If someone asked you to fashion a great preacher, the product would probably not resemble Fred Craddock. Fred is not physically imposing, and he describes his voice as sounding like "the wind whistling through a splinter on a post." But Fred Craddock can preach. And he's equally at home delivering the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale or preaching to a rural Appalachian congregation. Perhaps that's why God, not a human designer, is the one who calls and fashions preachers.
Craddock's formal education came from Johnson Bible College, Phillips University, and Vanderbilt, his informal education from Disciples of Christ pastorates in Tennessee and Oklahoma and a lifetime of thoughtful observation. Since 1979, he has served as professor of preaching and New Testament at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia.
But Fred doesn't content himself with teaching about preaching; he preaches at least as often now as he did in the parish. It is his great love.
His workshops and sermons in Preaching Today consistently rank at the top of listener evaluations. He is sought out as a speaker, pastors flock to his preaching seminars, and his recent book, Preaching (Abingdon), has been given warm reviews.
Since Craddock has combined excellence in preaching with effectiveness in teaching others how to do it, LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley journeyed to Atlanta to discuss with him the craft of preaching.
Did preaching come naturally to you? Or has it been a struggle?
I didn't like my preaching when I began in my first parish. I was uncomfortable with the manufactured style I felt I had to put on. I felt if old friends or family members would come to hear me preach, they'd say, "Is that you, Fred? What's the matter? You don't sound like that any other time, so why do you shift into it in the pulpit?"
Even though I weighed only 120 pounds, I was trying to be the preachers I had heard as a child-big, impressive men-and I was coming up short.
That was painful, because I wasn't trying to sound manufactured. I studied hard. I felt my messages strongly. I believed what I preached. But I was trying to push it with a body that couldn't do it and a voice that didn't do it. That was discouraging. I thought of quitting rather than being a parody of the preacher I assumed I should be.
What did you do?
I started thinking, There must be a way for people without exceptional physical qualities to be heard, so how can I get anyone to listen to me?
Then I noticed that when I talked at church dinners and less-formal congregational occasions, I did better. People listened and remembered more. For instance, in the fellowship hall after a meal, I found myself using Scripture and people's experiences, telling anecdotes from my life, and bringing it home to the point of the occasion. But then in the sanctuary on Sunday morning, I'd manufacture something else that I thought a sermon must be.
So I thought, Why don't I move what I'm doing in the fellowship hall into the sanctuary? That initially brought some criticism from people who didn't call that preaching, but I felt I was being heard more. Finally I decided I didn't care whether they called it a sermon or not; it was working. If they got the point, if they wanted to talk about it more, then I was being heard.
It was another ten years before I thought about it theologically, since in the parish I was just trying to preach. But finally I decided my style wasn't just a concession to my weaknesses. I was moving the Word of God away from my lips to their ears, and that was worth doing.
So what you considered your idiosyncratic weakness could be a strength.
Yes. I was very retiring, very shy, as I began ministry. The most difficult thing for me was to go up to somebody, put out my hand, and say, "Hello. I'm Fred Craddock."
I had the feeling the answer would be, "Who cares?" I thought, Why should I impose myself on anybody?
That made preaching difficult, because in preaching, I'm an intruder-benevolent, but still an intruder. I'm still hesitant socially. There remains a kind of pain in entering a public arena-going to the pulpit and taking everybody's time.
But, again, it seems you have turned what might be a weakness into a strength. As a shy person, you measure your words more carefully.
Perhaps. I do think it makes me more receptive. I absorb things. My wife remarks, "People just talk to you!" It's true; people open up to me everywhere-on planes, at school, in homes.
I have a large interior world. I listen and receive, and out of that mix comes my own thinking. It's not something planned, but it provides me with a wealth of preaching resources. Understanding this has turned into an advantage what for a long time I lamented as a flaw. My oldest brother could walk into a room and take it over, and I once regretted lacking that charisma. But now I try to maximize my own silent strengths.
How else has your background affected your preaching?
It took me a while to discover the resource my father had been. We were poor, and there were few toys to play with. So in the evening, my father would tell us stories. Growing up, I discounted the value of stories, but when as a preacher I started struggling for a way to make my point and I discovered stories, I realized I was drawing on his resources-not the stories he told, but a legacy of the dynamics of storytelling. I began to bless him for what I had considered for twenty-five years to be worthless.
Then I started spending a lot of time with storytellers. There was one last blacksmith shop in town and a store where people gathered. There I listened to the older people tell stories. Then I would go home and try to sketch them out hastily on a piece of paper to figure out what made the effects and why they held my interest. By observation and reflection, I learned storytelling principles like restraint: holding things back, keeping things unresolved until the end of the story.
Where can pastors look today for models of good storytelling?
Garrison Keillor, who was on public radio's A Prairie Home Companion, is a good storyteller. Once in a while there's a standup comedian who tells comedy in parable form, especially Jewish comedians with rabbinic training, and quite a few of them have been trained as rabbis. While the content of their stories frequently is not all that worthwhile, their technique, the way they hold you off until the very end, is good.
I am constantly looking for authors-like Eudora Welty-who know how to tell a story. As a child I was often ill, and when I'd complain, my father would say, "You should arrange your life so that if you spend the rest of it in a wheelchair, it can be a good life." When I asked how to do that, he would give me a book.
I liked to read short stories, and to this day, I consider the short story a cousin to a sermon in the way it unrolls.
Sometimes I would record what older people said and ask myself as I replayed it, What makes this story interesting? The subject matter isn't all that important, but I follow the story. Then I thought, If you increase the importance of the subject matter to the kingdom of God, why can't you be just as engaging?
What good does preaching accomplish?
There's the obvious, the proclamation of the gospel. But because preaching is oral, it is also a socializing force. It gathers people. Written material is private; you hold it on your lap. But a word spoken in a room helps create community. People have a desire to belong. It does what hymns sometimes do; it reminds people of their roots.
Preaching also gives people something over against their lives. Many people don't like life to just move comfortably before them. In preaching one gets that keen edge of moral seriousness about life; it introduces larger dimensions. People feel their lives are so trivialized; when they hear a sermon, they see something much bigger than life. What they do with that is another matter, but they need to hear it.
Poor preaching is not so much false as it is little. Preaching should be bigger. To be a human being is to long for something larger than I am, and preaching provides that if it's good preaching.
What makes a sermon good?
One element is thematic control, and that theme has to be, for me, derived from Scripture. There are a lot of Christian things said that have no direct connection to Scripture, but a sermon that is not directly drawn from Scripture is orphaned, however bright or clever it may be. "By what authority do you say these things?" is the audience's proper question.
I need to study a text of Scripture until I am satisfied I know what the text is saying, so when I preach, I can say, "This is from that text through honest and prayerful engagement, not just from my own ideas. This is what the text is saying to us." Certainly a given Scripture text contains more than I can ever cover in a sermon, but my sermon should at least convey part of what the Scripture says.
Take the text, "Lord, teach us to pray." I may decide the thematic control here is, Prayer is something learned. That theme must hold together all the sermon material, however casual, humorous, or anecdotal. It's that theme that gives material permission to get into the sermon.
There's a direct relationship between constraint and freedom of imagination. If I know in particular what I want to say, I can think of more things to say. But if I know only in general what my theme is-say, for instance, I intend to preach on "prayer"-nothing happens; the subject is too broad, too general. My brain dulls. "Prayer is something learned" is a more manageable, more easily developed, theme. So thematic control is terribly important.
A second element of good preaching is appropriateness. The sermon needs to fit the congregation. I don't mean making concessions to what people want to hear, but the sermon should be appropriate in the same way that Jesus was. He answered the questions people asked, not other questions.
There's nothing more useless than the inappropriate. A good message to the wrong crowd at the wrong time may be full of truths, but they are not winged for the minds and hearts of those people.
You once said that "Good preaching not only speaks God's word to the people, but it speaks the people's words to God." What did you mean?
Another quality of good preaching is it evokes the best from the treasury of people's own Christian experience. If I can preach in such a way that you begin to say, "You know, that's happened to me. I've thought of that myself. I feel exactly the same way," if I can get you to the point where you can't remember if I said it or you thought it, then my preaching will be effective.
In my sermons, I try to include a high percentage of ideas the people have heard before, but to say them in a different way. In any sermon, 85 to 90 percent should be recognized by a congregation. That is, if you were in a black congregation, they would know when to say, "Amen! Preach it!" But I try to say it in a way that's fresh for me as well as for them.
If I deliver a message that's brand new to people, it can be as true and right as rain, but if they don't like it, they can dismiss it. But if I evoke a thought in them, and they say, "That's right! That's exactly right!" then the results are inescapable. The great unused resource in preaching is that roomful of folk who've been Christians for years and have experienced a lot of life. When a kid comes up to me and says, "Mr. Craddock, I have something you can preach," that's a high compliment, because I've made him feel the sermon is partially his.
How do you create an atmosphere where people feel they can share with you?
Part of it is by my appearance and my voice, I'm not a threatening person. I mean, when I walk into a room, it's like nobody walked in anyway! I'm not very intimidating.
Second, I try to project a sense of freedom. When I first started out, the intensity of my desire and passion pushed people away. Then a retired minister-he's dead now-said to me, "I have a suggestion. Before you leave the house in the morning, say a little prayer that the Lord will lead you and that you'll be effective. Then when you open the door to leave, say, 'Well, here goes nothing.' If you can do both of those, you'll be much more effective."
I thought he was being a little light. But once I accepted the truth of what I was preaching, my sense of the importance of things was mellowed by the fact that God is the one in charge. I just happen to be here. I started to see it as almost humorous that I was allowed to participate.
I never tell jokes in the pulpit, but I do use humor. I may read a Bible passage and then say, "Why in the world would anybody write this?" and then I give a couple of humorous responses. People begin chuckling, and then when I say, "It seems to me what Paul is really saying is . . ." they listen, because they've been thinking about it too.
What goes through your mind as you're preaching? Is there any overriding concern?
I want to show people that I am really interested in what I'm saying, that I believe in it. To me, the most fatal comment about preaching is not "It wasn't biblical," but "He preached as though nothing were at stake."
Indifference is deadly. People listen if they feel you really are invested; this is not a Great Books club where we're thinking of a few great ideas.
I present my sermon as an advocate. There's something for people to agree or disagree with. I'm not confrontive or combative, but people tell me sometimes it's on the way home or the next day when they suddenly realize, I think he was talking to me! It may be delayed. It may be indirect. But it's there: I feel keenly about my subject and I have invested emotion in it. Emotion is the way my body registers my values, so I become emotionally engaged in preaching. Then people become involved, too.
On some Sundays, the congregation seems more difficult to reach. What do you do when it looks like people aren't about to listen to you?
Sometimes in a service I'll see people who are sullen or communicating their boredom. When I see this arms-across-the-chest resistance, my first thought is, What are you doing sitting in the back corner refusing to sing?
But then I decide there's some reason those people are here. Their posture is to tell me "I'm not interested," but beneath it is another message, communicated even more clearly by their very presence: "Of all the places I could have gone today, I came here."
So I preach to that second message: "You came," not "What are you doing here resisting?" I try to identify the search, the desire that brought that person here when there are so many other places he or she could be.
Back in those struggling days when I was trying to find a way to preach, a young man in the congregation asked me, "Why do you speak to the worst person in the house rather than the best?" It was true; I had appointed myself as a kind of detective. I was always pursuing evil, using my sermons to root it out of people.
"You speak to the worst in us," he said. "We're here. We're searching. We're hungry. Take that as the place to start."
It hurt me to realize what I had been doing-my zest to go after the bad in people.
So now, when I see the resistant person in the corner, I think, But that person is here! He may have an ill-defined hunger, like standing in front of a refrigerator when you don't know what you want. But I'll just go ahead and put the food on the table. He might eat.
Resistance is there in any congregation. People resist good preaching and they resist poor preaching, and that's a compliment to the gospel. If I believe the gospel really effects change in people's lives, then why shouldn't they resist it?
Resistance, distractions in the service, people leaving-it used to bug me to death early in my ministry. I interpreted everything negatively: What's wrong? They didn't like that. Now I realize the person who leaves early may have a plane to catch. My job is not to keep everyone riveted to his or her seat. That's been very liberating.
But doesn't it affect you when your sermon is ignored-or taken lightly?
I do spend a lot of time studying, Grafting, praying, reflecting on a sermon, and therefore it becomes very much a part of me. My emotions and my passion are in my preaching, so for people to just drop in before the service and say, "Well, going to give us a good talk today, Fred?" is offensive.
I pray and worry and study all week, and somebody drives up with a boat behind the car on the way to the lake and stops off for forty-five minutes to say he's been in church. My temptation is to not speak to him.
I feel like saying, "When you are ready to listen, come back, but right now I don't really have anything to say to you."
A sermon belongs to the public, but in the process of preparing it, it becomes so personal that sharing it in public is like holding an open house in the prayer room; it just doesn't seem to fit. My inclination is to say, "Those who are interested, step inside, and let's talk," but I know I can't do that. I'm not a Gnostic; Christianity is not some secret sect.
The Christian faith is personal, but it can't be private.
That's right, and I have to fight the tendency to keep it private or available only to a committed few.
That same battle lingers after the sermon. I'm not effective making conversation at the door following the service. I expose my soul from the pulpit, and then somebody shakes hands with me and says, "Boy, that killed me yesterday when the fellow dropped the ball on the ten-yard line. Did you see that play?" I'm not ready to shift into that.
I honestly can't recall what I say sometimes after a service. If you made a recording of what I said to people at the door, it would probably be sadly comical. I need a little time to get debriefed, to kick a can down the road. I don't like to go to lunch with people immediately-maybe an hour or so later. I need to get reassembled, reoriented around people and away from the sermon.
How do you avoid worn ruts, saying what people have heard many times before?
Even when I'm looking over material I've preached before, or a passage they've heard before, I try to find a way to approach the same material from a different angle. Even though the way I once preached it was all right, I couldn't continue preaching it that way. I would get dull. I'd be hearing myself say clichยs.
I don't really like to hear myself talk, so I play little language games to keep language fresh. I'll ask students, "Which of these is faster: out of the tree, from the tree, or down the tree?"
I may say, "What's your favorite word? How about isthmus?" or "What's the hardest word for you to pronounce?" Or I have them search for alternate images. Instead of saying "The squirrel ran across the road," say "The squirrel rippled across the road." If I use unpredictable words, my voice doesn't sound so bad to me.
By being sensitive to words, we stay alive to language. We're talking to the same people all the time, so we must keep our language alive.
As a homiletics professor, you'd better say yes, but we'll ask the question anyway: Is good preaching something that can be taught?
There is enough disappointment among teachers in this field, as in all teaching, that once in a while someone gets down on preaching and says, "It can't be taught!" But it can, because it involves art and skill, thorough preparation, the arrangement of material, nuances, insights into texts-a lot of things you can convey.
Granted there is a gift God gives that lights the lamp in a way that's different. You take no credit for that, but once I discover students' strengths, I can brighten them if only 1 or 2 percent. The gains are in the little things.
Are there elements that can't be taught?
No one can ever teach the self-investment, the self-disclosure, the testimonial dimension of preaching, what the New Testament calls witness.
If someone preaches sermons at arm's length or always in the third person, if there is no involvement, I can't inject the passion. I can decry and pray over that lack of passion, but if there's no oil in the lamp, I can't supply it.
Can you spot the good preachers in your classes?
Once in a while I can, but I've discovered there's something about going into the pulpit that draws out qualities in some of my students that I had no way of knowing were there.
Some of my students have the gift of gab. They are articulate; they won the debating contest in high school. But sometimes they seem to so trust in the horses and chariots of that verbal skill, when they get up in the pulpit it's just more of the same.
Then there's somebody sitting off to one side, taking notes, chewing on a pencil, and thinking. But when that person gets in the pulpit, it's like what is said of people who become president: once they sit in that chair, they grow and take on something of its size. Once they stand in the pulpit, it brings out deeper thought, deeper feeling, deeper conviction, deeper knowledge and study that couldn't be seen before.
Every year there's somebody I had pretty well written off who surprises me. I always look forward to it. I don't at all mind being wrong.
What help can you give to pastors who realize they are not great preachers but would like to improve?
Find out what your strength is-through listening to your preaching, conversation, consultation, attending workshops. The strengths are there. I find in people who are not great preachers such strengths as caring, a love of people, excellent minds, but they don't know how to maximize these strengths. Sometimes they have good material but just don't have a sense of timing.
Ministers come to me in workshops and clinics and say, "I'm kind of down on my preaching."
So I tell them, "Well, let's listen to some of your sermons. I'm not going to try to find your weaknesses and work on them. Weaknesses get too much attention. If you discover your strength and work from there, some of those weaknesses become lovable idiosyncrasies. And I work on just one thing. Why don't we work on the way you end your sermon."
They go to the library and study and come back with an even better conclusion. At the end of the week I say, "Let's play the sermon you brought Monday. Notice how you ended it? Oh, my goodness! We've helped the conclusion."
Or I may work on their storytelling. "Here's somebody named Sam Smith, and here's what happened to him as a child, as an old man, his first marriage, at work, and all. Let's arrange those pieces differently to achieve different results. Suppose we tell them this way, what does it do?" Pretty soon confidence is built. The person realizes, I'm really more capable than I thought.
Most preachers are more capable than they think they are, but they have been put, for a variety of reasons, into the category of mediocre. Some are not great preachers and won't be great preachers. They have other gifts. But there are little things I can do.
And if they improve one little aspect of their preaching, chances are the confidence they gain will help them improve other things.
Ephesians 4 seems to list pastor and teacher as one role. How do you see the two functions working together?
The role of pastor is larger than the role of teacher. It includes dimensions of caring for the flock that teaching would not adequately describe. But teaching is an important function of the pastor.
The most effective teaching is done by someone who has a pastoral relation to the people, because there's a ground of confidence or trust. When you bring up religion, you bring up a subject that's important even to casual acquaintances. If the person who brings it up is not care related, it can be offensive, distancing, alienating, counterproductive. But the true pastor can teach in a context of assent rather than suspicion. I know-and my wife can tell you-that my best preaching was when I preached each week to the same people.
Why?
I knew them. I was related to them in ways other than the teacher in the classroom.
Here I have a grade book. When I preach in chapel, it's Professor Craddock. When I guest preach, I am Professor Craddock, who represents theological education.
But when I preached in my church, I had buried the dead, I had married the young, I had counseled, I had been in the hospital. If a person is a good pastor, he does an exegesis of the congregation as well as of the text. He can close his eyes and tell you where the people sit on Sunday morning. Even a mediocre sermon to people who love you is great.
People say to me, "You must come hear our minister. He's marvelous." So I go, and when I hear him preach, homiletically it's perhaps a C+. But to their ears it's A+ because he had the wedding, the funeral, the crisis counseling. In that context, no one could preach any better.
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
