, "No, you choose one, Pastor."

From the central aspect of the vows, I move backward in the wedding service to explain the questions of intent, the meaning of the Scripture readings and prayers. Then I sit back and watch them do all the work of deciding what they want included in their service, and in what form. Through their interactions I can see how they make decisions.

When they are finished, they have designed their wedding service — within the limits I have set. Couples find it exhilarating. I ask my secretary to type the service, and we deliver several copies to them.

Like any pastor, I have room to improve my premarital ministry to couples. One area I am currently studying is how to better relate couples to the church's ongoing program of marriage enrichment. But my ministry is working. By the time we reach the wedding event:

We have built a warm and trusting relationship.
I have involved them in the process by giving them choices.
They have articulated their expectations.
We have studied practical issues, and I have conveyed critical information in important areas.
They have practiced and strengthened their communication skills.
I have modeled and they have experienced openness on subjects that might have been taboo previously.
We have shared the presence of Christ together.
Study of Scripture and the meaning of covenant has helped them understand the difference between getting married and holy matrimony.
They have begun to articulate the rules of their relationship.
Perhaps there has been confession, with forgiveness pronounced and experienced.
They are aware of where to turn for help in the years ahead.
The wedding service will express their unique relationship.

Building the best possible marriages remains a lofty goal, but for the health of the home and the church, it is a worthwhile pursuit. And I would find premarital conversations worthwhile if only the first goal were achieved—a warm and trusting relationship established between me and the couple. Just as marriage gives couples a secure environment in which to grow and reach out, the relationship I've begun with a couple offers a secure step to a deeper relationship with the church and her Bridegroom.

- More fromBruce Rowlison

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Whatever you do, let people see that you are in good earnest. You cannot break men’s hearts by jesting with them or telling them a smooth tale or patching up a gaudy oration. Men will not cast away their dearest pleasures upon a drowsy request of one who seems not to mean as he speaks, or to care much whether his request is granted. Let us, therefore, rouse ourselves to the work of the Lord and speak to our people as for their lives.
Richard Baxter

An elder, a close personal friend of the pastor, recently filed for corporate and personal bankruptcy. “It’s a tragedy,” said the pastor. “But he was a ‘positive thinking’ kind of person who, when you asked him how things were going, would always say, ‘Fantastic!’ That was part of the problem. He was so optimistic about his business that he didn’t pay attention to the warning signs. Consequently, the business went under, and they’re going to lose their house and most of their possessions. He finally told me about it after it happened.”

“Fred,” the pastor had said, “where have you been? I’m your friend. I’m your pastor. Why didn’t you let me know sooner?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember when you were at my house, and I talked about almost losing my first church because I hadn’t vet learned how to read the financial accounts?”

“Yeah. You were asking about me then, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I even asked about financial threats you faced in your business. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“I just didn’t want to admit defeat,” said Fred.

Now he and the pastor are meeting regularly, talking through the financial and spiritual realities in all of this.

“Fred finally is ready to admit a need for help,” the pastor says. “But his wife still won’t talk to me. She’s never rude, but when I call her once or twice a week, she always puts me off. I can help Fred, but I cannot help Naomi. And I grieve about that.”

A month earlier, the pastor could not help Fred either. His indirect overtures had been rebuffed. At times, only direct intervention can break through, but for direct confrontation to be effective, timing is vitally important.

Signs of Readiness

When people finally become willing to work on an area of their life, pastors must know when the moment comes, and not jump the gun. What are some of the signs of openness?

One of them is increased nervousness, as evidenced by blushing, inability to sit still, or intestinal problems. Body language reveals much about a person’s internal condition.

A second sign of readiness is a lapse in the defensive posture. Before a person is ready to deal with an issue, he usually will be defensive about it. “Initially, if someone is defensive, I’ll overlook it and show acceptance,” says psychiatrist Louis McBurney. “But after I’ve worked with him a while and feel we have more of a relationship, if he’s still defensive, I might challenge him a bit — ‘It sounds like you feel a little defensive about that subject.’ I may still have to wait, but before long he’ll usually say something like, ‘You asked me about that before. What do you think about that issue?’ Or something will indicate he’s not reacting with the same degree of defensiveness, that he’s feeling more secure. At that point, I can raise the issue directly.”

Both of these principles were put into play by Pastor Daniel Frantz.

Daniel had been approached by Eddie Wiebe, a young man in the congregation. “Pastor, Sherry and I have been married only a year and a half, but we’ve got problems. She’s still seeing an old boyfriend who works with her. They eat lunch together — just the two of them — twice a week.”

“Have you two talked about the problem?”

“Yes, but she says she’s not doing anything wrong. I say it may not be wrong, but it sure tears me up inside. When she won’t end the contacts for me — for us — I wonder if she loves him more than me. Would you talk to her?”

“Does she know you’re talking to me about this?”

“I told her we should consider counseling, but she says we shouldn’t need counseling after only a year of marriage.”

Daniel agreed to talk to Sherry, and as was his custom, he asked Eddie to perform a “familyectomy” — to take himself and their son out of the house so Daniel and his wife, Ruth, could talk to Sherry alone. He didn’t want her to feel humiliated or emotionally pressured by any other family members. Eddie agreed that the next Tuesday night he would tell Sherry about 7 p.m. that he needed to pick up something at the hardware store. “Come back around eight,” Daniel suggested.

The next Tuesday evening, with his wife along, Pastor Frantz rang the doorbell about 7:10. Sherry answered.

“Hello, Sherry. How are you?”

“Fine, Pastor. Hi, Ruth. Come in.”

“First, let me tell you why we came,” he said, planted on the porch. “We don’t want to come in unless you really want us. Eddie told me you two have been struggling with some things. I’d like to talk about them, but I am not going to push myself in. I realize you didn’t invite us to come here. I’ve come because as your friend and pastor, I felt I should. But we won’t come in unless you invite us. If you say no we’ll still be friends. We won’t say anything more.”

He paused and watched Sherry swallow hard. (He calls this his “Revelation 3:20 approach” because it makes sure the person knows her freedom was not being violated. But it also forces a decision.)

As is the case in most of Daniel’s experiences, Sherry said, “Come in.” They sat at the kitchen table.

“Eddie tells me he feels he’s got some competition for you. I wanted to hear your side of things.”

Sherry reassured Daniel that she wasn’t doing anything wrong, that she and Roger were “just friends,” that she had no guilt feelings, and that she was unafraid to be seen with Roger. As she continued to talk, however, Daniel noticed that while her mouth was saying one thing, her hands were telling a different story.

A box of Kleenex sat on the table, and Sherry unconsciously took one after another out of the box and shredded it. Before long the pile resembled a sizable bird’s nest.

Finally Daniel remarked, “You keep saying you don’t feel guilty about this relationship, but I’m not sure I dare believe it. You know why? Because your hands betray you.” He pointed to the nest of shredded Kleenex. “I wonder if your sense of guilt isn’t about as high as that pile of Kleenex.”

She was speechless.

“You know,” he continued, “when Jesus came into Jerusalem and everyone was cheering, the Pharisees said, ‘Hey! Make them shut up!’ And Jesus said, ‘If I make them shut up, the stones will cry out.’ Sometimes I talk to people who shut up part of themselves, but their gallstones — or ulcers or blood pressure — cry out. Sherry, I think you are crying out through this pile of Kleenex.”

Sherry lowered her head and admitted there were things about herself that she hated. “She never admitted guilt, but she did talk about her loss of self-respect,” Daniel recalled. “Her bravado was really a cover-up for her self-hate. We talked honestly, and she and Eddie have begun to make progress on their relationship.”

In this case, the key was noticing her unconscious nervousness — the clue that the confrontation was striking close to home — and then moving gently but firmly when the defenses began to come down.

The Internal Work

Those who confront need to be aware of internal dynamics.

First, the goal is not an emotional experience but a change of the will. As one church history professor puts it, “Don’t look for the highs and lows as much as the longs.” That’s true of people as well as historical movements. Helping those who don’t want help takes a persistence and a perseverance — a long perspective, not a high.

Another pastor said, “I have to remind myself that the past is not as important as the future. I’m willing to forget point A, B, and C with a person. Those are in the past and can’t be helped. What I’m looking for is point E, F, and G. I want to help individuals with the points they have not reached yet.”

A second internal adjustment for confronters is to keep responsibility straight. “I have to remember that I am not ultimately responsible for their behavior — they are,” said a minister. “My purpose is to help the individual function on his own, not to obey the decisions I make for him.”

Other ministers confess a tendency to play the white knight, riding repeatedly to the rescue. “Every once in a while I find myself wondering what’s happened to this couple or that person. I’m tempted to call and say ‘What’s going on? Do you need more help?’ Sometimes they do, but more often it’s probably more my need to be the great healer than it is something they need. I have to get unhooked from the need to be needed.”

Escalating Steps of Intervention

What can pastors do during the period of resistance, when people refuse to accept input from others? How can the barriers be breached?

It is often safe to assume that the person has a reason for his behavior. Most pastors quietly but persistently seek the source of the hurt.

“I’ve found that almost any time people claim to be atheists, somewhere in their past they’ve sought answers from Christians and have been rebuffed,” says a pastor in Kansas. “I’ll say, ‘You’ve been hurt by the church, haven’t you?’ And they’ll say, ‘How did you know?’ Almost anyone who is resisting help is harboring a hurt.”

The job of the confronter is at least partly to identify with the hurt that’s causing a person’s behavior. That creates an opening that can be used to great effect. The means can be as simple as an earnest question.

Most ministers try repeated loving probes, often simply by finding time for an unrushed talk and asking, “How are you doing? Really, how are things going for you at (pick one) work/home/church? I haven’t touched base with you for a while. Give me an update.” Perhaps this initiative will have to be taken more than once. Sometimes the response is “None of your business,” but normally, if they trust the pastor, people will be honest and afterwards will say “Thanks for asking.”

At times, this low-key, oblique approach is sufficient.

Richard Evers never realized what he was walking into when he agreed to see Sharla Holland. Sharla was a thirty-year-old mother of four. Her husband, Toby, two years older, was an airline pilot. Both had been regular church attenders. When Sharla asked to talk with him about “child discipline,” Richard set up an appointment.

As Sharla began describing their home life, however, Richard quickly saw that, as is often the case, the problem was not with the children, but with the parents. The home Sharla described contained two separate empires. When Sharla was home alone, one set of standards reigned. When Toby was home, another regime took over.

“We bicker constantly,” she said. But the problem of two separate discipline styles wound up being only the surface issue.

One of Sharla’s offhand comments set off an alarm in Richard’s mind. After complaining of Toby’s short fuse with the older kids, she said, “But he spoils Joshua, our youngest. At night, he’ll cradle Joshua on his lap and read him a book. They usually both fall asleep in the recliner. I have to wake them both to get them to bed.”

“How often does that happen?”

“Oh, almost every night,” she said. “He seems to spend more quality time with Joshua than he does with me.”

Richard wondered what that did to their sex life, but he decided not to raise the issue just yet. He offered Sharla a book on child discipline and suggested she and Toby both read it and come in together to see him the following week.

He wondered if Toby’s lack of interest in intimacy with his wife could mean something more was happening. He decided to raise the issue directly but to be indirect in implicating Toby. Richard asked Toby to meet him for lunch. After some casual conversation, Richard said, “As your pastor, I’d like to know how you’re doing as a Christian. You’re in a tough job. Pilots are away from home a lot. You’re alone. I would imagine temptations can be pretty strong. They would be for me!” He consciously tried to avoid any hint of accusation of infidelity; rather, he tried to suggest that the potential for compromise would be there for anyone, and it was OK to talk about it. “How are you coping with that?”

“The best I can,” Toby said, but he didn’t look Richard straight in the eye. “You’re right, it’s not easy. You just have to keep yourself busy — have things to do.”

Richard asked how it affected his relationship with Sharla, and Toby was equally noncommittal. The lunch ended on polite but hardly intimate terms.

Two days later, however, Toby showed up at Richard’s office.

“You knew, didn’t you?” he said.

“About what?” Richard asked.

“That I’ve been seeing someone,” Toby said. “I knew it couldn’t be kept secret forever. Did Sharla tell you? I wondered if she was beginning to suspect anything.”

“No, Sharla didn’t tell me. But you’re right, it’s hard to keep something like that hidden for long. Want to tell me about it?”

Toby explained that he had been seeing a young woman, another employee of the airline, for almost a year. “I’ve been trying to live in a dream world,” he said. “I guess I knew I couldn’t have a wife and a mistress, too. But you don’t think about the consequences when you get into these things.”

That was the beginning of a long road back for Toby. Eventually, he quit the affair, and he and Sharla were able to repair their relationship. The story might not have ended so happily, however, if Richard had not firmly but tactfully taken the initiative to see Toby. His intentional but oblique confrontation helped save a marriage and heal a home.

Tips for Interveners

Confront with tears. In any confrontation, the tendency is for the person being confronted to say, “You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’ve gone through.” Graciousness, tenderness, and empathy are important even when you have to be firm.

“I’ve got to feel their pain, and let them know I feel it,” says Joel Eidsness of Trinity Bible Church in Phoenix. “When you say the hard things, say them with tears. I’ve found that people who enjoy confronting make lousy confronters. A psychologist told me a long time ago, ‘When you have to confront, be sure to share how you feel — not just with your words but with your body language, your facial features, your tears. Let them know this isn’t easy.’ It was good advice. People are much more open if they don’t feel you enjoy correcting them.”

He finds it takes away the impression that the pastor arrogantly thinks he has all the facts, has interpreted them correctly, and knows exactly what the person needs to do.

Confront with strength, not authority. There’s a difference between intervening from a position of strength and a position of authority.

Authority means coming down with an imposed order and saying, “You need to stop this because the board (or the pastor or the Bible or the church constitution or the denomination) disapproves.”

Intervening from the position of strength is to point out strongly the natural consequences of the present course. “If this keeps up, here’s what’s going to happen.” And perhaps “Some of those things have happened to me, and they hurt like the blazes. Do you really want to do this?”

When talking with Katie, the woman in chapter 5 who was marrying a second nonbelieving husband, her pastor not only spoke of the biblical prohibitions, but also showed her a Newsweek article revealing the unfavorable statistics on second marriages working, especially when the marriage takes place within a year of the divorce.

Very few times will a person turn around by being told he is doing something evil or unacceptable. More often change will happen when a person is confronted with what’s in his best interest — “Have you considered this consequence?”

Don’t fear their tears. “When I was a younger pastor, I was more lenient with people,” says David Seamands. “I didn’t like to see anyone cry. Now I’m not as afraid of tears. Sometimes, if a person is reduced to tears, it can be the breakthrough you need. Obviously, you are not simply out to manipulate emotions, but you can be direct with the facts — biblical facts, statistical facts, personal experiences with the consequences of such behavior. You cannot afford to let sentiment prevent you from making the person face reality. If the person cries, that does not mean you’ve done something wrong. It means you may be getting through.”

Encourage them to take even small steps of responsibility. Many pastors don’t try to straighten out every area of a person’s life at once. “I take my model from Elisha with Naaman (2 Kings 5),” says Mike Tucker of Bethany Community Church in Tempe, Arizona. “After Naaman was healed, he asked for some Israeli soil to take back to his homeland so he could worship God there. Elisha did not correct him with a lecture on God not being tied to geographic locale or holy dirt. Naaman wasn’t ready for that. His desire to worship God was enough for now. Elisha simply said, ‘Go in peace.’

“Another example is Christ. Several times he says, in effect, ‘I’ve got a lot of things to tell you, but I can’t tell you yet. You’re not ready.’ As a pastor, many times I must be sensitive to how much a person can receive. So many times I encourage a small step rather than a total transformation.”

One pastor said his approach is to tell counselees not to set up the next appointment on their way out of the office. He specifically tells them, “Call tomorrow to set up an appointment.” This is to insure that people have to take some initiative, to invest some effort, so they will take the session more seriously. A small but significant step toward responsibility.

Another pastor was counseling a divorcée who was sleeping with a man five nights a week. “Interestingly, she told me she wouldn’t marry the man because he was not a Christian and was not interested in becoming a Christian,” said the pastor. “But she had this great need for affection, and no Christian men were interested in her.”

Since her previous attempts to cut off the relationship entirely had failed (largely because she didn’t really want them to succeed), the pastor decided to aim for a more modest goal.

“I asked if she thought she could cut down to sleeping with him only one night a week. I figured you have to start somewhere, and she wasn’t ready to stop seeing him completely. She agreed to try to reduce their contact.”

The affair gradually withered. “Today she is walking with God and doing pretty well,” the pastor reports. “In fact, she remarried her former husband. The strategy worked that time. I don’t usually do it that way. I may never do it that way again. But it has worked.”

A counselor in Dallas, Creath Davis, says if he can get a person to agree to break off an affair for six weeks — which doesn’t seem totally impossible to most people — he’s found that in most cases the feelings fade, and the affair can be ended. “But the agreement must be no contact. Not just sexual contact, but no visits, no phone calls, no notes,” he says. “Why? Because affairs are not just sexual in their orientation. They usually end up there, but it’s the emotional addiction that’s tougher to break. But if the lovers can stay apart for six weeks, that’s usually enough to help end the addiction.”

When small steps are successfully taken, they can be the basis for subsequent major changes. Counselor Robert Carlson writes of two cases where small steps led to life-changing results:

“Lyle and Betty had been struggling. One problem was that Lyle had been raised with four sisters, and he had never learned to take any household responsibilities. Lyle had an affair, and he and Betty separated and finally divorced. After two years, Lyle came to visit his children, who were living with Betty. The conversation was polite and guarded. Betty was cautious, but inside she was praying for a miracle. As the family spent the evening together, Betty noticed how delighted the children were to see their father, and how much like old times it was, but she noticed one other important difference: he carried his own dishes to the kitchen, and he emptied his own ashtrays.

“Eventually they decided to try again and were remarried.

“Seeing even small changes enables people to see the potential of negotiations made in good faith. This provides the loamy soil in which hope grows.

“With Ted and Andrea, the problem was communication. He was in sales, she in education. She would talk about her day at school, and he would respond with advice. She thought What does he know about it? She wasn’t after answers, only understanding. She grew more and more silent at home. He would try to dig and probe, but of course, you can never make someone else talk.

“We examined the habits and patterns of their interaction. He agreed to ‘invite’ her to talk about school. She agreed to try to share something. He agreed to listen and withhold advice. It was tough at first. He felt obliged to ‘help her out.’ But gradually he began to change. Then she had the courage to deal with the bigger things in their life.”1

Make use of other relationships the person holds dear. Pastors have found the people with the most potential for making changes in another person’s life are the individuals that person respects most. Sometimes pastors can make use of these already-established relationships.

In his autobiography, Norman Vincent Peale recalls one time he was faced with an emotionally volatile situation.

A fourteen-year-old boy came one day to my office in Kings Highway Church. Sitting on the edge of the chair, he nervously twisted his cap. He was disturbed about something and that it was a painful matter was very clear. I tried to put him at ease.

“What is your given name?” I asked.

“It’s Robert and you know my father. I don’t know what to do,” he stammered.

“Why don’t you talk to your father?”

“I can’t; I just can’t. That’s why I’ve come to you.”

“Well, tell me about it and I will help all I can. And remember that as a pastor you can tell me anything in confidence.”

“Reverend Peale, is my father straight? Is he a good man?” He seemed to choke up as he put this question.

“Robert, I am not very well acquainted with your father, but to me he seems a fine man and I’ve never heard anything bad about him. Why do you ask this question?”

“Well, you see, I love my father very much and I’ve always looked up to him. I think he is great, the finest man in the world.” As he made this statement, tears ran down his face.

“I’m sure he is just that, Robert.”

“Oh, I hope so. But the other kids have been whispering things so I can hear them about Dad and some woman. Oh, it can’t be true, it just can’t,” he sobbed.

“Now look here, Robert, you must not let your faith in your father be shaken by some stupid whispers by a bunch of kids. You and I are going to believe in your father. But just to give you peace of mind I’ll check up a bit.”

Next day I telephoned Robert’s father for an appointment. “What is it about?” he asked. I told him I had a matter to take up with him. As I sat across the desk from him, I felt that he was somewhat uneasy. I noted the strong resemblance between father and son. “In the job of being a minister we get all kinds of cases and problems,” I explained, “and some of them are quite delicate and personal. But we have to do the best we can with each one. We are in the people-helping business.”

“Yeah, I get you,” he responded impatiently. “But what has this got to do with me? I don’t need any help.”

“Maybe not, but your son Robert does.”

“Robert,” he echoed. “What possible trouble could he have that he wouldn’t talk to me about?”

I let the matter hang in the air for a few seconds. “You,” I said.

He flushed angrily. “What do you mean by that, Reverend? I don’t like what you are saying.”

“I don’t blame you for that, and you may think it is none of my business. I assure you that what must be said to you is most unpleasant for me. But I have to keep faith with your son who loves, no, idolizes you.” Then I told him of my conversation with Robert. “I’ve gone out on a limb in urging him to have faith in you and not to believe those whispers. But in my opinion you are on the edge of absolutely devastating this boy and ruining your relationship with him. What shall I say to Robert; or how do you want me to handle it with him?”

He sat quite still as though in shock, face white. The silence continued until I became concerned about him. Finally he said, “Let me think. May I see you later?” I left him with his thoughts and his problem, and my heart ached not only for the boy but also for his father.

That night, after a meeting at the church I found the boy’s father waiting for me outside. We went back and sat in my office.

“I want to level with you, Reverend. I am involved with a woman. I’m a dirty, low-down no-good. My wife is the finest woman in the world. I’ve done this because I’m dirty in my mind, in my thoughts. I see clearly what I’m doing and it just isn’t worth it. I’m a damned fool. But how can I get out of it?”

“Just tell her you’re through. And then be through.” He didn’t say anything, so I continued. “But that is only the start. You not only must get out of it but, more importantly, you have to get it out of you. It is just plain old sin that got you into this mess. And now we need to get sin out of your mind, out of your heart. That is done by your becoming a new person through faith in Christ. Do you want this change to happen in you?”

Suddenly all the pretense dropped from him. “Oh, my God, Reverend, I can’t live unless you get me out of this and get me changed. I’ve got to control my evil thoughts. Lust, that’s what it is. It’s the evil in me. I’m no good.”

This was healthy, the way he was talking, for it was conviction of sins. He made no excuses. He was honest about what he was and what he had done. And that was basic to becoming what he could be. He was also taking another important step: confession. He emptied out all his sneaking and lying and dishonesty and infidelity. He portrayed graphically his inner warfare between good and evil. He saw what he was and the sight was decidedly unpleasant.

Then, it was important to have him see what he could be. “Telephone the woman now and break it up.”

“You mean right now, here with you?”

I shoved the telephone over to him. “Tell her you are with your pastor, in confession, and you are changing your life, beginning now.”

Red of face, with a shaking hand holding the receiver, he told her exactly that. Slowly he replaced the receiver. “Know what she said?”

“What?”

“‘You’re a good man. Better be that.'”

“She is right,” I commented. “… Now ask the Lord Jesus Christ to forgive and cleanse you from all sin. Tell Him that you believe in Him with all your heart and accept Him now as your Savior.”

He did this with deep sincerity and with tears. I repeated that great old verse: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” and the glorious words of Jesus to the woman taken in adultery: “Go, and sin no more.”

When he arose from prayer, on his face there was an unforgettable smile mixed with tears, like sunshine after rain. He grasped my hand with a grip like steel. “How can I ever thank you?” he asked.

“Just by keeping the faith with the Lord and being a wonderful father to that terrific boy of yours. And,” I added, “by being true …”

Some weeks later father, mother, and son stood at the altar of the church as I received them into membership in Christ’s Holy Church, into the society of the redeemed. But it was the look on the boy’s face that got me. The whispers ceased and the father kept the faith to the end, so powerful was the change that Christ made in him.2

These happy endings don’t happen every time, perhaps not even a majority of the time, but they occur frequently enough to encourage pastors not to give up hope. And hope is warranted even in what is perhaps the most vexing pastoral situation: working with withdrawn, unwilling family members.

Robert J. Carlson. “Hope for Hurting Marriages.” Leadership, vol. 7, no. 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 36-37.

Norman Vincent Peale. The True Joy of Positive Living. (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984) pp. 98-101.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Whom you would change, you must first love.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the interesting discoveries of the Apollo space program was that somewhere between earth and the moon, the spaceship reaches a point where the moon’s gravitational effect is greater than the earth’s. The spacecraft is literally falling away from earth. The only way it will ever return to earth is to fire its engine to escape the moon’s gravitational pull.

People, like spaceships, will also sometimes drift past the point of natural return. “You can almost feel it,” said one counselor. “I would say more than half the people who come for counseling have already passed that point.”

There seems to be a point where the person begins to act as if I’m going to do it my way no matter what anyone says. If you get right down to it, I’m going to do what I want even if God disapproves. I don’t care.

What are some of the engine bursts needed to break the outward drift and propel people homeward? At this point, atmosphere alone is insufficient. Some kind of confrontation is needed — either direct or indirect. Since the indirect approach is easier on the adrenal glands, let’s start there.

The Necessary Foundation

The first step is to develop a relationship with the person that he or she values. Without a relational base, prompting change proves difficult.

Often pastors pick up rumblings of problems from a third party who doesn’t know if the claim is true or not. What to do? Become a detective? Ignore it until the person himself eventually decides to see you?

Most pastors begin by trying to establish or strengthen their personal relationship with the individual in question.

“I don’t go around checking the validity of the story. But I do let the person know I care about him or her, and in the process, often the situation comes tumbling out. It happened just last month,” said a Baptist pastor in the South.

“I’d heard that a man in our church had violent outbursts with his wife. At times she feared for her life. He’s a dentist, so I just showed up unannounced and sat on a stool in his office until he finished with a patient. He came in and said, ‘What are you doing here?’

“I said, ‘I just want to pray with you, Fred. I try to visit everyone periodically. I know you’re facing some struggles, and I care for you. Just let me have two minutes to pray with you.’

“‘OK,’ he said. He had patients waiting, but he paused, we prayed, and I kept it to two minutes. He didn’t say much other than that he appreciated me stopping by. But three days later, he was in my office saying, ‘OK, now let me tell you what’s happening.’ I didn’t have to ask him.”

A relationship functions as the prime mover in producing change. Preaching and congregational services can help create an atmosphere conducive to change and instill a desire for something better, but the work of actual change usually demands more than a conducive atmosphere.

“I’ve found people don’t change attitudes or patterns of behavior on Sunday morning,” said the pastor of a community church. “Change happens when they see how it works in somebody else’s life. They can’t just hear about it; they have to see it. That’s what makes our small-group ministries so important. Talking about ‘How I handled a problem in my job this week’ shows others how the Christian life is lived.”

The function of a preaching service is primarily to display, almost like an advertisem*nt, that “A better way is available.” But for more information, people want to see it fleshed out. Making significant life changes demands a relationship of trust.

Most of us don’t trust people who have an obvious agenda for us. We feel we are being manipulated for some ulterior motive. For pastors, part of this means letting the individual know you can be trusted not to reveal his problems to other people. “I try to let them see that I care about them and have their best interests in mind, not my own,” said one rural minister. In most cases, the key is to find or develop common interests. This is especially true of people who have little involvement in the church.

In such cases, “I’ve learned not to talk about my agenda but about their agenda,” said an Ohio pastor. He began meeting with two unchurched friends for pizza on Sunday evenings after the church service. “For over a year we talked about nothing but the price of cattle, cultivation techniques, and life around the farm. But as a result, we began to find other common interests — fishing and backpacking. Eventually they began attending church and made commitments to Christ.”

Others Who Can Get Through

Now most pastors admit they can’t find common ground with everyone. Perhaps this is one way of selecting people to try to help personally. When no common ground appears, perhaps other Christians who speak the same language can be brought in.

We normally think of doing this with literal languages. One pastor met a medical doctor from Pakistan who had become a Christian. The pastor introduced the doctor to a missionary friend who had served in Pakistan, and the doctor was very impressed that the missionary was able to speak such fluent Pakistani. As a result, he invited many of his non-Christian friends to his home for a dinner party and also invited the missionary to come and present his testimony in Pakistani. The dinner and gospel presentation were very well received. The pastor initiated that contact because he saw the importance of putting people together who speak the same language.

But this pastor has also done the same thing with people who speak the language of motorcycles.

“I saw a group of young men who were drifting away from church life,” he said. “I noticed they all rode motorcycles. Since several of our solid young men were bikers, too, I encouraged them to get together. Before long we’d started a group of motorcycle buffs called the Retreads. I specifically invited people from the church who had an interest in motorbikes to get together, and out of this common ground, relationships were built with these fringe people.”

Other pastors have used such interests as hunting, fishing, backpacking, woodworking, or photography to build relationships with those who won’t acknowledge their need.

Another way to help people who need help but won’t ask for it is to point out that there are others like them in the church.

“One man came to me, very embarrassed, and confessed that his teenage son had a drinking problem,” said a minister in the Church of the Brethren. “I realized the problem was probably as much the father’s as it was the son’s, but the father wouldn’t admit it. He told me, ‘Please keep this confidential because the church wouldn’t understand.'”

The minister said, “I’m wondering, would you be interested in meeting with some other people in the church who are in this exact same situation? If I got their permission, would you talk with them? I think it would be helpful for all of you.”

The man refused — at first. “I’ve found there’s reluctance initially,” observed the minister, “because they doubt whether it’s really so. There’s a certain amount of pride that comes from thinking My problem is so bad, nobody else has had it as bad as I’ve got it. It’s a sick self-concept, but it’s real. These people seem to think, I make the pastor worry about me because he’s never seen anyone like me before. And, you know, God owes me something because he’s given me these special problems. No one’s ever endured my unique situation.“

Eventually, however, the father did meet with others and gradually began owning up to his own struggle with alcohol.

“When I give the name of the person they should talk to, invariably the initial reaction is ‘Jack Edwards? He seems so together! I didn’t know he’d been through anything like this!’ But when they get together, there’s a tremendous empathy that develops. It’s one of the most effective ways of getting through.”

Other churches do this with anyone remarrying after?? divorce. Many times, people marrying for the second time d?? not want help. They feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are looked down on, persecuted. They are rarely open to counsel or caution about entering a new marriage. Several churches have tackled the problem by using other people from the church who have had similar experiences.

In one congregation, as part of the conditions to have the ceremony in the church, the couple agrees to a series of counseling sessions, and two or three of those sessions are with other people who have “blended families.” The group acts as a barometer for the couple, helping them determine if they really are ready for marriage. If the wedding does take place, the group also provides a natural source of friends afterwards.

“They look for characteristics that indicate readiness to remarry,” says the pastor. “Such things as a healthy admission of guilt for the failure of the previous marriage and a realistic acknowledgement of future problems. When these people say, ‘You’re just rebounding,’ it communicates a lot stronger than if a pastor says it, because people who are divorced assume pastors will discourage remarriage.”

It gets through because it comes from people who speak the same language.

Well-Placed Compliments

If the first “rocket burst” necessary to turn a life around is a relationship, either with you or others, the second might be a carefully worded comment offered in passing. Of the many ways to draw attention to a problem area, a sincere compliment is one of the most effective.

When you observe a couple getting stale with each other, the head-on approach — “I’m concerned about your relationship and I think you need to do something about it” — might not be well received.

Instead, one Christian counselor will say something like, “I love seeing the two of you together. You’re really good for each other.”

She’s feeding that relationship, and at times, that’s all it needs to perk up. Other times, it’s a nonthreatening way to draw attention to a problem area.

“After I said that one time,” the counselor reports, “the wife came up to me later and said, ‘Things aren’t as good as they seem.’ It had opened up the issue.”

The well-placed compliment lets them know you’re observing their relationship but does so in a positive way.

Curiosity as an Ally

Yet another rocket engine is curiosity. Most people are curious, especially about themselves and their relationships. They generally are willing to consider Maybe there’s something I’m missing. What else is going on? If pastors can provide glimpses of dynamics they don’t see, people are often intrigued.

One pastor plays on curiosity by injecting questions that make people wonder whether or not they’ve seen the whole situation in its larger frame.

With one man so consumed by his career that his family was being neglected, his pastor invited him to lunch and asked, “John, if we asked your wife how cherished she feels, what do you think she would say?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Could you look me in the eye with a clean conscience and say, ‘I know that I am making my wife feel absolutely loved and adored.'”

“No, but what’s that got to do with it?”

The pastor considers that conversation the beginning of John’s working on an area he’d never before considered a problem.

Yet another way of playing on curiosity is by sharing the stories of other people who have been in similar situations.

“One of the benefits of a long pastorate is that you develop a file of letters from past counselees,” says David Seamands. “Some are from people whose stories did not end happily: Against your advice, I married the man I told you about. In the beginning he said he would let me continue my involvement with the church, but gradually he got more and more jealous of the time I spent with my Christian friends. Now life with him is continual conflict. If other people come to see you contemplating remarriage to a nonbeliever, don’t be afraid to be cruel. I wish you had convinced me I was making a mistake.

“On the other hand, I have letters such as: I broke up with the man I wanted to marry. Despite many tears at the time, I knew I had a duty to do what was right. In the years since, God has honored my obedience, and I met a fine Christian man who is a great father to my two boys.

“I use these letters in my sermons and in my counseling to let people see that there is hope, that God can provide better solutions for their lives than they can themselves.”

This kind of testimony can arouse curiosity in resistant individuals about how God might work in their situations.

Willingness to Be Used at Times

One pastor was counseling a bulemic who continually phoned him to confess that she had failed; once again she’d eaten too much and then forced herself to vomit.

“I felt I was being used,” said the pastor. “She wasn’t improving. She just wanted someone to hear her confession so she’d feel better. Normally I would have confronted her with my suspicion and refused to let the situation continue. But with this particular problem, I felt patience was the best approach because one of the key issues for bulemics is self-esteem. It would have been worse to reject her than it was to continue to offer the encouragement — even at the risk of being used.”

That approach paid dividends later when the girl phoned to ask for help with another situation. She had been going to a secular counselor, who had instructed her to take off her clothes so he could caress her. He claimed she needed a parent figure — a role he was ready to provide.

“But he makes me uncomfortable,” she told her pastor. “What should I do?” The pastor told her the counselor was wrong and that she should not go back to him. She did not. And saying no to the counselor greatly improved her self-respect.

“At that point,” said the pastor, “I felt that all those hours on the phone listening to her confessions had been worthwhile. She felt she could trust me.”

At times, of course, this means that we sometimes feel foolish, demeaned. But the long-term effects make the sacrifice worthwhile when the window of opportunity opens.

Jacques Maritain’s book, St. Thomas Aquinas, recounts this attitude in the life of the Catholic scholar and saint: “One day a friar in a jovial mood cries out: ‘Friar Thomas, come see the flying ox!’ Friar Thomas goes over to the window. The other laughs. ‘It is better,’ the Saint says to him ‘to believe that an ox can fly than to think that the religious can lie.'”

Friar Thomas — and we — may feel foolish in situations where people take advantage of us, but how much better to be used and eventually change a life than to be overly concerned about our need for independence, our mastery of situations.

Affirming the Importance of Life

Surprisingly, people tend to underestimate the value of their own lives. One of the duties of a pastor, especially when dealing with those destroying themselves but refusing help, is to remind people of the importance of life — their own included.

Remember the story of Samuel confronting Saul after Israel had defeated King Agag? Saul won a military victory but had violated God’s commandment by allowing Agag and the best of his livestock to survive (1 Sam. 15). God’s ways had been repudiated because Saul thought he knew better. The will of God was no longer the standard; Saul’s will was. But Saul took charge without a sense of the spiritual powers at work.

When Samuel approached him, Saul said, “The Lord bless you! I have carried out the Lord’s instructions.”

“What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears?” Samuel responded.

When Samuel reviewed God’s command, Saul insisted, “But I did obey the Lord.… I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag their king. The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder … in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your God.”

It was a rationalization, which Harry Stack Sullivan once defined as “an exceedingly plausible but highly irrelevant” reason for one’s behavior. At any rate, Samuel wasn’t swallowing it.

His speech offers an interesting insight. “Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And the Lord sent you on a mission.…”

Interestingly, he points out that Saul’s sin was not thinking too highly of himself, but not thinking highly enough. He was unaware of the import of his actions. He underestimated the significance of the responsibility God had entrusted to him.

When it comes to helping those who don’t want help, sometimes they, too, need to realize their own significance. God himself is interested in their decisions.

At times this can be done with indirect confrontation; at other times, however, it requires direct intervention.