Preaching:
You come out of an African-American tradition as a pastor for a number of years
but you've now taught in two schools where the majority of your students are
not African-American. Tell me what insights you try to draw out of your own
preaching tradition that students outside of that need to learn from. What are
things that pastors, preachers who are not African-American can learn from those
churches?
Smith:
First of all I don't consider myself a black preacher. You didn't say that,
but I consider myself a preacher black. I say that because I want my preacherliness
to define me and not my race. I'm a preacher that just happens to be black so
I don't want to be defined, confined and categorized by my ethnicity, which
I don't deny. It's to enable me to be true to who I am but to be able to move
out of who I am so that I can adapt to any audience because truth is not ethnic.
I need to be able to relate to any congregation I preach in — the idioms in
those congregations, the time schedules in terms of their worship — don't decry
them, don't think that there is a superiority in African-American preaching
over any other preaching. But to say that God has given all of us something
and we need to learn from each other and inform each other so we can be more
effective. My students hear that all the time. So that's one of the things that's
been helpful for me.
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Of
course black preaching is not monolithic. There are congregations that participate
in call and response and other black congregations where if you held a gun to
their head they wouldn't smile or do anything!
I
want to be myself to a point that I'm kind of like Michael Jordan. He was asked,
"What do you think about when you have 10 seconds left in a game and the
score is tied and you're one point behind? Are you going to make a hook-shot?
Are you going to dunk, drive or you going to shoot a 20-footer, a fade-away?"
He says, "I take what the defense gives me. If there's an opening down
the lane I take it. If someone backs off and I can fade, take a shot, I'll do
it."
That's
the way I am with preaching. I take what the congregation gives me. If the congregation
is open to me swinging, I'll swing. If it's open to me lecturing more or whatever
. . . I want to, at the same time, still be myself and perhaps take them further
than they are used to going. And that can never be done unless there has been
an engagement of the text all the way through. Otherwise it is just emotionalism.