American Preaching: A Dying Art?

Seven star preachers suggest the end is not in sight "

The Word became flesh," says John's Gospel of the incarnate Christ of Bethlehem. In Christmas sermons before some 75 million Americans this week, words about Christ will become flesh in the person of the preacher. Through their strange and marvelous craft, Christianity has been transmitted and reshaped for every age since Christ himself went "preaching the Gospel of the kingdom."

For many American churchgoers, though, a Sunday sermon is something merely to be endured. Many preachers and parishioners alike think that passionate and skillful preaching has grown rarer and rarer in individual congregations in the postwar years. The chilling of the Word is a major contributor to the evident malaise in many a large Protestant denomination these days.

For Roman Catholics, the sermon has not been as important, but rather a kind of spiritual hors d'oeuvre before the Eucharist. Otherwise, as Catholic Columnist Rick Casey explains, priests might become mere "performers" like Protestants, and "upstage the Eucharist." In Protestantism, however, the sermon is virtually raised to sacrament. Even if all believers are "priests," they still need expert guidance. Said Theologian Karl Earth, "Through the activity of preaching, God himself speaks." As a result, lackluster sermons strike at the heart of Protestant religion.

One man tempted to think that American preaching is a dying art is George Plagenz of the Cleveland Press, who writes an oft acerbic "review" of a local church service each week, complete with restaurant-type ratings. Instead of cuisine or ambience, he rates worship service, music, sermon and friendliness, granting up to three stars in each category. In nearly two years Plagenz, who listened to many pulpit greats a generation ago, has found only two preachers worth three stars.

Plagenz blames this in part on the backwash of the 1960s. "A lot of men went into the ministry for reasons other than preaching. They were interested in social action, so now we're stuck with them." It seemed only natural that in 1969 The Pulpit, venerable sister magazine of the Christian Century, renamed itself Christian Ministry.

Charles L. Allen, folksy pulpit patriarch of Houston's First United Methodist Church, thinks that seminarians' lack of interest in preaching was largely due to the emphasis on social impact encouraged by Martin Luther King Jr. The irony is that King, "one of the greatest pulpit men of all time," moved his countrymen as much with words as with deeds. "A lot of younger preachers at the time didn't see that," says Allen.

Many preachers devote far too little time to research, reading and writing in sermon preparation. As a result their poorly constructed, poorly thought out addresses wander from point to point, and listeners' minds wander too. Lack of effort is not necessarily a sign of sloth. Ministers increasingly are expected to bear heavy loads of counseling and administration that nibble away their time. One rule of thumb is to spend "an hour in the study for each minute in the pulpit." But many modern preachers say they are lucky to manage half that.

The problems are compounded when the clergyman is a liberal in theology, which may mean that he is uncertain about the importance and accuracy of the Bible or even about the urgent need for biblical teaching. Seminary instruction in homiletics (the techniques of sermon preparation) is generally good. But to conservative critics this work is often undermined by Bible faculties. "Seminarians are not sure God is speaking in the Bible," says James Boice of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. "The professors think of the Bible as a collection of human documents. Centuries ago, even the heretics believed the Bible was the Word of God; they were just wrong in the way they interpreted it."

Princeton Theological Seminary, considered among the best Protestant seminaries in training preachers, requires three courses on the subject. One covers enunciation, pace, voice production, posture and similar techniques, and is taught by a layman trained in speech. A second analyzes the construction of model sermons from the past. The student learns to mine Bible commentaries, boil his message down to a single sentence, then write out a well-organized sermon. In the final course, students in groups of twelve deliver sermons and criticize one another's-performances.

The graduates face a formidable challenge. Churchgoers today are "theologically illiterate," says Lutheran Minister Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for the Ministry. A lot of things have to be explained rather than taken for granted. (A recent Christianity Today-Gallup survey showed that while 84% of Americans believe the Ten Commandments are still valid, more than half could not even identify five of them.) Preachers have less time in which to do the explaining too. Says Donald Macleod, who has taught homiletics at Princeton for 32 years: "The minds of listeners are geared to TV and the 30-second commercial."

While Macleod insists on an 18-minute maximum, in former times sermons would run more than an hour. Ministers commanded an authority that would be unthinkable today. They could give full play to docere, delectare, flectere (to teach, to delight, to move), the three purposes of preaching once listed by St. Augustine.

The most famous sermon ever preached in America was Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which compared the sinner's plight to "a spider or loathesome insect" held over a fire. When Edwards preached, all New England shook in its boots. But the so-called Golden Age of Preaching did not come until the 19th century, with stemwinders like Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn and Phillips Brooks of Boston. Clyde Fant of the First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, a former homiletics teacher, notes that even then folks found fault with the state of the pulpit. "Where are the good preachers?" asks Fant. "Right where they've always been --few and far between." By most accounts, the 20th century giant was Harry Emerson Fosdick, who died in 1969.

Today the pendulum is swinging back in favor of preaching. When search committees are scouting about for a minister to hire, the top things they are likely to look for are, as an old adage puts it, 1) Preaching. 2) Preaching. 3) Preaching. Right now there are around 200,000 Protestant preachers in America. Anyone presuming to choose the best would be guilty of the sin of pride, not to mention some shortage of charity and common sense. The following seven stars of the pulpit selected by TIME'S editors and correspondents across the country are at the very least proof that many splendid practitioners of the ancient art of preaching are still at large in the U.S. Only preachers who nurture a congregation week by week, year after year, were considered, thus ruling out famous evangelists like Billy Graham and TV personalities. Those chosen had to convey, along with solid content and skillful delivery, the sense of over whelming conviction that is one of the golden keys to great preaching.

Like poetry, preaching is always a mystery. Each Sunday brings the danger of failure, and with that the question of potential impact. In his intriguing little book on preaching, Telling the Truth, Novelist and sometime Preacher Frederick Buechner describes the magic moment when the minister steps into the pulpit. In the pews sit a college student there against his will, a banker who twice contemplated suicide that week, a contractor on the take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?"

David H.C. Read, 69, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York. "The worst sin is dullness," says Read, a transplanted Scotsman and British army chaplain who is never dull. Still, he disapproves of the whole idea of "princes of the pulpit," and he deplores the fact that people go to church to hear a celebrated preacher rather than to worship. But if there is any one prince of the Protestant pulpit these days, it is Read.

A typical Read sermon may begin with a quote from Humpty-Dumpty to Alice and turn on some apt lines from Samuel Johnson or Shakespeare as it wrestles with a timeless (but contemporary) problem using the perspectives of the Bible. "Scholarly content is terribly important," Read says, "but it shouldn't intrude." Read's material is solid enough to make him one of the few preachers whose collected sermons can be read as literature--and at the same time enjoy a respectable sale in book form.

Read is not merely elegant and literary; his words carry authority. So does his silver-haired, kinetic presence as he hunches forward in the pulpit, chopping the air with one hand to emphasize a point or flinging phrases imperiously out over the congregation. What he manages best of all is to be civilized and witty yet dedicated to a faith that many worldly and successful men find hard to maintain. He comes at problems mind first, deals with them in terms that sophisticated people understand, always giving the devil his due, never glossing over the chaos and confusion. But through his thought runs a strain of deep feeling and faith capable of convincing others. One of Read's finest sermons, called "When I Stopped Explaining Human Suffering," notes that he knows by heart, but has stopped offering, all the standard religious ways of justifying God's apparently harmful ways to man, of answering the seminarian's eternal question, "Why did this happen if God is love?" Read's passionate conclusion: "I believe the Christian Gospel not because it offers the best explanation of human suffering, but because it gives us the strength we need to win through." All of which illustrates Read's own suggestion that a sermon must be commanding rather than chatty, and that however urbane, it should finally "leave the listener in the presence of God."

Edward (E.V.) Hill, 46, Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in central Los Angeles. E.V. Hill does not have to worry about competing for attention with television--or anything else. There is hardly a gifted teacher, TV actor or stand-up comic in America who can surpass the show that Hill puts on every Sunday before 1,400 enthralled parishioners in the black ghetto of Los Angeles. Hill is a man of a thousand voices, and all of them can range from a whisper to a raspy roar. It is the folly of mankind, especially as practiced by the folks in his congregation, that Hill dramatizes with a gift for caricature reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer limning the qualities of his sinful pilgrims. In devastating yet genial parody, Hill can do a drunken black and a policeman, a young couple falling in (and out of) love, wives bearing grudges against husbands, husbands tired of wives. From time to time he'll call out, "Are ya'll listenin' to me?" or "Help me now!" or "Help me, Holy Ghost!" The crowd joins in until the church hums with sound.

But just when it seems that this is pure show biz, Hill will lay his theme on the people: the need for agape, or pure, unselfish love. "I can't be bothered with my old mother," he quotes a parishioner. "I can't be bothered gettin' married. I can't be bothered with my husband." Each "bothered," thunderously drawn out, reverberates with pride and selfish isolation -- and the boredom that he sees as a curse of the modern world. "Sin won't stop developing," he notes. Boredom and selfishness are merely the devil's latest tricks. "Life lived at its best is full of daily forgivin' and forgettin'," Hill concludes. "It's no trick to love the lovely. It takes a child of God to love the unlovely."

Hill's "hells" are not just for other people. As he holds forth, a chunky figure in white billowing robe, mopping his brow from exertion, or telling a funny and touching story about how he and his wife once avoided divorce by going to an ice show, it is clear that he is down there, an Everyman in the street, wrestling with the devil himself. Hill brought his earthy style from Seguin, Texas, where he was raised among Depression sharecroppers. From his freshman year at Prairie View A & M University, where he earned a degree in agriculture in 1955, he paid his way by preaching. What he calls his lifelong "ro mance with the Word" is catching. In his almost two decades at Mt. Zion, his congregation has produced 74 preachers.

Edward W. Bauman, 52, Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington, D.C. "Someone once told me I always preach on tiptoe," says Bauman. "I consider that the greatest compliment I've ever received." It was a Boston University professor who first trained the slender, lantern-jawed Bauman in what has become his trademark in the pulpit: the importance of conveying joy and enthusiasm. "Preaching combines the skills of a writer and an actor and an artist," he notes.

Bauman gets up every day at 6 for prayer and yoga before tackling the daily chores. He outlines a whole year's sermons during a two-month summer "vacation" and admits that he reads and jots down ideas and quotes for sermons constantly, like an enquiring reporter. To preach effectively he has found he must remain close to his 1 ,400-member congregation. The outpouring of affection from members after worship each Sunday proves he has been successful.

"Preaching is one of the great joys of my life," Bauman declares. "The reason is that I believe what God did through Jesus Christ is the most important thing that ever happened in human history." Before coming to Foundry 15 years ago, he taught at Wesley Theological Seminary and American University, where he originated a TV series on the Bible, "Bauman Bible Telecast," seen in 50 cities. In this TV-minded age, Bauman feels, it is doubly important to provide illustrations in sermons. He notes that parables were Jesus' favorite form of teaching. Bauman is a theological liberal whose sermons are larded with quotes and examples from writers like C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton. But he notes that America "has been on a head trip" since Franklin, Jefferson and the Age of Reason, and he thinks, "we have to remember to get in touch with our feelings."

In one of his finest recent sermons Bauman spoke of ways to deal with personal grief, taking as his text Jesus' raising of Lazarus (John 11:17-44), and touching on Lewis' book about his own wife's dying. Finding one's way back to new hope, he concluded, is always "frightening." He paused, then added in a rising voice, with overwhelming conviction, "but wonderful!" That was preaching on tiptoe.

Franklin Pollard, 45, First Baptist Church of Jackson, Miss. Pollard is very much in the evangelistic mainstream as preacher in a big church in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's biggest denomination. He was raised in a Texas shack, one of seven children of a poor oilfield worker. "We had three rooms and a path," he likes to say of the primitive conditions in his childhood. But though he has a ready supply of down-home anecdotes, he shuns the kind of cornpone and bombast sometimes associated with evangelical pulpits. Pollard commands attention instead with infectious charm and an ingratiating, please-understand urgency, communicated by eyes and face as he leans out over the congregation. Since he finds that laymen always make the same two complaints about sermons (too long, too short on humor), he tries to oblige, honing his Sunday morning sermons to 22 minutes, often putting them on tape cassettes for memorization.

Though his church stands across the street from Mississippi's state capitol and his congregation includes the current Governor and three of his predecessors, Pollard's pulpit does not emphasize politics. He does speak out occasionally about racial equality and has always insisted on an open membership policy, though First Baptist says it has no record of how many members are black. Pollard sees the U.S. in trouble, and one of his persistent themes is how to save American democracy in a hostile world. He is likely to point out that "the best in vestment of all is the missionary investment," after citing figures snowing that the average "overseas conversion to Christianity costs just $654 per convert -- as opposed to the cost of $200,000 to kill a single enemy soldier in World War II or $500,000 per kill in Viet Nam. It takes character to preserve freedom, he insists. The Ten Commandments, in fact, are ten principles from God about how to keep freedom.

Pollard delivers three sermons a week, teaches a Bible class for some 500 prominent laymen every Tuesday, and prepares both a TV and a radio program weekly. "But if ser mons are not drawn directly from the Bible," he says firmly, they're "just speechmaking." With all the competing forms of commercial art and entertainment today, Pollard figures, the continuing demand for preaching "can't be explained in any other terms than that God is using it."

Gardner C. Taylor, 60, Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, N.Y. "He has a voice that sounds like God," an admiring fellow preacher says of Taylor. To anyone who has listened to a Taylor sermon, the judgment does not seem far off target. Taylor's voice is deep and apparently inexhaustible. Working variations on a biblical theme ("Create in me a clean heart, O God"), he artfully circles around his subject, now lulling the listeners into serenity, now rising to majestic sincerity in stately cadences that overwhelm as much with their sound as with their meaning. Taylor says that for him a sermon is a journey. "I like to start with a cool introduction to suggest what I'm going to say, without giving away the secret." But when the secret is out and the climax is reached, the key biblical phrase that Taylor wants no one to forget is engraved in the congregation's memory.

He has a gift for the short, sharp, descriptive phrase. The Apostle Paul appears as "a deformed wanderer with the label of Tarsus on his baggage." Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus marvels at Taylor's way of playing with a single word: "He whispers it and then he shouts it; he pats, pinches and probes it," each new sentence adding a shade of meaning. Taylor, a veteran community activist and a nationally influential churchman, has been at Concord Baptist for 31 years. He is widely regarded, with justice, as the dean of the nation's black preachers.

Peter J. Gomes, 37, the Memorial Church at Harvard University. A quintessential New England preacher who speaks like a Brahmin, Gomes is a board member of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Mass., his famous home town. He happens to be black. Gomes (rhymes with homes) notes wryly that his parents raised him in "a rather backward environment in which language still had some validity." The Plymouth schools thereafter drilled him in memorizing large chunks of great prose and poetry, a skill he retains.

As a preacher to students, he constantly searches for "the judgment of history upon this place and this moment. We're very unlikely to uncover anything new. It's a conceit of our age that we are the first people who ever encountered anxiety or fear or guilt." When Gomes preached on one of the year's hottest campus issues, divestiture of university investments in firms active in South Africa, he did not dwell on the politics. Instead, he spoke of the irony that the dispute underscored: the crying need for firm moral convictions in a time when universities are celebrating their "freedom from morals, values and virtues."

Gomes' congregation necessarily changes with each graduation. He is naturally as concerned as his student listeners about attitudes toward the future. He notes: " 'What are you doing next year?' can be, and often is, regarded as a hostile question." Gomes makes cheerful academic jokes (on Ascension Day: "It is the Lord who graduates") and will quote Ogden Nash or Woody Allen as freely as Crisis Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But he offers no easy optimism or simple uplift to his young charges. "Human progress is a foolish myth of epic proportions," Gomes insists. "It is the fantasy of our age and time. Human perseverance in the face of human folly, it is that of which the kingdom of heaven is made."

Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style on Welsh preachers, the only regular actors on display during his youth.

Though Davies' mother had a personal experience of Jesus--who talked to her when she was polishing the brass--Davies at first set out to be a lawyer. He switched to his present vocation only after working his way through the philosophical skepticism of the logical positivists rampant at Cambridge University when he was there. He arrived in the U.S. for good in 1952, and has preached in Chicago for 18 years. As a preacher, he tries to translate the Gospel into the idiom of today, so that "the Bible comes alive and the Christian faith is made believable." One way that Davies makes the Bible come alive during his sermons is by gesturing, mimicking and acting out roles with the skill of a Marcel Marceau. But he finds it "appalling and tragic" that present-day idiom itself sometimes becomes the Gospel, as when "sensitivity training is mistaken for the work of the Holy Spirit." Davies' rich and mostly middle-aged congregation regard him as a star performer and a provocative mind. For his part, he likes to quote Karl Earth, who once described preaching as "an attempt to give God's answers to the questions people raise." Most of those answers are the same for rich and poor alike. qed

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