From the Church To the Church The Witness of Preaching by Thomas G. Long, Westminster, $13.95 Reviewed by Calvin Miller, pastor, Westside Church, Omaha, Nebraska
Many preachers step into the pulpit perplexed: In the community of believers, they have encountered Christ and been nurtured in faith. Yet they are called to stand apart from that community and speak an authoritative word to it. What can they say to the church which discipled them in the first place?
Thomas Long, associate professor of preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, knows that tension. But he accepts it, and, in The Witness of Preaching, uses it to inform and clarify the task of preaching.
He does so by binding our pulpit work to one of our prime callings as Christians: to be witnesses. The preacher is a witness of Christ because he has seen Christ in and through the church. Preachers, says Long, are never “visitors from clergy-land . . . ambassadors from seminary-land . . . We are members of the body of Christ . . . to whom we are about to speak.” He put it engagingly in a conversation we had: all witnessing comes from the church to the church; we but tell what we have seen and heard in the church.
Naturally, that view of preaching will curb preacherly pride. But does viewing the preacher as one of the community dilute his pulpit authority? Not at all, argues Long. It simply precludes false authority in preaching. The preacher recognizes that a sermon’s spiritual clout comes not from within him, but from somewhere else.
The source of authority is made clear when Long outlines his thoughts on witnessing. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s insights, he says a witness is, first, not a volunteer, but one who is sent. Second, God has a claim on the life of his witnesses. Third, the purpose of the witness is to proclaim, and fourth, testimony demands engagement and action. This witnessing is not passive testimony, then, but a bold affirmation of what God is doing through his church. As he said in an earlier book, the preacher is “called to be a witness . . . whose right to speak is created by what he has seen.”
In addition to offering a fresh concept of preaching, Long also syncretizes many of the latest, most important ideas on preaching. For instance, in discussing a sermon “move” (a unified section of the sermon), Long adapts David Buttrick’s philosophy:
“1. Opening statement. The preacher must state, in one clear sentence, the main idea of this move (e. g., ‘We are all sinners’). This invites the hearers to ‘take a picture of this.’ In addition, the opening must show how this move is connected to the one before, indicate the point of view of the move, and establish the move’s emotional mood.
“2. Development. In the middle section of the move, the main idea is elaborated, sometimes through clarification or illustration and sometimes through the raising of objections.
“3. Closure. In a terse final sentence, the main idea of the move is restated, thereby signaling to the hearer that this move is complete. Thus, the shutter on the hearer’s camera closes, and the film advances in readiness for the next move.”
The last three chapters of The Witness of Preaching abound with these long quotes and a great deal of practical advice. For example, he says a sermon introduction should:
1. Make an implicit or explicit promise to the hearers.
2. Make a promise that the hearers want kept.
3. Make a promise at the same communicational level as the rest of the sermon.
4. Anticipate the whole sermon, but connect logically to the first step of the sermon.
My sermons are often begun in well-fixed intention, but a clever idea or a need to grandstand sometimes lures them afield. Long’s fourth chapter calls those with such weaknesses to write out “focus” and “function” statements. They make sermons pay attention to their subject: the focus statement describes what the sermon is about, the function, what the sermon should do for the listener. Long feels that when sermons pay better attention to their focus and function, the sheep will pay attention to the sermon.
Fred Craddock once warned that a three-point sermon should not mean we have glued together three sermonettes, but that our single argument takes three steps to complete a single idea. To help the preacher test the power and direction of the sermon, Long offers a valuable five-point checklist: Unity, Order, Movement, Proportion, and Climax. Shaping our outlines against these criteria will not only keep the sermon to one theme, it will give the sermon a strong form and brisk movement. In thinking of how my sermons sometimes meander into impotence, I am not only rebuked, but genuinely ready to listen to Long.
In pulling his many sources together, he sometimes comes off a bit academic and “quotey.” That may put some readers at arm’s length, but I believe the book is strengthened by the supporting scholarship.
If the form of the book is rigorous, the soul is casual. Long, himself, is congenial and warm. After our conversations, I found myself hoping I could hear him preach. In short, Tom Long is a friend to all of us who care about what we say in the pulpit and how we say it.
Head and Heart Marriage Love Is Never Enough by Aaron T. Beck, Harper & Row, $17.95 Reviewed by Reed Jolley, pastor, Santa Barbara (California) Community Church
“Our marriage is failing; we are considering divorce.” The dreadful refrain is heard everywhere, from the video world of “thirty-something” to church fellowship halls. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. What’s going wrong? Aaron Beck, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, has been working with a simple idea for thirty years now: change the way people think, and you will change their lives. This, of course, parallels the proverbial wisdom found in Scripture: as a man thinks in his heart, so he is. According to Beck and other advocates of cognitive therapy, depressed or anxious people first should change the way they think about their lives; only then can they kick debilitating habits like drug abuse and profligate spending. In Love Is Never Enough, Beck applies his cognitive therapy to troubled marriages.
Love may be a wonderful and powerful force in marriage, but it does not alone create a well-functioning relationship. Says Beck, “Special personal qualities are crucial for a happy relationship: commitment, sensitivity, generosity, consideration, loyalty, responsibility, trustworthiness.” In this book, Beck discusses “how partners can correct their self-defeating patterns of thinking and counterproductive habits, improve communication, and help clarify and modify their mate’s problems.”
Beck explores the power that negative thinking holds over a marriage. In this intimate relationship, we naturally assume, often rightly, that we understand the mind of our mate. However, our supposed insights into our spouse, when combined with negative thinking, can produce disastrous results: Why is he silent? He must be angry at me. I must have offended him. He is always angry at me. I always offend people. Nobody will ever like me. I will always be alone. It may be that the quiet husband was simply tired and wanted a little peace.
Negative thinking encourages mates to “catastrophize” events or statements. A tardy dinner becomes a major crisis: She’s home late from work again. She is always late. My dinner is never ready. She doesn’t really love me. Likewise, we “overgeneralize” (he is totally inconsiderate), “personalize” (he’s deliberately trying to provoke me), and “awfulize” (it’s so bad, I can’t stand it anymore). When negative thinking runs its course, partners “flip flop” their opinion of each other. The husband admired for his punctuality is now seen as harsh and rigid. The “lively wife” becomes an “emotional female.”
When I talked with Beck, he said his therapy emphasizes the freedom of human will, individual responsibility, and what he calls the three C’s: commitment, caring, and consideration. Beck’s therapy asks the troubled to put on the brakes and think. The key question in cognitive therapy is: “What is going through your mind right now?” [emphasis Beck’s]. The answer to this question likely will move the couple past the volatile issues on the periphery and get them to the essence of their conflict.
Furthermore, Beck believes that his call to rethink one’s view of his or her spouse is the most helpful part of his book. “We suffer from a ‘framing problem.’ We see each other as enemies instead of friends,” Beck said. The solution, according to this therapist, is cognitive. “Re-frame” the way you view your mate, and your marriage will improve.
Love Is Never Enough is the best practical guide to dealing with troubled marriages that I have read. It is a readable discussion of the causes and cures of failing relationships and so a valuable tool for pastors who do marital counseling. A friend of mine, who is struggling in his own marriage, said Beck’s insights gave him and his wife fresh perspective and hope. Presently, they are working through the book with a counselor and seeing positive results.
Unfortunately, Beck’s therapy lacks the benefit of Christian perspective. But his common-sense approach to marriage remains instructive and viable for the believer.
No, Love Is Never Enough will not put an end to divorce in America. However, it can serve as a useful tool for those willing to think and act their way out of a distressing relationship. As Epictetus put it, “Men are troubled not by things, but by the view they take of them.”
Pressure in the Parsonage Life in a Glass House: The Minister’s Family in Its Unique Social Context by Cameron Lee and Jack Balswick, Zondervan, $14.95 Reviewed by Mark Galli, associate editor, LEADERSHIP
One minister complained, “The people want a perfect family, and each one is a judge.”
“I personally feel inadequate as a pastor’s wife,” said one woman. “I hate being used as a role model; I don’t like people looking at me as an example for what to wear, eat, do . . . which they do!”
A pastor’s child said: “People think because you are a minister’s child, you have to be perfect and never fail.”
Pastors and their families are confronted daily with superhuman and sometimes conflicting pressures from their congregations. To help the minister’s family understand these pressures, Cameron Lee and Jack Balswick, professors at Fuller Theological Seminary, have teamed up to write Life in a Glass House.
Lee, an assistant professor of marriage and family studies, and Balswick, a professor of sociology and family development, stress that their purpose is more than pragmatic, because “the family that truly understands the demands it must balance may discover some unique solutions” on its own.
Lee and Balswick make generous use of family systems theory to understand the minister’s family’s situation. They call their approach “ecological,” and compare the minister’s family and the church family with a delicate ecosystem. In a lake, for instance, the water, the trout, the mosquitoes, and the grass along the shore are vitally connected. Touch one part, and you touch all the parts.
The pastorate is a study in social ecology, claim the authors. “The groups to which we belong, including family and church, help us define and shape the values and beliefs by which we guide our behavior.”
Let’s say Pastor Jones resents Mrs. Smith’s suggestion that his wife stop working at Macy’s. It isn’t just Mrs. Smith’s antiquated chauvinism or his lack of patience that’s the problem. If Pastor Jones tries to solve the problem individualistically, he won’t get far. Only when he understands Mrs. Smith and her family, his own relationship with his wife, and the relationship of his family to the church family, will some lasting solution come to light.
It may be, for instance, that he’s resentful of Mrs. Smith because she simply articulates something his own mother also recently expressed that troubled him. Or, perhaps Mrs. Smith had a wonderful relationship with the last pastor’s wife and is simply saying, in her own way, that she wants that type of friendship again.
Or maybe Pastor Jones and his wife are “triangling,” resorting to a third party or situation to solve a problem that exists primarily between them. Perhaps Pastor Jones and his wife have been growing distant, and his wife took the job to avoid direct confrontation about their lack of communication. So now, instead of working on communicating, they fight about her job. Perhaps, Pastor Jones subtly and inadvertently lets parishioners know of his dissatisfaction at home. And when Mrs. Smith seems to bring it up “out of the blue,” it irritates Pastor Jones because it brings all this anxiety into instant focus.
If family systems sounds complicated, it is. If it sounds unreal, Lee and Balswick say, “Take the time to examine your own church and marriage and family. If it sounds too far-fetched, it may be because you’re not used to thinking in terms of triangles and interconnected relationships.”
Aside from their family systems slant, they offer other insights into the pressures put on ministers’ families. For instance, they claim many congregations unconsciously want the minister’s family to play a role like that of the British royal family. Just as the royal family symbolizes the empire and commonwealth for the world community, the minister and his family symbolize the congregation to the local community. Consequently, many congregations expect the minister’s family to be “more than human but less than God,” a spiritual and moral example to all.
In short, Lee and Balswick detail how the minister’s family faces unique pressures: “People in other professions,” they write, “would be aghast if their employers began to make direct demands on their families. But this is precisely what happens in the clergy family.” The pastor’s family lives in a “glass house” and it “leaves the clergy family feeling like they have no place or time to truly be themselves.”
Although Lee and Balswick emphasize understanding, they do include some helpful advice on dealing with the glass-house syndrome. They emphasize the importance of “self-differentiation.” In fact, Lee said, part of his intent in writing Life in a Glass House was to help create “well-differentiated” pastors.
The well-differentiated pastor not only understands clearly what his roles are-and aren’t-with congregation and family but also responds rationally to emotional pressures. The poorly differentiated pastor, on the other hand, responds automatically on the basis of emotions.
One new pastor, in his first sermon to his new church, quoted Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr. After the service, the wife of a seminary professor approached him and said, “There are certain people we do not quote in this church.” An undifferentiated pastor-insecure about relationships, for example-might react defensively, arguing with the woman or vowing never to quote such authors again.
The well-differentiated pastor recognizes the emotion that accompanies this woman’s response (disappointment, fear over valued church traditions) and his own natural defensiveness as a new pastor. But his response would not be dictated by the emotions of the moment. In this case, the pastor admitted the authors were controversial and said he enjoyed finding God’s truth from different sources, even some with which he didn’t agree in every other aspect.
Although pastors’ families are keenly aware of the pressures they face, few church members are. When Lee and Balswick have shared their research with congregations, the reaction has been nearly the same in each one: “We didn’t realize we were doing that to our pastor!”
According to Lee, one of the few ways they will find out is for the pastor simply to explain the pressures and talk about ways to alleviate them. Another way, of course, is by letting them read this book.
New and Noteworthy The Church and the Rites of Passage by W. Wayne Price, Broadman, $3.25
Wayne Price remembers his emotions as a 17-year-old headed for college, a life passage in which, he says, “my church, so important throughout my life, was completely uninvolved.”
Price, a Southern Baptist pastor, pioneers new ground for non-liturgical churches. In seven chapters, he reviews birth, baptism, graduation, marriage, retirement, and death, as well as passages in marriage, residence, and career. He shows concern for both theory and practice, aiming to answer the question: How can the church reach out to those in transition by appropriate use of ritual?
Some readers will recoil at his ceremony for divorce. Others will think Price too ritualistic. Yet his concern that the church play a formal role in the life passages of its people is well-taken.
Pastoral Care with Adolescents in Crisis by G. Wade Rowatt, Jr., Westminster/John Knox, $12.95
Few people have such immediate access to adolescents as do pastors, says Wade Rowatt, theology professor and associate dean at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. So he sees great opportunities for them to minister to today’s troubled youth.
Rowatt outlines the developmental changes (physical, emotional, intellectual, and social) that youth face, and then tells how to build relationships, gain respect, and listen to youth. After discussing interviewing skills, problem solving, and crisis intervention, he provides workable solutions to specific adolescent crises, such as family problems, sexual tensions, peer and academic pressures, depression and suicide, and substance abuse.
Rowatt sympathizes with pastors reluctant to work with youth in crisis: “It takes a special person to love working with adolescents over the years.” Then again, this book can help make one into that special person.
Best Sermons 2 by James W. Cox, ed., Harper & Row, $16.95
Someone has said that sermons don’t keep any better than fish. And I admit a book of sermons derived from a sermon “competition” made me leery. But preaching professor James Cox (Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville), with the consultation of several judges, has assembled an impressive collection of twenty-four winning and twenty-eight commissioned sermons.
The sermons come in six varieties-ethical, doctrinal/theological, evangelistic, expository, pastoral, and devotional. They run the spectrum from liberal to conservative, from Catholic to Protestant to Unitarian, from preachers Willard Scott (yes, the “Today” show weatherman) to Charles Colson.
Naturally, gestures and facial expressions can’t be reproduced on a printed page, but Best Sermons provides a wealth of illustrations and inspiration.
The Pastor’s Complete Model Letter Book by Steven Clark and Anne Williman, Prentice Hall, $39.95
Mark Twain once said that the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning. The same can be said about well-written and not quite well-written letters. There’s a vast difference in impact.
Perhaps the key title word is complete. Authors Clark and Williman, both free-lance writers, have assembled 450 model letters to cover every occasion. Need a letter encouraging parents of a runaway child? It’s there. A letter of dismissal to a staff member? It’s in there, too.
Naturally, there will be occasions when none of the model letters included will be appropriate. Not to fear-the authors have included a section on “Writing Letters Right.” In short, for the pastor who has trouble putting thoughts into words, this is the book.
Money, Motivation, and Mission in the Small Church by Anthony Pappas Judson, $9.50
Small churches usually mean limited budgets. But that doesn’t necessarily mean minute ministry, according to Anthony Pappas, pastor of First Baptist Church, Block Island, Rhode Island.
Pappas, who is also a member of the Small Church National Ministry Team, American Baptist Churches, gives insights into small church culture by describing his own church and taking us to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, he argues, provides a vivid model of how small churches act and think.
Pappas then tackles such problems as fund-raising, paying the pastor, maintaining the building, reaching out, and developing workable budgets-all from a small church perspective.
Pappas’s writing is peppered with practical, humorous anecdotes, but no easy solutions: “There is no magical way to finance the small church. … Go forth each day to wrest a blessing out of the struggle. And God will be with you.” You might begin, though, by wresting a copy of this book.
-Reviewed by Mike Coughlin, pastor Snowy Range Evangelical Free Church Laramie, Wyoming
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
