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I began my present job as Bishop of the North Alabama Conference by going around the state and conversing with small groups of laity. I asked the people in the pews, “What do you need most from me as your bishop?” In every group, there was always someone to say, “We need better preaching.”

One layperson offered a string of criticisms about the poor quality of her pastor’s sermons—just the sort of layperson I tend to avoid. Her concluding comment to me was, “Bishop, it’s too tough being black in Alabama without having good preaching to enable you to resist and to cope in a racist culture.” That woman’s testimonial was a poignant reminder that much is at stake in a sermon.

I swore that I would not appoint an elder to any church before I had heard that pastor preach. (It’s rather shocking that I had never been appointed to a church by anyone who had heard me preach—despite the laity’s insistence that they need, and deserve, good preaching.) I have had difficulty keeping my promise to God to hear the preaching of the preachers I appoint; however, through the miracle of video recording and my district superintendents, I have now heard the preaching of nearly two hundred pastors in my conference. This past year I listened and responded in writing to over sixty sermons of my clergy who were moving from one congregation to another. Listening to these sermons, combined with over twenty years of teaching homiletics in a seminary, qualifies me to say a thing or two about the state of preaching in United Methodism.

First, a prejudiced statement of the sort that you would expect a preacher to make: I believe that there is not much wrong with our church that can’t be cured by more faithful preaching of the gospel. The laity seem to know this better than we preachers. Paul sure knew it when he declared that “faith comes through hearing.” John Wesley began a grand conflagration that swept like wildfire across England and into North America on the basis of nothing but words. The Christian faith is an inherently auditory phenomenon. Preachers bring the gospel to speech, keep holding up before our people the truth of Jesus Christ, and say what needs to be said in order to be faithful disciples in our time and place.

I have this so prominently on my mind because I have just finished listening to the sermons of a dozen preachers who are under my care. Many of their sermons were lively and engaging and most congregations would hear them gladly on a Sunday morning. Yet with most of them, there was little indication that the content of the sermon or the engine driving the proclamation was the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Other than that, most were fine sermons.

One sermon began well enough, the Second Sunday of Christmas, Luke 2, young Jesus putting the temple elders through their paces, abandoned by Mom and Dad. After reading the text, and noting Jesus’ adorable ability to stupefy professional scholars, the preacher sailed off into a veritable shopping list of things we needed to do. We were told that we needed to resolve, in the coming year, to be more proficient in the study of God’s Word. We should strive to “increase in wisdom and in stature.” We ought to spend more time with our families. We ought, we should, we must….

I was struck by how quickly, how effortlessly, and predictably the preacher disposed of a wild story about Jesus and transformed it into a predictable moralistic diatribe about us. Moving from a text that simply declares what Jesus did and, by implication who Jesus is, it was as if the preacher said, “You don’t want to hear about Jesus; you want to hear about you.” Thus the sermon was mostly anthropology with just a dash of theology. Moving quickly from the biblical text, the pastor asserted a moralistic list of all the things that we need to do if we (in the absence of a living, active God) are to take charge of our lives, save ourselves by ourselves, and run the world.

Most congregations that I know love such sermons. These are the folk who say, “I like a sermon that tells me what I need to do to live a better life,” or “I like a sermon that gives me points to remember and to put into practice in my life.” Notice anyone missing in these definitions of a sermon? God. The sermon subtext is you are gods unto yourselves. Through this insight, this set of principles and platitudes you can save yourselves by yourselves. Whether preached by an alleged theological conservative or a card-carrying liberal, listening to most sermons in our church indicates that we’ve become secular humanists. Autosalvation is our goal. Church is where we come to get motivated to go out and run the world on our terms. God is humanity spoken in a resonant, upbeat voice backed up with a PowerPoint presentation.

We come to church, not to meet the Trinity, but rather to meet our responsibilities and to better our lives; to get our assignments for the week. When Wesleyan sanctification loses a living, active, resourceful, gracious God, it becomes insufferably boring and moralistic. The “sermon” is no better than a talk we could have heard at Rotary—and at least a civic club meets at a convenient hour of the week and serves lunch.

Sadly, a chief motivation for such anthropological preaching is evangelism. Reaching out to speak to the world, we fell in face down. Over confident in our assessment of what our audience will and will not hear, we have reduced the gospel to a set of sappy platitudes that anyone could accept and no sensitive, thinking American could resist. Our testimony has been reduced to whatever we think the market will bear. In the process of such “preaching,” distinctive Christian speech was jettisoned and the discourse of pragmatic, utilitarian, therapeutic deism became the dominant preaching mode.

The fundamental question, “Is this true?” is set aside in favor of, “Will this work for me?”—evangelist Charles Finney’s pragmatism and utilitarianism triumph. When preaching ceases to be about the truth of God in Jesus Christ, preaching degenerates into another program of human betterment, the old “Christ has no hands but our hands” sermonette for basically good people who are making progress.

Why bother? This is the message the world is already telling itself. Theologian Karl Barth convinced me that the Bible was more interesting than I could ever hope to be because the Bible is mainly about a living God. As Barth put it: “Preachers must not be boring. To a large extent the pastor and boredom are synonymous concepts. Listeners often think that they have already heard what is being said in the pulpit. They have long since known it themselves…. Against boredom the only defense is again being biblical. If a sermon is biblical, it will not be boring. Holy Scripture is in fact so interesting and has so much that is new and exciting to tell us that listeners cannot even think about dropping off to sleep.”

Scripture keeps preaching theological because it is the nature of Scripture to speak primarily about God and only secondarily or derivatively about us. So the challenge of preaching is not to get to know our people and their needs but rather always to be obsessed by and tethered to the biblical text. I once advised pastors to “love your people.” Now I tell them that the best way to love their people is to love the biblical text!

In seminary, someone told me to “share myself” in my preaching, to build on my “life experiences” and thereby “connect with the congregation” in my sermons. The trouble was, I walked into my first parish at twenty-four. A few weeks of peering into their lives convinced me that my life experiences were no match for the depth of their need and desire. I had to admit that if my listeners would be saved, it must be by the work of a God who loves to forgive sinners and to raise the dead. If their only hope was for progressive human betterment, they would be damned.

As Barth said on another occasion, there is only one preacher—Christ. Until the risen Christ shows up, speaks, commandeers the preacher, and thereby makes the sermon someone’s Good News, it isn’t a sermon. German church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that the whole purpose of the sermon is to allow the risen Christ “to walk among his people.”

Thus the Trinity is not only the subject but the agent of faithful preaching. We cannot allow preaching to be dominated by a humanly derived “how?” when our greatest challenge, and the source of our true power to preach is the divinely given “Who?” Specifically Christian preaching is not about the ways that we can get closer to God, but announcement of a God who has, wonder of wonders, found a way to get to us. Faithful preaching is theologically authorized. “And God said…” is the basis of everything. Can it be that our principles for better living delivered in PowerPoint, our “culturally relevant” communication techniques and “seeker sensitive” worship, are our latest attempts to keep a living, speaking, strange, and demanding God at a distance?

I recently heard a sermon based upon Jesus’ parable of the seeds. After reading a wonderfully outrageous story of a farmer who sows by slinging seed everywhere, wasting a huge amount of seed in the process, the preacher immediately jumped into a list of things that we were to do if the seed is to germinate: we must carefully prepare people’s hearts for the gospel, we must be diligent in rooting out our bad habits so that the good seed can grow, we must be willing to work hard in expectation of a good harvest. We ought, we should, we must…. Notice anyone missing from the sermon?

I worry that we have trained a generation of Christians to expect that every sermon ought to be about them—what they are to be and do. Faithful preaching is always an announcement of who God is and what God is doing in Jesus Christ. Rather than jump so quickly to questions like, “What am I to do with this?” and “How can I use this to make my life more meaningful?” we must again discipline ourselves to ask questions like, “Who is the God who meets us in Jesus Christ?” and “How does my life need to change in order to live with such an interesting God?”

When I was chaplain at Duke, one of my duties was the baccalaureate sermon. In order to prepare myself, I convened a group of graduating seniors and asked them questions like, “What is going on in your lives now? What issues would you like me to address in my baccalaureate sermon this year?”

The evening of our discussion a bright young woman said, “You should be studying the Bible to prepare for your sermon. It’s a waste of time to study us. On graduation weekend, we’re going to get lots of advice from lots of different people. You’re a pastor. We don’t want more advice. We want you to talk about God. That’s got to be more interesting than advice.”

I’m convinced that a factor in our denomination’s decline is that we have (albeit unintentionally) given our people a rationale for secularity, a validation for godlessness. Many of them wake up on Sunday morning and can’t figure out a reason to go to church because what they hear in church is so similar to all the other messages they get during the week. We have conditioned them to think that religion is something they do rather than a work of God. Boredom and disinterest are the inevitable results of allowing anthropology to take the place of Christology.

And by the way, if our church is going to get back in touch with the under-thirty crowd, then we better refurbish our theological commitments. From what I’ve seen of young adults, their attitude is that if the church is only about correct thinking, friendliness, social work, or anything else other than the worship and service of a living God, why bother?

I met a man in England last summer who, when he discovered that I was a Methodist said, “I once was a Methodist.” I wanted to say to him, “That’s nothing to brag about, there are millions of people just like you.” When I asked him why he was no longer a Methodist, he explained: he had had a terrible week, his life was out of control, he had reached the end of his resources. So he went to his Methodist church on Sunday. His pastor’s sermon was, “Better Roads for Britain.” He never went back.

Recently my Cabinet visited one of our prominent seminaries where we interviewed a dozen of our students who are preparing for ordination. We asked them, among other questions, “Which ministerial activity do you feel most passion for and look forward to practicing once you earn your theological degree?”

Not one single student said “preaching.” We have got to hold our seminaries more accountable for the preachers they produce and we must convince our future clergy that proficiency in preaching is the main skill that the church now needs in its leaders.

In our beloved denomination we have a good number of clergy who are fine preachers. And yet there appears to be little connection between clergy who preach well and how those clergy are deployed in the Connection. Those of us who are called to the ministry of oversight have got to do a better job of evaluating, recognizing, and affirming those clergy whom God has given special gifts for preaching and who spend the time and effort to put preaching at the center of their ministry. The laity want it; the gospel of Jesus Christ demands it.

When the women went to the tomb on the first Easter morning, they were met by a “young man in a long white robe” (Mark 16:4). They were told that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Then they were commanded, “Go, tell….” Curiously, the women were not told to soothe the needs of hurting people, or to be in service to the world. They were not even told diligently to search the Scriptures. They were told, “Go, tell….” that is to preach. This is the church’s great commission as well as the chief means whereby the church continues as Christ’s church—preaching.

The great Methodist preacher of another age, Halford Luccock, told his preaching class about the little Methodist congregation somewhere in the Dakotas. One week they had a snowstorm that piled snow so deep that even the U.S. Mail couldn’t get through. That meant that the pastor had no idea whether it was United Nations Sunday, or Festival of the Christian Home Sunday, or Native American Sunday. So when a few people gathered despite the weather, the pastor rather embarrassedly told them that, since the mail didn’t get through, and since he had no idea what denominational program was to be emphasized this Sunday, they were going to diverge from their usual practice. This Sunday they would just worship God.

Will Willimon is Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. One of his more recent books is Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Abingdon Press).

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Preaching in United Methodism Today By Will Willimon

Preaching in United Methodism Today
By Will Willimon