Tuesday, April 28, 2009

April 28, 2009: Against Cheap Manipulation In Sermons

This one is for my fellow preachers: Don't be a manipulative jerk in the pulpit. I suppose a stronger word than "jerk" could be applied to those who do the things I condemn below, but as a man of the cloth myself I will tame my tongue as I call to account some colleagues who irritate the living snot out of me.

A pastor I'll call "Will Bibles" recently (according to a Christian journal) "challenged members of the congregation to raise their hands if they were willing to surrender their possessions and lifestyles fully to God and actually decide to use their resources to serve the poor and honor God...Then Will said he wanted to have a word with all the folks who did not raise their hands: 'I hope you have a terrible afternoon. And then I hope you have a terrible evening. I hope the Holy Spirit keeps after you, and you have to keep thinking this one through until you're able to raise your hand as well.'"

What a cheap shot. First of all, Will doesn't have the moral authority to summon heaven's rebuke of the greedy. (I read one of his books where he wrote - guiltlessly - of tooling around in a sports car that costs more than double my annual salary, and about all the friends he made at his sailboat club. Yes, his sailboat club.)

Second, it is so easy to turn the "I-pray-you-have-a-bad-afternoon" mantra against anyone - Will included - who falls afoul of the conviction you're harping on at the moment. For example, at my former church I hosted an organizational event for the Hike For Life, and the representative from Will's church explained that she couldn't make any announcements there because the church had a policy against public pro-life statements which might offend pro-choice seekers. (Grrrr. They have no policy of refusing to condemn racism just because that might offend seekers from the Klu Klux Klan.) A man of my convictions might want to thunder from the pulpit, "RAISE YOUR HAND if you are willing to take a public, uncompromising stand against the slaughter of the innocents," and, if Will were present and did not raise his hand, stare him straight in the eye and say, "I'll keep praying that you be miserable, miserable, until you repent." But that would be wrong. It is never right to try to influence behavior by calling for a show of hands and then browbeating those who keep their hands down.

A preacher I listen to on the radio was troubled that some in his congregation did not applaud one of his rhetorical flourishes, and at the conclusion of his message he actually prayed for all those who did not clap. I'm not kidding. I had noticed in the preceding months that he was developing the bad habit of crafting emotionally laden crescendo lines, slowly biting off the words of paper-thin monstrosities like "I...Will Not...Bow...To Satan...even...If...He...CAN raise the dead!" and then stopping to wait for the applause. Sometimes he'd provoke up to five ovations in 20 minutes, and it always made me groan. I suppose that if he thought that non-applauders needed prayer, then eye-rollers like me needed exorcisms! But I maintain he was just being manipulative and should cut it out.

One pulpit manipulation trick is to treat your audience like ventriloquist dolls. At both a Promise Keepers convention and at a mega-church service I was instructed to "Turn to the person next to you and say" something really inane. I did it, like a lemming, but if it happens again I'm not going to bother. That kind of thing needs to be discouraged.

Some manipulations have heart-breaking effects. Years ago I talked with a sweet-spirited woman, a school teacher in her early 50s, who had recently experienced the sorrow of losing her husband-to-be to a sudden heart attack just before their wedding. In the course of our conversation she mentioned that she had gone to a large church where a multi-part "invitation" was given. If you were willing to give your heart to Jesus you were supposed to stand. Then if were already a Christian you should stand too. Then if you weren't in either of those categories but were "on the way" as a seeker and willing to respond to God's call, you should stand as well. She was left as the only person sitting surrounded by a sea of the standing, and she felt conspicuous and awful and never wanted to go back. I apologized to her on behalf of my Christian brothers. (Is this how we call people to Christ - through peer pressure and social embarrassment? For shame.) Thankfully she read and responded well to a copy of C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed that I gave her.

Say no to homiletic pressure tactics. Gospel truth conveyed with conviction, reverence, earnestness and love has a power all its own and needs no manipulative gimmick to support it. You cannot straighten a soul by twisting an arm.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Graciousness 4: The Assist

Philadelphia 76s point guard Maurice Cheeks dished out 7,392 assists in the course of his basketball career, but his best one came 10 years after he retired. On April 28, 2003, Cheeks, then coach of the Trailblazers, stood on the sideline as 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert began singing the national anthem before a game with the Mavericks. Natalie got as far as "the twilight's last gleaming" when she froze, forgetting the words. In her silence the crowd began to whoop it up, and she buried her face in the microphone as though trying to hide. But Cheeks quickly went over to her and began singing, "Whose broad stripes and bright stars...". He draped his arm around her, and they finished the song together as the whole crowd joined in. Watch it on YouTube, and you can see for yourself why Cheeks is rightly regarded in basketball circles as a great class act.

A gracious person stands ready at a moment's notice to provide an assist like that for someone stuck in a bad situation. It can be very simple. The other day as I finished a transaction at the bank, the guy behind me said, "Excuse me, sir?" and apologetically noted that my collar was up in back. I had neglected to fold it down over my tie. I thanked him and fixed it, and told him I never would have known the collar was amiss if he had not alerted me. I was reminded of the quick work of a friend of mine who, when sitting in a high school physics class, saw that his teacher's fly was open. Rather than embarrassing him with "Mr. Johnson, your zipper!", he hastily scribbled a note and placed it atop an assignment he was handing in. The teacher soon found an excuse to leave the room and came back adjusted.

The classroom is one of those settings that provides daily opportunities for gracious assists on the part of both teacher and student. When I was at Trinity I was very impressed by the way several professors managed to respond thoughtfully to the tangled verbiage of over-caffeinated seminarians. Had I been more gracious myself, I might have gone up to them afterward and said, "Thank you, Professor. I like how you were able to make sense of that question!" I can only imagine how many times they had to resist the temptation to stare at a student and mutter, Snape-ishly, "Go regroup your fuddled thoughts and come back when you have a coherent sentence."

I believe most students probably don't realize that their teachers need assists too. Scholar and author Scot McKnight used to tell us that when he first started teaching he was afraid to go to class. Professors realize that they will get evaluated. They probably look themselves up on RateMyTeacher, and know very well when they are bombing. By the time I got to graduate school I learned the trick of raising my hand and posing lots of questions to struggling teachers, and that always seemed to energize them. It was a matter of helping out a teacher whose brain was good but needed picking.

Look for opportunities to give an assist. Jesus will some day say to the righteous, "I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink, in prison and you visited me," etc. He might also say, "I was a 13-year-old who forgot the national anthem, and you came to my side and helped me to finish it."

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Graciousness 3: Just Paying Attention

When I was 14 I was reprimanded by a teacher for something very rude I had done. While other freshmen were giving oral presentations I took out a book and started reading it. Believe it or not, my motive for ignoring my classmates was good. I myself hated, hated, pathologically hated giving speeches - the thought of talking publicly made me so nervous I'd want to crawl in a hole. What a horror to have everyone looking at you while you perspired and sputtered and turned red! So, in the spirit of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," I deliberately paid no attention to the speakers, even as (so I thought) I wanted them to pay no attention to me.

Boy was that dumb. The teacher was right to insist that I put the book away. And so I learned, by means of rebuke, what naturally gracious people know without being taught: Generally, people don't like being ignored when they're speaking. They like being listened to. Even I like being listened to now. I get flummoxed if someone reads a newspaper during Sunday School, or goes out for coffee as soon as the sermon starts. But who am I to complain? It is probably karma for my own rudeness!

Back in the early 70s my mother celebrated my father's gracious spirit with an essay she wrote about the things he did to make her happy, shaping his deeds into words of counsel for husbands who had "more love to offer than money." One of the bullet points was: "Listen patiently, try not to yawn, while one of her loquacious relatives rambles endlessly on." It is a mark of a man's character that he can listen patiently to a woman's boring relative, not merely when he is trying to woo her, but when he has been married to her for 25 years and no longer stands to gain anything by it!

Of course there are limits to how long even a polite individual can listen to some people. When my sister feared calling an acquaintance because she knew the woman would monopolize her time for a whole afternoon, I said, "I can help! Just let me know when you are about to call. Then I'll call you 15 minutes later, say that I need to talk to you right away [to help you end the call on the other line, but we'll leave that unsaid], so you can get back to your friend and say, 'Hey, that's my brother, he wants to talk to me right now.'" She declined my offer, and, instead, patiently endured a long listen.

D. L. Moody once spared some congregants a long listen by boldly interrupting a droner. At an evangelistic rally a guest minister was praying an impossibly long prayer and people were getting restless. A physician in the audience, W. T. Grenfell, was so bored he was about to walk out. But Moody, sensing the problem, sprang to his feet and announced, "As our brother finishes his prayer, let us sing a hymn!" (Grenfell, relieved, stayed, made a profession of faith in Christ that night, and eventually became a medical missionary to Canada.)

Within limits set by prudence, it is usually a good and gracious thing to let others say their piece. The Bible says that God extends the grace of focused attention to witless mortal sinners like us. It is a fact about him that amazed King David, who asked in Psalm 8:4, "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Or, as Eugene Peterson put it, "Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?"). But he does pay attention to us somehow, and the Holy Spirit even intercedes on our behalf "with groans that words cannot express" (Romans 8:26).

I don't know why he "groans." Maybe it is because many of our prayers are a tedious test of his patience!