Moral Issues And The Black Church: An Interview With Bishop Harry Jackson
Preaching: Switching gears a bit, if I were to come to your church on a Sunday morning, tell me about what I would hear and experience. Describe your approach to preaching, the kind of messages that you preach in your own congregation on Sundays.
Jackson: You would hear a lot of good music, good singing, and a rousing, upbeat, kind of celebratory environment. In my preaching you would hear me typically take a text, a passage of scripture, and even if I talk from a thematic area like anger or family, usually we are going to deal with some exegesis of a passage. But I would treat it more in a story-telling kind of format. I would give biblical background for the context of the passage. If it was an Old Testament text, I always give some New Testament application for the same truths I find there, so people understand that this is one book.
Advertisement
Then I would work on application, application, application of the story -- working it through what we’ve already said: personal, church and then culture. We may flip the order depending on the story. For example this Sunday, we are talking about how important fathers are. Some of you guys know people who weren’t raised around their father, but they got certain blessings from their family and they got certain problems from their family. Some of our families have alcohol problems, or down our genealogy or family tree there were certain issues, and I recited stories of people I knew who had not met their dad before. Maybe talked to him two or three times before their dad passed away. But they were so impressed with things they saw in their lives; it reminded them of their dads, meaning the way they dressed, certain attitudes, a certain flare of life. We build a connection with people so that even if you have an absent father or a poor father, somehow there’s this connection. I think that’s very important -- the story telling aspect of things and finding a place where the scripture can become real because of the nature of the story.
Preaching: How long is a typical sermon for you?
Jackson: How long? A typical sermon is about 40 minutes. I’m a long winded preacher.
Preaching: Do you preach in series?
Jackson: I preach almost exclusively in series. Right now I’m in a series called “Family Matters.” We’ll be talking about various issues. We started with the role of a man. In a sense I’ve got a mini-series within a series. The man’s role in the house: husband, father, we’re going to talk now about how the man can really renew his mind, and then we’ll go on to the role of mother. Then we’ll deal with some specific areas like finance, child rearing, etc.