He never permitted the busy program of the church to be a substitute for preaching. He developed a program of institutional activities in a church which drew its power from the preaching of the Word and from a pastoral relationship of rare friendliness and understanding. To the end of his pastorate he made more than one hundred calls a month. It was not uncommon for him to call at the East Side apartment of a wealthy family only to be greeted with the remark that they were not members of his church -- to which his reply was that he would appreciate an opportunity to visit with the maid for it was she he had come to visit.

He was genuinely interested in each member of each family. His people sensed his interest and were ready to share their concerns and problems with him. Reinhold Niebuhr said of him that he "regarded the local congregation as the chief flower of the Christian community and built a church in which all sorts and conditions of men should feel at home, would be instructed, edified, comforted and built into the body of Christ"3

At the early age of forty-one, Coffin was invited to deliver the Beecher Lectures on Preaching, the forty-fourth in that notable series. He took for his theme In a Day of Social Rebuilding and produced a series of lectures worthy of the occasion and singularly appropriate for the disturbing days of 1918 when they were given. The first lecture was entitled "The Day and the Church," which was followed by lectures on varying types of ministry -- reconciliation, evangelism, worship, teaching, organization, and friendship -- ending with a study of the kind of ministers needed for the day. The treatment is fresh and warm, and makes the reader feel that the ministry is the greatest vocation known to humanity.

In 1926 Coffin delivered the Warrack Lectures on Preaching in New College, Edinburgh, and in the Colleges of the United Free Church of Scotland in Glasgow and Aberdeen. He was the first American to be invited to hold this lectureship, regarded in Scotland as the highest honor which the churches could canfer on a minister. The general theme was What to Preach, and in the light of his own experience he proceeded to deal with various types of preaching: expository, doctrinal, ethical, pastoral, and evangelistic. There is an extraordinary wealth of suggestion offered on every page. Principal Martin said of these lectures that they had freshness, vitality and force, and they left in the hearers' minds a heightened conception of what it is to be a Christian minister.

Coffin urged his hearers not to think of themselves so much as prophets -- for Elijah, Amos and Isaiah were not parish ministers, preaching regularly to the same congregations -- but as teachers of religion. We are surfeited, he declared, with what are called 'inspirational sermons" -- exhortatations with a maximum of heat and a minimum of light; we need more patient, systematic instruction in the truth of God. A minister should from time to time tell his people what the Christian faith is in terms congruous with present-day thinking, with no attempt at doctrinal fixity, remembering that theology is "the ever-changing interpretation of the soul's life with God."