WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT PREACHING IN 70 YEARS [Sa, 9-19-26, which is Talk Like a Pirate Day, Matey.]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The 70-Year Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT PREACHING IN 70 YEARS [Sa, 9-19-26, which is Talk Like a Pirate Day, Matey.]

 

PEOPLE LIKE STORIES.

It’s not just that we like them, we live in them.

“Any sorrow can be borne if a story can be told about it.” Izak Denisen

“There is no story that is not true.” Chinua Achebe

PEOPLE WANT TO LAUGH.

Even in hard times. Perhaps especially then. I was helpful and appreciated at funerals because I wasn’t afraid to make people laugh, because I knew they wanted to and needed to.

Please understand, I did the laughter thing only in funerals, not in private pastoral moments with grieving people. Well, sometimes even then, if I could tell it was acceptable and helpful.

“You have a deep voice and you make people laugh.” That’s what former student and 60-year friend, and sometime ministry colleague, Jim Kiefer said, when saying why folks thought I was a good preacher.

CHURCH PEOPLE DON’T ALWAYS ACT LIKE CHRISTIANS, EVEN TO ONE ANOTHER.

Remember, I was only 19 when I started preaching at Chrisney. I had experienced only two churches until then. I assumed that Christians were interchangeable parts of The Body of Christ. {Yes, I had not read I Corinthians 12.}

I attended East Park in Indianapolis, from ages 4 to 10. But I went only to Sunday School. The only folks you encounter in Sunday School are people who like children.

Then Forsythe, the little country church in our country neighborhood, after we moved to the farm near Oakland City. Another place that prized children.

In neither of those churches was I involved in decisions about church life, and I never heard adults talk about how stupid other adults in church were, because my parents didn’t go to church. [Well, my father thought anybody who went to church was stupid, but that’s different.]

As a preacher, I was involved in the decisions of the church, and I learned that otherwise good Christians can clash quite ferociously over the color of a carpet.

“We never let those two women work together.” Catherine Adams of the Chrisney Church told me.

A PREACHER’S MAIN WORK IS EVANGELISM

Evangelism is not haranguing, but inviting, inviting someone to be part of the community of faith.

“Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.” D.T. Niles

WE GET BY ON FAITH, NOT KNOWLEDGE

As another former student and 60-year friend, Dennis Heller, says: “I have no choice but to believe in free will.” That sums up theology, all of it, rather nicely.

I wasn’t sure I was called, but I did have the necessary “gifts and graces” to be a preacher, so I got by.

YOU GO WHERE YOU HAVE TO GO, DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO

If you have accepted the job, even if you are not sure of the call, when the bell rings, you have to answer. I learned that in my second month of preaching, when I was 19, when Bob Adams said I had to go comfort the family of Billy Quick.

That sums up 70 years of preaching.

John Robert McFarland