Last January I started writing a monthly pastor’s letter to the congregation, and frankly, I was concerned about how many would read it. Concerned because I broke all the rules.
Other than printing the copy in two columns, I didn’t do anything to make it visually appealing: no pictures or colors, little white space, no large type or special fonts, even for the headings. Just as daunting, the letter was almost two pages long. I didn’t have an adequate printer, but I figured I’d start where we were and upgrade later.
Given our turbo-powered world of communications, on occasion I’ve wondered if my preaching comes across with the sensory minimalism of that pastor’s letter. After all, preaching is as low-tech and scant-budget as it gets. Most of my listeners are accustomed to movies powered by special effects, by Hollywood budgets that can soar beyond $100 million. For the 1996 Super Bowl, Pepsi spent $5 million just to produce its commercials.
Can preachers compete? In creative moments I’ve thought about trying-preaching with some sort of musical accompaniment, or with slides dissolving in and out in the background, or with video segments. But I simply lack the resources.
And so the question stares me in the face: When I take my stand behind the podium and for some thirty minutes do nothing more than talk, can mere words engage listeners and, more important, change lives?
Mere words-empowered by the Spirit
In my kitchen sits a tiny, $20 clock radio. It has an on-off button, a volume control, and an am/fm switch. It has one speaker, two-and-a-half inches in diameter, that produces only monophonic music. I enjoy listening to the two classical music stations in Chicago, but when I’m getting my breakfast, I almost never tune them in because the sound from this clock radio is thin.
In my living room, though, I have a component stereo system that includes a sixty-watt amplifier with individual controls for bass, treble, and balance; and four speakers, with woofers, midranges, and tweeters spread around the room. So when I turn on the classical stations, I use my living room system, and I get thick, quadraphonic music with full bass and clear, sparkling treble.
As superior as this system is to the clock radio, so Spirit-empowered preaching outdoes other communication. Paul said he spoke “not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words” (1 Cor. 2:13).
As Christian preachers, our words are qualitatively different than other forms of communication. As we speak spiritual words, our listeners experience revelation and illumination from the Holy Spirit within their human spirit, touching them at the marrow of their being. Preachers engage parts of the person that mere media can never reach.
Now, this is no excuse for anemic communication, because preaching is a divine and human event. To use an extreme example, even if God empowers my sermon, someone who doesn’t understand my language will profit but marginally. Neither will someone who sleeps through my sermon or is distracted by a crying baby or who daydreams. And so it is if my message is confusing or boring.
So I can’t quote Isaiah 55:11-“[My] word … will not return to me empty”-and then preach sleepers. A sermon that bores today would likely have bored the saints two thousand years ago. Competition with high-tech media has little to do with it.
All that said, however, there is a divine and thus supernatural dimension to preaching that no other form of communication can touch.
Last year I attended my denominational General Council in St. Louis just as I was assuming my current pastorate in Chicago. At the first night’s meeting, the speaker challenged pastors to be people of the Spirit and of prayer. As he spoke, God stirred something in my heart that could only have been a divine work: I began to agonize for the millions in Chicago who do not know Christ.
After the sermon, the speaker called us forward for prayer. I responded with several hundred others and began to weep for people without Christ in my city. Even as others stopped praying and began to talk around me, I kept my eyes closed and my hands in the air; what God had stirred in my heart wasn’t finished yet.
This response was not brought about by novel insights or profound homiletics. The Holy Spirit had touched me, and spiritual words had taken hold of part of me that only such words can reach.
No, preachers don’t speak mere words. Divine truth will never lose its unique spiritual force.
As long as preachers proclaim God’s Word, there will always be a powerful message for those who have ears to hear.
Mere words-empowered by the drama of life
In the 1980s I went to old Comiskey Park with my two oldest sons for a night game between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. The game was mildly entertaining until around the seventh inning, when we had the baseball thrill of a lifetime.
Sox batter John Cangelosi swung at a pitch from Dan Petry and fouled it off in our direction. Suddenly I realized the ball was coming directly toward us. Adrenaline hit me, and I jumped to my feet shouting, “Here it comes!”
I put my hands out, then saw several hands shoot in front of mine. The ball dropped to the cement floor in the row in front of me. Without hesitation, I dived over the seats headfirst and snared the ball.
Panting with excitement, I displayed the prize to my boys. Nothing else distinguished this ball from hundreds of other balls I had played with as a boy. It was plain, even dirty, and the words “Cushioned Cork Center” were smeared.
Nevertheless, this is not just another baseball. It is a major league baseball from a major league game. Pitchers hurled it; an umpire judged it. Batters ripped at it; fielders chased it. The game, the league, the teams, the players-all made that bit of cork and string and leather a thing of magnitude.
So it is with the preacher’s words. In one sense, mere syllables, sounds, symbols-yet infused by the drama of life with big-league meaning. Sensational, sensory-packed media effects don’t fill words with deep meaning; the big game does.
The married woman who fears she is about to lose her husband will listen with desperate interest to a sermon about God’s presence in our loneliness. The man who fears death will breathe deeply as he hears a sermon about heaven.
Of course some things in the game of life outweigh others. But when preachers utter true words about the ultimate issues in life, there are no minor-league words. Our God is too great, our needs too numerous, and the stakes too high.
My oldest son is 20, a junior in college, and, like most of his generation, a lover of all things media, especially movies of the special-effects, Schwarzenegger genre. He’s also an art major, hence visually oriented. So I asked him, “Can you listen to a speaker without getting bored? Do your teachers at school put you to sleep?”
Aaron distinguished between entertainment and information. “When I’m flipping the channels on television, I notice something quicker if it has entertainment value, but I’ll lose interest after I get past the initial ‘Here, watch this!’
“Information that is presented in a low-tech way interests me more because it’s not fake. People of my generation are supposed to be pessimistic, but it’s just that we’re not easily convinced. We’re more discerning about the motives and sincerity of others. When someone is supposed to convey information, you’re turned off when it’s shallow glitz.”
Many listeners in search of truth find low-tech more credible. The significance of the subject is what makes mere words appealing. Preachers aren’t really competing with $100 million movies because people demand different things from sermons than they do from pure entertainment. Sometimes mere is more.
Mere words-empowered by eternal truth
A month ago my father suffered a heart attack, and tests showed he needed bypass surgery. The night before the surgery, my wife and boys and I went to the hospital. I was confident things would go well in surgery, but I couldn’t help but think this might be the last time I would see my father alive. As we prepared to leave, I said, “I love you, Dad.”
He looked calmly at me and replied, “I love you, Brian.”
The surgery was a complete success, so much so that two weeks later my dad came to my son Benjamin’s high school graduation party. While squeezing Ben’s hand an extra few seconds, he said in a voice quavering with emotion, “I’m sure proud of you, Ben. I love you.”
Mere words, yet so moving because of the person and the circumstance.
We all long to hear authentic words from the hearts of those significant to us about things that matter. Those words don’t need high tech to hold our interest, for they come with what brings the greatest power to communication: credibility, truth, love.
The desire that people have to hear a trusted voice has never been greater, for never in history have there been so many voices, so much input, so much confusion. People desperately long for someone to sort things out for them, a point of reference, a shepherd.
While God did give visions, he did not inspire people to draw a picture book; he inspired them with words. Mere words move mountains and melt hearts. Mere words convey gospel, convey the Word made flesh.
For several months I’ve been preaching recurrently on the theme of Christian community. Have these mere words gone so far as to change the way people actually live? I decided to put a church attender-and myself-on the hot seat by calling and asking that question point blank.
Caught off guard, he pondered a bit and then said, “Yes, I have changed something. As a direct result of your sermons about forgiving and accepting each other, I decided to do that with someone in the church. Before this I had shut down toward him, thinking, That person’s just a little too weird. I’m not going to try to communicate with him.
“But based on your messages, I have made a deliberate effort to reach out and relate to that person more. We now have more open communication, and when I feel that person doesn’t act the way I would like him to, it doesn’t bother me so much.” A broken relationship mended-even the biggest budget on Madison Avenue has trouble pulling that off.
Words. They still work.
Craig Brian Larson is a contributing editor to Leadership. He is pastor of Lake Shore Assembly of God in Chicago, Illinois. Preachers engage parts of the person that mere media can never reach.
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
