As I began traveling more internationally, I learned that everyone loves a story. I remember talking to a veteran Arab one day. He was really quite surprised because he listened to me preaching, actually in Israel. He said at the end, “I haven’t listened to preachers very much. As I was listening to you, I knew a lot of these stories. I didn’t learn them in the church; we didn’t go to church.”
I said “Well, where did you learn them?” He said around the campfire in a Bedouin tent he had learned the narratives. There is no question in that regard that I have learned the value of story.
I think another thing I have learned is there is a legitimate place for humor in preaching. A fellow said to me one day, “I have been to your conference; I have been in all your sessions. I go home at night and take off my shirt and find a knife sticking in my ribs, and I think, ‘How did he get that in there?’ So I decided to come tonight and watch carefully, and I see that more often than not it was with your humor that you were able to make the sharp point in a way that was acceptable. We often weren’t even aware that there was a sharp point until we went away and thought about it and got over the yucks and thought seriously about what the point was.”
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I think of another thing: A friend of mine who passed away some time ago, named Dr. Donald English was a great Methodist preacher in the United Kingdom. On one occasion he said to me, “At the end of a worship service I ask myself: Which part of me need I not have brought here today?”
I sort of twisted that a bit and ask myself the question: Which part of me did I not utilize as a channel of communication today? I think the older I got, the more relaxed in the pulpit I became. This could be misunderstood—I don’t mean more casual or more flippant.
Phillips Brooks’ dictum is that preaching is the communication of truth through personality. I know that the truth was unchanging, but I also know that personalities differ widely; therefore there should be an enormous variety of preaching styles just so long as the truth is paramount. I began to recognize that the style should be related to who you are when you are being yourself rather than being a person who is performing in the pulpit.
Another thing I learned: I remember listening to Billy Graham when he first came to England. He was the master of the rhetorical question. He always phrased it the same way: “‘But Billy,’ you say...” We used to laugh about that, in general conversation, just joking around we’d say, “But Billy, you say…” He would phrase it so it really wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was an imaginary question; he was dialoging with the people to whom he was preaching.
Preaching: Do you have any concern about the future of preaching?
