STORIES IN SEARCH OF A SERMON [AGAIN] [Sat, 7-23-22]

I never doubted my ability to preach well. I sometimes did not preach well, either because I was ill prepared or misunderstood what the congregation needed, but I knew that I had “the gifts and graces.”

That is surprising. There were no models in the family for me, on either side, and I was by nature shy and easily embarrassed and unwilling to try new things.

I gave one 3-minute speech, required, in high school. I chose the history of basketball. It went okay, but barely. I was quite nervous, which isn’t surprising, since research shows that death is the average person’s second-greatest fear, right after public speaking.

Then at IU, I had Speech 101, where mostly we learned how to outline a speech, starting with I and going on to A and then 1 and so forth down the page.

I

 A

   1

    a

 In 60 years of preaching and speaking, I never used that outline.

I do remember giving a speech in that class about the roaches in the water at Solsberry High School. They had to call off school for a few days. I had read about that in the IDS [campus newspaper], and thought it was a good topic for a speech. I think I excoriated the school administration.

Then, a year later, I was the preacher at the Solsberry Methodist Church, and Willie Eller, the high school principal, was a member of my church. So were his two teen daughters. His wife, Thelma, had designs on me on behalf of the older daughter, Sue, who was only a couple of years younger than I, but even though I did not cooperate with her on that, she was always one of my staunchest supporters, even after I married Helen.

Anyway, I thought it was some sort of sign, that I had spoken in speech class about Solsberry, and now I was speaking in church there every Sunday. I did not know what the sign meant, though.

Fast forward 60 years. Helen and I had moved back to Bloomington and went to church one Sunday morning at Solsberry, where we encountered the younger daughter, Shirley, now an old lady, who immediately said, “Oh, I’ve got to call Sue.” Fortunately, I do not know what Sue said.

Other old women crowded around us and told of how they were in the Methodist Youth Fellowship when I was pastor there and won a District MYF attendance contest because all the girls in town came to MYF because of me. I had no idea that was why our attendance was so large, and Helen still doesn’t believe it.

I think maybe I assumed I could preach well because other people assumed I could, like the folks at Forsythe, the little open-country church where I grew up. They always assumed that anything I did would be good. Then the summer after we graduated high school, Bob Robling and Bob Wallace and Dave Lamb and I went Sunday by Sunday to whatever church in our District needed a pulpit supply that week. We sang as a quartet, and I preached. Up until his death, 62 years later, Bob Robling always said, “The best preacher I ever heard was an eighteen-year-old kid.” If your friends think you’re good at something, it’s much easier to believe it yourself.

I didn’t know how to preach when I was 18, but I knew that when I heard a sermon, what got my attention, pulled me in, made me think, what I remembered…were the stories. So I told stories. Stories from the Bible. Stories from books. Stories from life. Bob saw that as good preaching.

I said above that I had no preacher models in my family. That was not quite true. There were no preachers or public speakers in my family, but there were a lot of story-tellers. Well, that’s why I never doubted that I could preach well; I had heard a thousand stories that were just waiting for a chance to get into a sermon.

John Robert McFarland

I’m going to preach again, or at least tell stories, at St. Mark’s UMC in Bloomington, Indiana at 10:30 Eastern Time on July 31. You can “attend” by clicking on the livestream button on the smumc.church web site. [Not smumc.org.] Or you can get it via the archive button any time after noon on 7-31.