The Preaching Life

by James Earl Massey

“The Preaching Life” is a regular feature of Preacher’s Magazine where readers are privileged to sit in the classroom and read insights on current preaching models from some of North America’s finest preachers. This workshop is presented by Dr. James Earl Massey, Dean Emeritus and Distinguished Professor-at-Large at Anderson University School of Theology in Anderson, Indiana.

Christian preaching fulfills itself by shaping a community in which Christ is the living center and within which persons relate meaningfully through his love. Preaching at its best involves person in relation, and to encourage this result the preaching must be both personal and pertinent. There is something most contagious and inviting about our preaching when those who are hearing us sense that we truly regard them and have their best interests as our motivating concern. The miracle of community happens within the rich context of sharing, when both the preacher and the hearers match in eagerness, earnestness, trust, openness, and regard.

Human togetherness is a vital concern to God, and the public side of the pulpit experience is a part of the divine strategy to effect and further that togetherness. The preacher is sent to bring persons into an accepting togetherness with God and with each other, through shared truths that make God’s will known. The sermon, therefore, must be engagingly clear, and the preacher must be expressively focused and personal in sharing its truths. Togetherness between preacher and hearers demands a rightly focused speaker and listeners who give a full and eager hearing. Douglas V. Steere treated the dynamics of listening in one of his seminal books, asking, “Have you ever talked with someone who listened with such utter abandon to what you were trying to tell him that you were yourself made clearer in what you were trying to express by the very quality of his listening?” Think about this with reference to the way some persons respond so avidly to preaching, and you will readily understand what I mean by an experience of “togetherness” between preacher and hearers.

The community we seek to shape through preaching usually begins as a crowd, a gathering that is not singular but multiple in cast and mind. It begins as a heterogeneous mass of persons whose common point of togetherness is that they are all at the same place at the same time. Some in the crowd are mere fascinated spectators, but some others are ardent disciples in faith. Some are there as active church members who depend readily upon fellowship with other members for encouragement and nurture, persons who are more oriented to life within the group, while some others are there before the preacher whose bent is toward the world beyond the group. To be sure, there are many concerns that predetermine the personal interest at work in the minds and lives of those who gather where preaching takes place, and those concerns will affect the level and extent of each hearer’s interest in the preacher’s presence and purpose.

This multiple cast of an audience can make any preacher’s feeling of vulnerability an even greater burden, unless he or she is steadied by the realization that something meaningful can happen if the sharing is focused and responsible. Focused is the right word, because preaching is done for situated persons, not for the crowds, and every hearing person is to be viewed as a candidate for engagement with God.

Togetherness between preacher and people is often encouraged by our means of appeal. Specific preparation for the pulpit presupposes a clear objective to be reached by preaching and some appealing means by which that objective is pursued. The framework (structure and sequencing) of the message should have appeal. It should be planned well to elicit interest and to reward that interest through shared insight and guided reflection. A sense of immediacy should be conveyed so that the preaching can rightly lead to the motivated attitudes and action the preacher seeks to inspire.

Appeal in preaching often depends on the right words for what one seeks to share. It is possible to show inadvertent disregard for hearers in the way we word our sermons. This is surely the case when a preacher uses the jargon of the academy in the pulpit, when the words chosen for the message are sensed by the hearer as a restricted or private language. Church jargon, so familiar to us, can be problematic in some settings, especially in this day, when the vast populace is known to be unfamiliar with both biblical lore and biblical terms. We who preach must be sensitive to the need to remain faithful to the biblical faith and to voice that witness with such terms and expressions as will make it readily understood in the many new settings where we must do our work.

As preachers we must seek increasingly to understand and to use language with which our listeners can most readily understand, aware of the sentiments and concerns that affect their listening level. There is still validity, as I see it, in the personal-openness appeal in preaching, by which I mean opening to the hearers’ view some pertinent aspect of one’s own experience with life and truth. Some preachers do a great deal of this, while others are reticent about doing it at all, fearful lest they be viewed as calling undue attention to themselves.

As preachers, our business is to effect an interaction between those who hear us and the Word we are sent to share with them. We do so through sight and sound, our presence and our proclamation. Both are germane to effect the togetherness preaching was appointed to make possible. Our business is more than facilitating a group interaction; it is to lead people to invest themselves in God’s grace and involve themselves in God’s will. As David H. C. Read voiced it, people “listen to a sermon expecting grace.”