The first thing I want to say that I know about effective preaching is that I know that I don’t do it. My only hope of dealing with this subject is to state a few of my convictions and ideas about effective preaching which remain way out there in the unattained future and confess what have been my short-comings and unscaled obstacles as I’ve tried to move toward the objective of effective preaching.

Some time ago I was playing golf with a couple of Presbyterian preachers on a Monday morning (where I wish I was right now) and one of them remarked: “Do you guys ever think about retirement? You know we are moving up in that direction.”

An honest confession is always good for the soul, especially on Monday morning, so I answered my Presbyterian colleague out of my heart and off the top of my mind: “My yes! I think seriously about retiring every Monday morning.”

Certainly there is no more humbling point from which to view this topic of effective preaching than Monday morning, any Monday morning.

I’d like to begin by telling you what I have found to be some of the most serious obstacles in my struggle to achieve some effectiveness in my preaching. Of course the chief enemy and offender is myself — my own laziness, disposition, and personality limitations. I won’t dwell on that — it is too dismally uninteresting.

But next to myself, I believe the greatest handicap I have encountered is the contrary conception other people have held concerning the nature and function of my office as a Christian minister.

First, there is the concept of the minister as the “Organizational Jump-up” in his own communion. In recent years the role of the minister in our dear old Presbyterian Church South has been cast more and more as the “Organization Man,” the fellow who is loyal to the machine of programs and causes. To be out of step is to be damned professionally. There is something suspect about the pastor who doesn’t observe Montreat Day and Christian Education Season and the week of Self-denial for World Missions and Church Extension, etc., etc. He must be present for every committee meeting on the Presbytery and Synod and General Assembly level, and organize his congregation by the latest patterns that come in a steady stream from Richmond and Atlanta and Nashville. “The Organization Man” by very nature is a loyal “carrier-out” of orders. “His not to reason why; His not to make reply; His but to do and die.” Of course, he is a needed and necessary man in the church, but “creativity” is not his watchword, it is rather, “conformity.” And effective preaching could not possibly emanate from such a spiritual atmosphere of the whirring wheels of organization. There is no time in his schedule for what that delightful Scotsman, George Docherty, calls “brrrooding”, a sine qua non to him for good preaching.

But there is another role the modern minister must play which stifles effective preaching: that of “Hatchet Man” for every good cause in the community. There are those in his parish and those in the city who expect his leadership in Community Chest, Civic Clubs, Boy Scouts, YM and YWCA campaigns and programs. He must be on the PTA speakers list and the Race Relations Committee, etc., etc. There are public pressures from powerful committees who feel they must have the support of the clergy behind their movements and conspicuously present at the Kick-off dinners and photographed with the lay leadership in the newspapers. The leading laymen of the church want the pastor to take an interest in their pet community projects, and rightly so. But this expected role of “Hatchet Man” for every good cause in the community, worthy a role as it most surely is, often gets in the way of his preaching preparation. Sunday is staring a man in the face and he has been in committee all week (Illus. Dr. Gammon — of Hamden Sydney — “the relentless return of the Sabbath, etc.”)

Now what can be done about all this I don’t know. Certainly I haven’t done much of anything. I’ve just experienced the pressures and the frustrations. I’m hoping that our discussion will bring out some solutions our colleagues have found.

There are about five criteria in my book for judging preaching. First, I would mention freshness as an indispensable quality of effective preaching. God help us, but so much of our preaching is a dull, lifeless business, a serving up of old ideas in pious phrases worn smooth of all meaning through endless repetition.

At a ministers’ conference some years ago, I was entering the lecture room late. The speaker was already well into his subject. I met a friend of mine coming out as I started in. “Where are you going?” I asked. “I’m not staying for that,” he said in disgust. “I can see where the fellow is headed and I’ve already been there before.” Do our congregations remain and nod through the sermon just because they are too polite to leave?

I was with Knox Poole out in Texas for a week’s meeting last month. He told me of this experience. One day when he was a student at Union Seminary some twenty or thirty years ago, and serving the little Fulton church as student supply, he ran into one of his professors on the campus. After the usual amenities, the Reverend Doctor said: “Young man, I want to give you a good text to preach on at Fulton. Over there in the 13^th chapter about the 36^th verse of Acts you find this: “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep.” Now Knox, that’s a great text. First it says, ‘David served. He was king, but he knew the honor and reward of service. Second, the text says that David served his own generation. What else could he serve, but his own generation? Third, David served his own generation by the will of God. Not David’s will, nor the people’s will, but God’s will, he served. Now young man, you develop that text. You will preach a great sermon.”

Knox told me he was back in Richmond in March of this year, about 25 years later, for his mother-in-law’s funeral. He ran into this same professor, now retired, and took occasion to thank him for a book the old gentleman had written in the meantime. The aged mentor seemed pleased and after acknowledging his satisfaction, said: “Knox, let me give you a good text for a sermon. Over there in the book of Acts at the 13^th chapter, it says, “David, after he had served his own generation ….”

Of course it is an ancient gospel we proclaim, but our preaching of it will not effectively reach, arrest, and convert modern man unless that imperishable gospel is presented with living freshness, clothed in the thought forms and vernacular of contemporary life. I heard a woman say of one of our Southern Presbyterian preachers recently: “Why, yes, I know him. I heard him preach ten or twelve years ago and I’ll never forget that sermon. Guess what his topic was? ‘My life is a Coral Isle’.”

Effective preaching has the quality of freshness.

Second, in my book, effective preaching has movement. A good sermon is a discourse that marches. It begins at a given, well-defined point and it moves steadily, resolutely to a certain destination.

William Barclay tells us that the Hebrew word for preaching among the Scribes of Jesus’ day was the same word for stringing beads one after another on a string. There was little logical connection and no real progress in the Scribes preaching — just a series of prudent sayings strung together. Such sermonizing may have been good from the point of view that it took realistic account of man’s short span of attention, but it was bad in that it did not relate one truth constructively to another and failed to minister to man’s thirst for movement and progress in his processes of thought.

Could it be that this was one reason the common people heard our Lord gladly and said of Him, in contrast with the sermonizing of the bead stringing Scribes, that He taught as one having authority and not as the Scribes and Pharisees?

Third, I say that effective preaching must be scriptural. Maybe you say that I ought to say that first. Certainly, no matter how entertaining and fresh the discourse, no matter how well organized into a marching caravan of forward moving thought, if it is not a word from God, founded in and proceeding from the scriptures, it is not Christian preaching.

You will remember Spurgeon’s entry in his diary that memorable day when he had been to church in Colchester Chapel and listened to the halting efforts of a poorly-prepared Methodist lay preacher: “The poor fellow had not much to say,” wrote Spurgeon, “and for that reason he kept repeating his text. But his text was all that was needed, at least by me, for his text was, ‘Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.’” It was the preacher’s text and not his sermon, that the Holy Spirit used to convert the great Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

But you and I have no right to justify our laziness by expecting the Holy Spirit to perform miracles just because we select great texts to preach from. Too often it works the other way round. The selection of a great text cannot overcome the tediousness and triteness our hearers will forever after associate with that particular part of God’s word because we have not gone through the mental and spiritual discipline to set it before them in all the imperishable glory it evermore possesses when thoughtfully and vitally related to contemporary life.

My fourth criteria for effective preaching is a quality we might call “Incarnational.” The word the preacher proclaims must become incarnate in his own life or it will not become effective in the community or congregation where he ministers. It was said of Henry Drummond that he never preached anything unless it had first passed through the channels of his own experience, therefore Drummond always preached with powerful effectiveness.

I remember when Dr. Charlie Diehl told me: “You may preach some great sermons but you will never extend your influence beyond the measure of your own moral and spiritual stature.” And Dr. Charlie is right, as he usually is.”

I recently ran into a former parishioner from a congregation I served 15 or 20 years ago. We were reminiscing about life in the church during those trying war years. Do you know the fellow didn’t say a word about some of those epochal sermons I preached (though I can distinctly remember at this moment his coming up one Sunday morning after I had preached on the nature and mission of the church and saying how deeply he had been moved by that provocative message.) But the other day, when I ran into him at the Memphis airport, he never said a word about that sermon or any other I preached.

Do you know what the guy talked to me about — what he seemed to be unable to get out of his head? Why, the time that he and I and some pilots from the nearby air training base had stayed up all one Saturday night (while I was worrying about my sermon for the next morning) trying to get clearance on some high priority penicillin (it was allocated only to the military in those days) and have it flown in by some of those brave trainees in time to save the life of his father, a civilian physician who was dying of pneumonia. (Dr. Hugh Gamble)

My feeling is that we modern preachers are not failing so much as word-merchants, but as dramatic artists. Our ministry is not prophetic enough in the sense that we do not act out vividly what we profess to believe. Jeremiah wore his yoke through the streets of Jerusalem. Today in Memphis the most characteristically Christian service which is being performed is the work of a German Jewish immigrant caterer. (Leo Seligman, a former inmate of a Nazi concentration camp)

But we are so busy, we preachers, with preparing to talk on our next speaking appointment that we have no time for living out the more demanding and spectacular aspects of the gospel. People hear our message but they do not completely understand, nor are they sincerely convinced or converted, because they do not see us act it out. The word does not become flesh before their eyes.

Finally, I have a criteria for effective preaching which might be called “Incandescence.” Good preaching glows with a heat that ignites. When James W. Clarke, Professor of Homiletics at Princeton Seminary, addressed the annual Michigan pastors’ conference in February of this year, he called for a prophetic ministry, because of (I quote): “the moral decline of political science, the resurrected barbarisms that are shouldering their way through the world and the submission too often to secular adjudication.” Dr. Clarke said: “one of the most important characteristics of the modern prophet is the capacity for moral wrath. This must not be confused with bad temper, petulance, or scolding. Moral wrath is the inner heart of the soul and is rooted in compassion, in conscience, and in the realization of the rights of God, and the worth of man. The trouble with so many clergy is that we do not get excited about certain things that ought to excite us, but stand and gaze upon moral evil without pulse increasing a single beat or without any rising anger.”

Here is a good text for an incendiary sermon, or a scriptural basis for incandescent preaching — I Samuel 11:6 — “And the spirit of God came upon Saul when he heard these tidings, and his anger was kindled greatly.”

You will remember the incident. The Ammonites came up to Jabesh-Gilead and gave the people this terrible alternative: either be destroyed or become the slaves of the Ammonites, and, as a sign of their servitude, have their right eyes put out. When King Saul heard this, his righteous indignation was stirred. Note that the text says the Spirit of the Lord came and kindled his anger. He moved with dramatic incandescence just as did Jesus in cleansing the Temple — for stern issues demand stern measures. Saul quartered two oxen and sent the bloody members throughout the land of Israel with this message: “This is what will happen to your oxen if you don’t come follow me in the fight against Ammon.”

So Saul gathered an army and marched out to the defense of the men of Jabesh-Gilead and slaughtered the Ammonites and saved his countrymen from slavery.

When as ministers of the church of Jesus Christ we behold injustice and freedom threatened or taken away from the children of God, and dismal destroying forces gathering — then is not time for mild measures and even pulses and timid resolutions and polite compliments, but bold action, dramatic movements, heroic challenges — yes, even the stirring up of righteousness indignation.

Effective preaching will always be what it always has been — a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness of man’s sin and shame and inhumanity to man, and rebellion against Almighty God: “Repent, behold what injustice and burden your rebellion and sin are heaping upon men.” Only a voice that cries from a conscience outraged by man’s sin will stir the slumbering soul to open to the Holy Spirit.

Years ago in England an energetic young curate got called on the carpet by his Bishop. Some of his parishioners had sent up objections. He had been preaching on Sundays from his pulpit, it seems, about the atrocious sanitary conditions in his little village and openly advocating a closed sewer system to replace the open ditches, for men and women and little children were dying like flies in the polluted town. So the outraged Bishop admonished the upstart clergyman: “Stick to the gospel. Preach the great doctrines of the church. Leave off these civic betterment schemes. They rile up your leading constituents.” The young cleric’s reply to his Bishop was memorable: “But sir,” he said, “it is precisely because I believe in the incarnation that I do all these things.”

I have run on much too long. These are some of the criteria I always have before me as I try from week to week to become more effective in my preaching. But I always remember with great gratitude what Dr. Hugh Black said to our class at the close of the course he taught us in homiletics: “Remember, I’ve taught you all the rules, but you may break all the rules, if only, you’ll preach a good sermon.”