In front of the fraternities and residence halls at Duke University stand creatively designed wooden structures that look like mini-bleachers. Students sprawl on them to enjoy the sunshine or to ogle the passing parade of coeds.
A short distance away stands the much more substantial Duke Chapel, impressive in its Gothic glory. Inside that chapel on Sundays, William Willimon preaches to the passing academic parade, trying to wrest their minds toward eternal matters.
An exercise in futility? Not on your life. In his puckish way, Willimon points their attention toward Christianity.
Willimon was called to Duke Chapel after pastorates in Georgia and his home state of South Carolina. His writing in The Christian Century and his more than twenty books have made him known to fellow pastors-many of whom can't quite figure him out.
What is the real Will Willimon like? And how does he preach to anybody in a college chapel students aren't required to attend?
To answer these and other questions, LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley visited him on the Duke campus. There, serenaded by the massive chapel organ playing Bach, he talked about preaching to a disinclined culture.
Do people really listen to preaching anymore?
I remember from childhood that preaching was a kind of public entertainment-the spring and fall revivals. Time magazine featuring the ten best preachers of America. We may have lost some of that.
But I'd like to challenge the notion that people are less interested in preaching than two thousand years ago. People are as interested as ever in finding meaning for their lives. In fact, one could argue that Americans are eagerly grubbing around for meaning. I mean, people are actually listening to Shirley MacLaine! That's kind of pitiful. But people are busy listening for something.
One thing I've learned from my experience here at Duke-a modern university, about as secular a place as I could imagine-is that it's amazing how little it takes to be a prophet in contemporary culture.
What were your fears upon coming to Duke?
I'd always been a pastor, but here I'd be just a preacher. I might, if I'm lucky, counsel a dozen students a week and talk with a few more, but basically on Sunday I preach to people who don't know me personally.
That frightened me, because I realized how much my ministry had been built on personal relationships. I'd never served a church of more than six hundred members. I was smart enough to realize that a lot of times I got away with murder, because, as people said, "Well, he says some nasty things about President Reagan, but he's such a sweet person and visited Mother when she was sick . . ."
Here, I didn't have any of that personal ministry to hold me up-only my preaching. Yet in this situation, I'm amazed at how much happens just from preaching. It's like I'm in a laboratory, and all the ministerial variables are stripped away until only preaching is being tested. The people who are affected by this "experiment" continue to surprise me.
Are today's listeners tougher to preach to than those of earlier generations?
I did a commentary on the Book of Acts, and I enjoyed the year-long discipline of digging into the text and living with Luke. It would be fun to ask Luke, "What do you think about modern disinterest in the gospel?"
Luke probably would say, "Has anybody beat you yet for preaching the gospel? That's the response we got."
Luke has amazing confidence in the power of the Word. His story is one of the Word leaping over boundaries. Some have accused Luke of homiletical triumphalism: "Preaching makes things happen! Look at Peter-he preached, and a couple thousand people showed up for baptism."
But triumphalism? Paul preaches a few verses later, and they beat the stuffing out of him. Christian communicators have never known which response they might trigger: baptisms or a beating.
Fortunately, response isn't the issue. The issue is to bear apostolic witness. When you do, people may love you and get baptized, or they may beat the tar out of you. People have always reacted that way.
It's been a long time since I've had the tar beaten out of me for the gospel-or that I've had two thousand seek baptism!
More typically I've gotten the Gentile response in Acts: scoffing or patronizing disinterest. It's like Agrippa or Felix, who say things like, "My, we haven't heard anything this interesting in a long time. We ought to get together and talk about this again. Of course, everything is relative, and we don't believe any of it one way or the other . . ."
I think Luke might say to us, "What you're reading as modern disinterest is just the good ol' pagan response to the gospel. Resistance is nothing new."
How should today's preachers address the modern world?
In my book with Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, we argue that Christians ought not take the modern world with the wrong kind of seriousness. I'm a mainline Methodist, and all our modern theological heroes-the Niebuhrs and Tillichs and all-generally have said to Christian communicators, "We have a huge problem with the modern world, because it's post-Copernicus, post-shepherds-and-sheep and all. We've got to demythologize. We've got to work these old words into new words. We've got to speak to the modern man."
But as Hauerwas once observed, we overlook one thing: this modern world didn't just give us a telephone and a telegraph, it also gave us Hiroshima and Dachau and Auschwitz. Is this the world we're supposed to take our cues from?
Why let that world determine all the issues? When the traffic moves just one way on the hermeneutical bridge, we have the modern world always telling Scripture what is important and reasonable and possible.
I've decided the Bible doesn't necessarily want to simply address the modern world; it wants to create a whole new world that cannot be seen without conversion. And so, if some people don't understand me when I speak as a Christian communicator, that's okay. It doesn't mean they're unintelligent or evil. It probably means they're not in that new world yet, and they haven't learned the language of salvation. As a Christian communicator, I need to give such people credit for not understanding me.
You don't want people to understand you?
No, not that. But I recognize that they may not understand the Christian message right away.
If my message were that Christianity is basically about being a nice person and being sensitive to the needs of others and being open-minded and affirming, they could understand that. Anybody who'd reject that is a fool, because then we're not talking about special revelation; we're just talking about being reasonable and open and American.
But true Christianity-the Bible says there are good reasons for not believing it. I mean, it's odd. It's against the grain. It's countercultural, always about the displacement of an old world order with a new one.
No wonder people walk away in confusion.
One of the best compliments I ever received was after an Easter sermon in which I'd said, "Easter is not about the return of the robin in spring or crocuses or a butterfly coming out of the cocoon or any of that pagan drivel. It's about a Body that somehow got loose. The gospel accounts strain to describe what happened, but don't make any mistake about it, they're trying to describe something unearthly: death working backward.
"So I can't talk about 'the eternal rebirth of hope,' or 'Jesus living on in our hearts.' We're talking about a dead Jew, crucified, who came back to harass us. And it scares the heck out of us!"
A student came up to me and said, "Thank you for helping articulate what it is I don't believe." He meant it as a compliment, and I took it that way. We ought to restore some of the dignity and distinctions of nonbelief, because to accept Jesus is radical; it goes against the grain.
So as Christian communicators, let's give ourselves credit; we're working with some strange stuff here. If we try to argue that Christianity is reasonable, a good idea-if we say, "Well, you're a Jew and I'm a Christian, but, hey, we both believe in pretty much the same thing"-we've lost the intriguing peculiarity of Christianity.
Our message is a stark contrast. That's the beauty of it-and the reason we can expect some opposition or just plain befuddlement.
Many preachers try to make Christianity a reasonable option. You're doing just the opposite: showing that Christian commitment is altogether different from what "nice people do." The first method tries to narrow the gulf to pull people over; the second points out how wide the gulf is, requiring a definite step.
I've tried it both ways. The first approach-that Christian commitment is reasonable-is dangerous. If I don't watch myself, I'll reduce Christianity to merely being a good person, someone who's good for society. But Christianity demands much more.
A good question to ask at the end of any sermon is, "Would they have killed Jesus for this?" Not all of my sermons stand up to that question; the death of Jesus would seem incomprehensible over some of the bland stuff I've preached. People would be more apt to make Jesus president of a university or a speaker for a weekend conference.
But no, people had good reason to crucify Jesus. They recognized in him a threat to the world as it was constituted, and he continues to be a threat. I love Jesus for being outrageous. I want my preaching to say, "What did you think we were talking about here-Santa Claus? Hey, this is God we're talking about, a real God, people, not some projection of your ego."
Preaching becomes invigorated when that Jesus gets loose again, and people come out of the service stunned.
When was a time you saw that happen?
I met a pleasant freshman not long ago. In the fall, his parents told me I needed to meet him. I had lunch with him and frankly found him boring-just another pretty face with a 1,300 SAT score. (Laughter)
Later Jim Wallis preached in our chapel-gave his radical Sojourners pitch-and two days later the kid told me, "Dr. Willimon, I want to thank you for bringing that man down here. I went back to my dorm, and I called my parents and told them I wanted my name removed from the rolls of the church I grew up in."
"Oh, no!" I said. "Why would you do something like that? I don't want angry calls from your mother."
"I grew up in that church-a Christian all that time," he replied, "and nobody ever spoke about Jesus and the poor. I did what Wallis said: I looked through my Bible, and it's unbelievable how much it says about the poor and the rich, and about God's love."
This kid was bubbling about how he was going to spend his Christmas break working for Habitat for Humanity. It's frightening when it's your own kid, but it's beautiful to see that kind of vitality let loose.
Is the resistance to the gospel more intellectual or emotional?
We take a distinctively wrong turn when we make Christianity into a kind of intellectual dilemma. It's more a practical problem, a problem of living.
One student, now in graduate school in Chicago, was telling me he's losing his faith. I asked him, "What is the faith you're losing?"
He said, "I don't believe in the virgin birth anymore."
"So what? You don't believe in virginity, period!" I replied. "You mean I'm supposed to be upset over your intellectual questions? You're 19 years old; there's a lot you don't know yet. Why don't you just wait a while to see how your doctrine works out."
Then he asked a good question: "Why do you have to swallow stuff like this to be a Christian?"
"Well," I said, "we start you out on the small stuff like the virgin birth and the inerrancy of Scripture. When we get you to believe these easy things, then you're ready for the tougher demands of Christianity, which are not so much intellectual as practical: How do I live this faith? What does the lordship of Christ mean in my life?"
I'm amazed at the subjects Jesus never got around to addressing in depth. For instance, he didn't have much to say about sex. Does that mean he was an ignorant, first-century Jew who just didn't understand as much as we do now? I doubt it; it probably meant he knew that other things were more important.
I've said to students, "I know that right now you think sex is life's most important activity. You're 19 years old, and you're probably really into that. But I'm not so sure your sexuality is the most determinative part of your personality. You're real impressed with it, and you're eager to spread yourself all over this campus, but as Christians, we're not into that."
What kind of a response does that bring?
I was talking to a young woman who'd been working with Habitat for Humanity in Americus, Georgia. She mentioned her astonishment at their discipline: "One thing about that group: you can't have sex down there with other people."
I said, "Oh, really?"
"Yeah, they kick people out for that. They said they've found that kind of stuff just destroys community. They have too many important things that need to be done for people to be messing up everything by sleeping together."
It was a new insight for her. And she was intrigued by it. Perhaps college should be more like that, I thought.
And perhaps our Christian message ought to be that focused, too-that following Jesus is even more interesting than sex.
Are you saying we should or should not preach about Christian behavior?
I'm for saying less to some of these issues and more for getting straight who we are and how odd it is to follow Jesus.
One reason the world ignores Christians is because it rarely hears anything from us it cannot hear from Dear Abby or Leo Buscaglia. I've met people who've given up on us because we're bland.
I believe the gospel is true and that it's a marvelous thing to give your life to. I try to say: "All right, folks, just for this morning, let's all trust this Word from God more than we trust our feelings or our experience. The gospel isn't trying just to explore your experience but to engender a new experience. It's trying to take you someplace you've never been. Let's see where that takes us."
Walter Brueggemann talks about preachers being world makers. We're busy constructing a new world; we're giving people the opportunity to roam in a place they've never been. That's marvelously creative work.
What brings people to Duke Chapel to hear about this odd notion of following Christ?
People come to church for a host of reasons-most of them bad, theologically. Why did people come to Jesus? Start the revolution now. Run the Romans out. Make me feel better. Cure my illnesses.
But when they were with Jesus, he specialized in rearranging why they were there. They thought they came for healing, but Jesus seems to say, "Healing is fine, but I'm about something even more interesting than healing."
When I ask people, "Why do you come to Duke Chapel?" and they say "I love the music," that always makes me mad. They can say that because they don't have to live with musicians! (Laughter)
Others say, "It's good for the children" or "It's like a filling station: I come empty and leave full." The beautiful thing is that God can work with whatever reasons people have.
I asked one student who'd been ushering several Sundays, "How do you like chapel?"
"I like it," he said.
"What do you think about the preaching?"
"Well, I like that, too."
"What do you like about it?"
"I just … I like it." I kept pressing him for specifics. Finally he said, "Look, Dr. Willimon. I'll be honest with you. I come to chapel to meet women."
"Thank you," I said. "This has done me good. In case I should ever become presumptuous, I will remember this conversation."
He looked a little chagrined. "Look," he said. "It's not that I have anything against what you do. It's been fine."
There's hardly a Sunday that I don't look out and think, Why are they here? What motivates them? I'm humbled at times. Their coming probably has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Think about it: A 19-year-old, who lives in a totally pagan situation, gets out of bed on a gray Sunday morning and comes to the chapel. I'm flabbergasted that anybody comes.
Surely people have other, unspoken, reasons for coming. They wouldn't keep coming if you were reading the phone book, would they?
People have said, "I'm here for some serious business. And if you don't indulge in serious business in the pulpit, that's your problem." We shouldn't sell people short. They feel a dissonance in their lives; in our more honest moments, all of us know what needy people we are.
But I'm also willing to say they're here for a host of impure reasons. But, again, aren't we preachers, too? The beautiful thing is, the Word has the most wonderful way of grabbing our motivations and making them better than they are.
Some pastors tell us their people have low expectations of the preacher. The sermon is not the real reason they're there, so if they get just one good idea-or even half an idea-they feel the sermon has been successful.
Then others say, "Expectations have been heightened incredibly with the rise of television and the standards of communication. I feel pressure to compete not only with the churches down the street, but also with all the media communicators."
Which do you relate to?
Certainly technical expectations have been heightened. People don't like communicators using notes, because they don't see anybody using notes on TV. They like people speaking in a straight-forward, conversational style. They like a polished presentation.
But I agree that substantive expectations have lowered. People are accustomed to thirty-second sound bites. And yet, there's also a funny kind of backlash: a hunger for the beauty of one human being standing up and testifying to what is true. People can find outstanding communicators elsewhere, but still they listen to "old Joe, who may not be very good-he reads his sermons and all-but he's ours. And when he's talking, he's one of us. He lives with us, and we know him."
I once served a church in a resort area, and I never got assaulted for my preaching by anybody but the tourists, the visitors. I preached on divorce once, and several people lined up to tell me, "How dare you say something like that about divorce! Don't you have any divorced people in this church?"
I said, "Sure. But they're my divorced people, and they know me and I know them." The preacher as a pastor works from some wonderful sources of recognition.
Fred Craddock says when people tell us, "Great sermon today. Preacher. You really preached to me," what they may mean is, "You really preached for me today. You said what I would have said if I'd been asked to preach." That's a legitimate function of preaching.
How direct do people want you to be in preaching?
I'm finding a generation that's seeing our post-sixties pathologies from the bottom up. For instance, I was in a sociology class to talk on marriage. Divorce came up, and I was saying, "Well, here are the words of Jesus, and there's been a debate within the church over their interpretation." I was trying to leave room for the many nuances.
Suddenly a student breaks in and says, "This is just the kind of mealy-mouthed crap the clergy is saying these days: 'Divorce is not right, but on the other hand it may be okay.' "
Other students pitched in their agreement: "Yeah, yeah. You tell him!"
After class I asked the student about his response, and I wasn't surprised when he said, "Well, my old man left us for his secretary when I was 16." We spent the next two hours talking about that. He felt no better a person than his father was.
The cultural flotsam of the sixties looks different when you're looking at it from the bottom up. Divorce isn't seen as "an exciting new option for personal freedom," but as abandonment by your parent.
So this generation is looking for moral direction?
Yes. Because they've also felt another kind of child abandonment. I asked one kid about his parents: "What's your father like?"
"He's a wonderful person," the boy said. "Very open and accepting." Then he told me about trying Buddhism, and going through a conversion experience his sophomore year, and how he'd attended Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship for a while.
"What do your parents think of all this?" I asked.
"They want me to be happy."
I said, "No, no. I mean, what do they want you to do with your life?"
"They don't want to pry into my life." Then he told me about taking his girlfriend home with him last Christmas and sharing a bedroom. His parents said, "Well, as long as it's an open, loving, trusting relationship … "
Finally I said, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. How old are your parents? They're my age, aren't they?"
"They're in their mid forties."
"I knew it!" I said. "Dumb as I am!" (Laughter)
But I thought to myself, We need more Jewish mothers!
These parents are physically present but morally absent.
Exactly. Experiences like this point out to me the real challenge for preachers. People today are coming from a totally different perspective. I'm concerned that we not capitulate.
Capitulate in what way?
I want to be distinctively, peculiarly Christian. There's no way to weasel out of the truth claims of the gospel. Kierkegaard wrote that one of the problems of Christian Denmark was that the categories got all messed up, and you had to think clearly to know what was Christ and what wasn't. We have that problem today.
How do you preach morality to kids who have grown up in an amoral world?
There are plenty of people out there who have been hurt by today's morality. The "new morality" was new for my generation, but it's old for the kids on this campus. It's what Mom and Dad have been doing for years.
I don't mean to talk about sex so much, but it's a good image of our culture. I asked a kid if he intends to have sex before marriage, and he said, "Yeah. Why not?"
"You grew up in a church, and you don't think anything's wrong with that?" I asked.
"I never heard that anything was wrong with it," he said. "What do you mean?" He's utterly naive, utterly unscathed by Christian morality.
The moral vision of Christianity is odd to this age. Many people aren't opposed to it; they simply haven't been exposed to the real thing. As preachers, our job is to present unashamedly the Christian moral point of view: "It's just plain true. Folks, this is the way God is, and your life needs to be congruent with reality."
Do you speak any differently to the Christian kids on campus?
You've probably noticed I enjoy taking a kind of belligerent stance. A Christian fraternity and sorority group wanted me to talk on being a Christian on Duke campus. So I said, "For starters, lets say I expect that you'll leave here tonight and by this weekend you'll be in bed with somebody you're not married to, maybe somebody in this group. What could I say to you tonight that will give you the resources to say no to that, because I know you want to do it, even if you're not?"
They got mad. Some of them said, "Wait. We're a Christian group. How dare you say something like that!"
I told them, "You look normal to me, and I know the statistics. I'm not doing this to attack you; I'm a preacher and I'm supposed to be giving you what you need to resist."
They calmed down a little, and one of the students said, "Okay, but why is it that preachers always get on sex like it's the biggest sin in the world?"
"Now, that's a good question," I said. "Sounds like you know your Bible. But one response might be that we assume that if we can just get you to say no to this, a relatively little thing, there's no telling where we could go from here. Say, what are you planning on doing after graduation?"
"Going into investment banking."
"Oh," I said, "you've got bigger problems than lust, let me tell you." (Laughter)
But then I got serious, and we had a good talk about a voracious consumer society in which people just keep taking while getting emptier and emptier. I concluded by saying, "If you're going to live the Christian life here on the Duke campus, you need a group like this who can name you and judge you and forgive you. You're at the right place."
Are students ready to hear hard truth?
Students today impress me as cynical. Cynicism is kind of ugly in a 19-year-old. I don't meet many today who have faith in the political process, and I realize how much we did when I was a student in the sixties.
The cynicism probably stems from fear-a fear that they don't have the resources to do anything. We believed we did-if we could just get the White House straightened out, the age of Aquarius would begin! I don't meet anybody anymore who believes that.
They seem to be on a materialistic treadmill. But at their best, they're hungry for some word from outside of that world.
One Sunday before Christmas, a guest preacher didn't show up because of icy weather, so I preached a spur-of-the-moment sermon on John the Baptist. In the sermon I said, "Imagine putting John the Baptist on a Christmas card, and saying, 'Our thoughts for you at this special time of year are best expressed by the one who said, "You brood of vipers! Who told you to flee from the wrath to come?" Merry Christmas.' "
People kept telling me afterward what a great sermon I'd preached. I thought it was a little harsh as I looked back at it. So I spent the rest of that week asking people, "Why was that a good sermon?"
They said, "You were right, and we're ready for some honesty about our condition." People are ripe for a voice that gives them something significant worth living and dying for. And that's kind of frightening, because it could be the wrong voice.
How hard do you work to make the gospel relevant, to apply it to the lives of your hearers?
In Acts 17, Paul speaks to the men of Athens, bringing the gospel into collision with their ideas. He calls them religious, but what they don't know is that it's not really a compliment. Then he makes a joke about their never seeing an idol they couldn't worship. Before long he's telling them about the God they don't know and bringing up the Resurrection, for which he gets the typical Gentile response of either mockery or polite, philosophical interest.
I see here an invitation and a warning to Christian communicators who want to contextualize the gospel. The invitation is to start where the people are, but the warning is to recognize our limited ability to adapt the gospel. Eventually the gospel is about something for which there is no precedent-the Resurrection-and you can only testify to it. The truth claims of Christianity are not easily validated externally. They're a matter of faith.
Most of my sermons here are evangelistic. By that, I mean I'm preaching gospel messages for people who have not heard, or people who think they've heard and they've disposed of it. I look upon this chapel as a neo-Gothic revival tent. (Laughter)
A student once said, "That was a typical Willimon sermon. You went in, you hit them in the gut, and you left." I want to create a religious experience, or provide the setting for one.
You come across as practically fearless, but do you ever get cold feet as a preacher?
Walter Brueggemann said to preachers, "If you're not a courageous person, at least hide in the text." I'm grateful for that, because there are times I just hunker down behind the text and peek out occasionally. Then I can walk out after the service and say, "You know how I like to get along with people. But unfortunately this is your Book, and you're the one who showed up today wanting to hear this."
Does such bravado ever backfire on you?
Sure. There have been times when I've overreached, or the irony was too much, or I came across as cute or exhibitionistic. That's particularly painful, but I'd rather risk that than fail to reach.
I love times like when the president of the choir, who's 20 years old, went up to the choir director after a sermon of mine and said, "I think Will's gone too far. People could get angry."
When the choir director told me on Monday, I said, "That's marvelous-some adolescent thinks a middle-aged has-been in a three-piece suit has gone too far! I didn't know I was capable of it anymore." (Laughter)
I've felt the worst, however, when I've just been clever, when people say, "Oh, that was wonderful! I'd never seen the Prodigal Son done from the perspective of the fatted calf."
Tell us about a time it was difficult to preach.
That's not hard. Last spring, toward the end of the school year, I got a call on Sunday morning: "Dr. Willimon, there's no electricity in the chapel this morning."
"Has the choir gotten in?" I asked.
"I think so. I can hear people moving around, but it's so dark I can't see anyone."
I hurried over to do what I could. We stuck lit candles all over the place. The organ wouldn't work. The PA system was down. Nothing went right, and I ran around for two hours improvising and calming upset people. At ten minutes before the service, the lights came on, but I felt awful-unprepared, disheveled, angry. I staggered through the service, thinking to myself, I hate this place!
But as I was greeting people leaving the church, three undergraduate women I didn't know came up and said, "Dr. Willimon, we're all graduating this year, and we were just talking about how some of our best memories will be the services we've had here in the chapel. We just wanted to thank you."
I said, "Did God send you here today?"
The funny thing was, my reaction later was almost a sort of disgust. I thought, That's typical of God: you get finally to the point that you're ready to throw in the towel because it's all so absurd, and then God sends you three girls with a message like that! So I decided to stick with the ministry another week. (Laughter)
Besides such unexpected encouragement, what else keeps you going when preaching is tough?
I've taught school. I've written books. I've tried other activities that people consider to be pretty demanding. But I'll stack preaching up against anything. It's totally demanding. If you're not in love with ideas, with the intellectual stimulus of the Word, then I can't imagine what would keep you preaching.
People sometimes say, "It must be wonderful to preach to students and academic people."
I say, "They're just as messed up as the last group of people I had, but in different ways." Those in the congregation, of course, affect how I preach. But the ultimate issue is not to whom I speak, but that I'm called to preach the gospel.
When someone walks out of church and says "That was the worst sermon I've ever heard," I regret that. But I try to keep in mind that's not what I'm working for. My question to myself is, Was I faithful?
Ultimately the only thing keeping me going is that I'm convinced this Christian stuff is true. It's true if I'm preaching for fifty people, or for five thousand.
What ought to cause me to lie awake at night is not that somebody said he found me boring, but whether I've been faithful to my appointed calling to preach the Word.
Leadership Spring 1990 p. 128-137
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
