Fosdick once used as an illustration the story of a man lost for two nights and a day in a dense fog on the Welsh mountains when suddenly he heard a voice say: "I wonder if by any chance he could have come this way." Commented Fosdick, "So may some such word come to someone here who thinks himself lost in the fog. May he hear a word out of the invisible that will put him on his feet." A black minister whose wife had committed suicide once came to see Fosdick and after speaking to him for two hours said to his secretary as he left: "He has put the stars back in my sky."

Fosdick owed his influence partly to his theory of preaching as "personal counseling on a large scale." In July 1928 he wrote an article for Harper's magazine, entitled "What's the Matter with Preaching?" In reply he said: "it ought to be animated conversation." In this kind of talk, with its give-and-take, you discuss what most interests the other person. You defer to his judgment. "Every sermon should have for its main business the solving of some problem."

He criticized expository and topical preaching and rejected them both in favor of the project method. "This starts with a live issue, a real problem -- personal or social, perplexing to the mind or disturbing to the conscience. It faces it squarely, deals with it honestly, and throws such light on it from the spirit of Christ that the people will go out able to think more clearly and live more nobly because of that sermon's illumination."

"The preacher must see clearly and state fairly what people other than himself are thinking on the matter. There is nothing that people are so interested in as themselves, their own problems, and how to solve them. The final test of a sermon's worth is how many individuals wish to see the preacher alone. Every problem that the preacher faces leads back to one basic question: how well does he understand the thoughts and lives of his people?"

This kind of preaching is human-centered. Fosdick said: "I know what I want to say to myself before I get into the pulpit: there is in that congregation one person who needs what I am going to say. O God, let me get at him."

William H. Hudnut, in a Christian Century article on Fosdick as teacher, tells us that in his preaching classes at Union Seminary he continually emphasized the importance of sermons that are vitally related to the everyday needs of individuals but firmly based in the great truths of Christian thought and experience. He would say: "Exhortation is hollow without exposition, but do not take it for granted that people are interested in what happened two thousand years ago. Begin by making the matter you are discussing live for your people, strike the universal note. The purpose of your preaching is not primarily to treat a subject but to influence individuals. An essay is concerned with elucidation, a sermon with transformation. Its aim is to send people out of church different from what they were when they came in."

Fosdick likewise owed his influence to his message. He appealed mainly to the intellect. His ideal was to spend an hour in preparation for every minute he stood in the pulpit preaching. His mind had a finely disciplined quality. He gave a sense of wide-ranging and an understanding perusal of many books. Intellectual honesty, hard and patient investigation, and serious thought lay behind his sermons. His successor in the Riverside pulpit, Robert J. McCracken, in his book The Making of a Sermon says: "Dr. Fosdick has written every word of his sermons. He has labored long and hard over the writing of them -- polishing phrases, sentences, paragraphs, spending several mornings over one sermon, then taking the finished product with him into the pulpit, where because so much work has been done on it, there is never any question of addiction to it or of reading it slavishly; it was preached spontaneously and freely, with vigor."