“WANTED — An unsuccessful and discouraged man to hear a sermon-lecture on ‘Personality’ at the Congregational church (corner of State and William streets), Sunday morning at 10:30. Costs you nothing but your time.”
“WANTED — Student who never attends church services anywhere but is interested in the development of his ‘personality,’ to come to the Congregational church next Sunday morning at ten-thirty.”
These are the kinds of random ideas Lloyd Douglas came up with, and he wasn’t bashful about following up on them. In January 1920 he was about to launch a series of sermons on “Personality” at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, and although the church was already filled on Sunday mornings, he thought they could reach even more people. Douglas was especially interested in reaching the kind of people who didn’t enjoy going to church, because he didn’t like it very much himself — or at least he didn’t like the way most churches conducted their services. He did things differently at the First Congregational Church, and he wanted to extend the church’s reach.
So he composed some notices for the types of people he wanted his sermon-series to reach, and he placed them in the local paper as Want-Ads. The newspaper even ran a story about it.
He also followed up with more conventional advertisements:
It was this sort of thing that made Douglas “the talk of the town,” no matter what town he happened to be working in at the moment. It also made his church the place to be on Sunday morning — if for no other reason than to satisfy people’s curiosity about what he would say. I’ll tell you what he did say in my next post.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 