The Internet Monk
"Read.Think.React.Write.Live."
A Webjournal edited by Michael Spencer
A Career In Foolishness
Reflections on Thirty Years of Preaching
by Michael Spencer
Sometime
this summer of 2002, I will pass the thirtieth anniversary of the first
time I stood behind a pulpit and preached the Gospel to a congregation.
I was fifteen, a well known stutterer, a relatively new Christian, and
totally without any idea of what I was doing. I spoke on the Parable of
the Soils from Mark 4, it took an eternal fifteen minutes, and I guess I did
okay. It's what I've been doing with my life ever since. Like it or not,
I have had a career in foolishness. The foolishness of preaching.
Before I started preaching, I thought I would be an English teacher, and I will admit that I've often wondered if that might have been the better choice. When a young person tells me he wants to be a minister, I will do all I can to talk him out of it. The preacher should be a compulsive, not someone exercising an option. "Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel." I readily admit to more than occasional ambiguity about preaching and the price I and my family have paid for me to be a preacher. At the same time, I sense what the old preachers used to call the "glory of the ministry," and a persistent certainty that God has chosen me for this work. I've decided this two-sidedness is part of the calling. If one is not human enough to at times wonder if it's not all a waste of time, you have too high an opinion of yourself, and too low an opinion of the miracle that Almighty God can say something to your fellow human beings through you.
My only model for being a preacher came from my uncle, W. O. Spencer, who pastored for more than fifty years in Western Kentucky, mostly at the Hall Street Baptist Church in Owensboro where I grew up. A man with very little formal education, he carried a sense of God about him that made him different from other men. When he came to the pulpit every Lord's Day, there was something about him that declared he had been with God. He was mysterious, different, anointed with the Holy Spirit. He was the very opposite of the stand-up comedians occupying today's pulpits. I now realize that in him I was seeing the best of what preaching is supposed to be: a man who is compelled to pay the price to be with God, so that he may stand before other men and speak for God.
I indicated my desire to enter the ministry at a time when seven young men from our church had professed the same desire within a few months. You may call it peer pressure or group hysteria, but all but one of us have stayed with it three decades later. I had no idea, I mean NO IDEA, what I was doing, and that's left me sometimes feeling I've premised my whole life on a youthful self-delusion. On the other hand, in clearer, better moments I realize that of such ordinary stuff God shapes and molds His servants on the stage of history. My stuttering, a fact of my life right through my sophomore year of high school, virtually vanished when I came to the pulpit the first time. I took it as a sign from God, and pressed on.
I've had so many mentors in preaching that it would take a page to mention them all: Henry Schaefer, Paul Duke, Gerard Howell, Timothy George, Will Willamon, Eugene Petersen, G.R. Beasley-Murray, Al Martin, Ravi Zacharias, Lloyd-Jones, John Piper, Mark Dever, James Boice, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon. Some of them are just words on a page, others voices on tape or radio, and some friends and fathers. At times I think I am just the accumulated influences of all the preachers I admire, and at other times I wonder if I, such a poor student, have learned anything from any of them.
I could list another paragraph of preachers I've learned from by their bad example. Men who were undisciplined, shallow, presumptuous, obtuse, immoral and irrelevant. I have a great admiration for men who are respectful of the Word and respectful of the people for whom they preach. Preachers sometimes become so "God-ward" that they begin to think themselves the Almighty or the All-knowing, and though their messages may be solid, there is no heart, only rattling, distressing volume. Others are politicians, experiencing the constant thrill of their election. The ministry is full of petty dictators, generals, liars, terrorists, the perverse, the mentally ill and the intentionally mediocre, as well as plenty of thoroughly unremarkable, ordinary sinners. Fortunately, this has allowed me in as a member in good standing for thirty years.
Some of those bad examples have been men who saw preaching as only a function of the job of being pastor. They weren't evil or incompetent men. They simply demeaned the Word and the ministry by approaching it with all the passion of the delivery of the daily paper. One preacher I sat under for years only brought sermons that served the church's budget and programs. No vision of God, no engagement with the great issues of good and evil, and no passion for the Gospel were traceable in his empty homilies. I learned from him that one may preach, be extraordinarily well paid and really say nothing. To say something and to have something to say are two very different things.
My humanity is as rotten as all these bad examples, but the calling of preacher has done me good. It has kept me sexually faithful. In great struggles of the soul, the knowledge that God had called me to preach kept me faithful when I had no other desire to be obedient. When I was ordained, I was kneeling at the front and my pastor came by and said "God will bring you to your knees many times in the future." That man was a prophet, but I wish he had been more of a prophet. Only now, in the middle of my life, have I started to experience the constant brokenness that brings true, compassionate, God-dependent Gospel preaching.
Preaching requires humility. People sleep through and nod through and talk through sermons. They listen to sermons with less attention than any other set of words they encounter in a week. They are predisposed to ignore the message, and usually only react when they are angry or feel the message violated some silent agreement to leave their personal sins alone. I was once taken to the woodshed for preaching a bit too long, denying the congregation the privilege of beating the Methodists to the best restaurants. Now, after years of work, I can be very self-deprecating about my preaching. It's given to me humor and humility, and though I am serious in the pulpit, I am not too serious about myself anymore. I've preached with my fly open and lived to preach again. I've been taken to the hospital in the middle of a sermon and laughed about it.
Luther said that he sat in a tavern drinking beer and the Word did it all. That observation is very encouraging to me, because my career in words has made me aware of how many of them are wasted. People do not remember sermons. They do not talk about them over dinner unless you made some gaff worth recalling for a laugh. But I believe God is at work in what I say. He is saving people and changing people in the words about His Word that come from me. When I talk about His mighty deeds of salvation in Jesus Christ, all the power is there again, and as ridiculous as it may seem, he accomplishes all His will with my paltry tongue as His messenger.
As I turn the corner of this thirtieth year, one of the things I must deal with is the fact that God has never used my preaching to grow a church. In my preaching before I became a pastor, that was not a concern, but now in two pastorates, it has been hard to preach week after week and watch the congregation not grow, or even grow smaller. Visitors come so rarely to hear me that I know it is a divine conspiracy. More homeless walk in the doors of most churches than visitors ever walk in mine. Part of this is my fault. I am not a television personality. I can preach over people's heads. I challenge the hearer to dig, and most people don't want to do more than scratch. I am too prophetic for most people's tastes. I use a lot of scripture and cover a lot of material. I ask hard questions. I point out errors and say things are sometimes wrong. I am not predictable on most issues, and I do not suffer fools gladly. Still, I am a good preacher, and I do not doubt that, but I have had to accept the fact that God has assigned me a place where the Spirit is doing other things than making a church larger. My ego usually doesn't need a crowd of fans asking for autographs, so perhaps I have been the man to be in the tough place and stay faithful. Only heaven can answer that question, but I am not unhappy to preach to the small church, and I will continue to do so if that is my assignment.
On the other hand, for ten years I have been preaching to high school students and our faculty at the Christian school where I serve. Here it is a little clearer what God is doing. I love apologetics and current events. I am comfortable with youth culture, music, and humor. When I am preaching to my mixed group of atheists, Buddhists, Christians of every kind, and who knows what else, I am very much at home. This is evangelism and Basic Christianity 101. I have no church politics to worry about. Handing my chapel congregation over to other preachers is very hard for me to do, because I feel a lot of ownership and a unique calling to this place. All my quirks are welcome here and I am loved (or at least they ask for my tapes), so I pray God gives me many more years to preach at Oneida.
There are times, when I am preparing four sermons in three days, that I am amazed at where it all comes from. Hundreds of times I have stopped to pray for what to preach, and the Word of the Lord came to me. Illustrations come easily. I tried preaching with no notes at all one summer here at school and preached some of my best. I have experienced the springs of living water that Jesus promised many times. I can identify with the prophets who encountered the Word of God unexpectedly and suddenly, capturing their minds and hearts with messages that they were compelled to deliver.
I am passionate about preaching. I read and think and write and breathe preaching all the time. I do not understand men who have the calling and the opportunity, but have no love for books or preachers or preaching. I go to conferences, listen to tapes and, if I can, rehearse. I preach in the car, and go to sleep preaching in my head. I dream of preaching the Word, not of money or pleasure or fame, but of the joy of a message in my heart and mind coming to life in my words. I grieve the replacement of preaching with "praise and worship," and I would gladly go to war for the preaching of the Gospel in my generation.
In being a preacher, I have chosen a life that denied me the financial rewards my peers have enjoyed. It has placed my children in the place of being "preacher's kids" with all the attendant expectations and idiocies. My marriage has paid the price a thousand times. But I never feel I have given anything up. Now that I have spent ten years in one of the poorest places in America, being paid less in a year than some of my relatives make in a month, I can honestly say I am the richer. Preaching the Gospel is priceless. It is the glory of God filling the space of one human life, and I cannot help but say it has been a suburb of heaven, even if it is within sight of hell.
In my office is a sign that says "Someday you will... preach your last sermon. What if today is it?" Richard Baxter said we should preach as a dying man to dying men. Will I get another thirty years to preach? I do not know, though I have a strong premonition that I am on the other side of the mountain in my preaching career. Baxter's advice is not just about how long one preaches, but about how one preaches.
The image that returns to me again and again is one used about ordination. The preacher is one "lashed to the mast." He is that unfortunate that is chosen to be tied to the mast in the worst of storms, tied so he will not be swept away, tied so he will not do the instinctive thing and save his own life. He is tied to the mast so that the ship will be steered through the storm and lives saved. I am sure the fellow lashed to the mast feels less than honored, but then whether he volunteered or was drafted kicking and screaming, it is his destiny. I understand that man, for I think I am him.
I get to be around a lot of young preachers every year. They are- predominantly- cocky, arrogant, Biblically illiterate and irritating in their certainty. I sometimes feel like grabbing them by the shirt and shaking them. Then I recognize myself, and I simply say a prayer for them. God will do the grabbing and the shaking, the pruning and the breaking. I pray that the calling of preacher will be as good to and for them as it has been for me. I pray that in thirty years, the hands of the master sculptor will have brought out of their rocky souls some of the wonder, glory and joy I have found in my own as I have stood to proclaim the Word of the Lord to His people.