Paul Scherer was born at Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania, on June 22, 1892. He graduated from the College of Charleston in South Carolina in 1911, and from the Mount Airy Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, in 1916. He was ordained to the ministry of the Lutheran Church in 1916.

After a short period as the assistant pastor of Holy Trinity Church, Buffalo, New York, he served from 1919 to 1928 as instructor in homiletics at Mount Airy Seminary. At the same time he was pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York City, a position he held from 1920 to 1945. From 1932 to 1945 he was the radio preacher on the Sunday Vesper program.

In 1945, Scherer became Brown Professor of Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a chair which he occupied with distinction until his retirement in 1960. His interest in homiletics and his desire to teach led him to become Visiting Professor of Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, during the academic year 1961-2. At the end of that time he accepted the invitation to occupy a similar post at Princeton Seminary, where he remained until illness forced him to relinquish his duties in 1968. He died the following year.

We may learn much about Scherer's preaching methods from the Beecher Lectures which he delivered at Yale in 1943 under the title For We Have This Treasurer. Scherer insists on the priority of preaching. Since the most creative and critical ages of the history of Christianity have been the ages of preaching, it follows that the first business of the preacher is to assign to preaching in his own thought and practice the dignity that belongs to it.

Yet -- like Phillips Brooks -- Scherer was convinced that the preaching office cannot be faithfully discharged without the care of souls. When he went to his church in New York he was told that regular pastoral visitation was neither essential nor particularly desired, but after a time he began to make his way in an orderly fashion into as many of the homes of his people as possible, and found that this greatly enriched his preaching.

In the last two of the Beecher Lectures, Scherer reveals his own methods. He needed anywhere from eighteen to twenty hours before he had his sermon ready. Much of the modern distaste for sermons, he says, may be due to the lethargy and sloth of many preachers. "It takes muscle and sweat to write a sermon. To fasten a man's attention and challenge his respect is not done lightly, no matter how worthy your material or how exalted your theme."1

Scherer insisted the morning hours should be reserved for serious study, especially of the Bible, which should be studied in a systematic way, book by book. He suggests that the preacher should always have on hand one book that is a little beyond him, since there is little profit to be had from reading what he himself might have written. "The clear and quick recording of illustrations; the copying out of quotations; the jotting down of some fleeting, suggestive line of thought; such material carefully gathered, preserved, perhaps even entered in a permanent book, not too laboriously indexed, is simply invaluable."2