Preaching – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Douglas on Engaging with Secular Society

An excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “In Re Sermons on Wages,” The Christian Century, 5/12/1921.

[The following is the conclusion of a Christian Century article by Lloyd Douglas entitled, “In Re Sermons on Wages.” It was published in the May 12, 1921, issue, a little over a year after the end of the First World War. Douglas is saying that the church should provide leadership both to business and to labor, even though he admits that neither of those parties will want the church to interfere. He writes:]

“[A]ny modern prophet who goes into this business of straight goods to all parties concerned – to mean and selfish capital, and cantankerous and unreasonable labor – must promise himself in advance that he is in for something interesting.

“Moreover, he will find that he cannot enter upon the subject at all unless he proposes to take the consequences of his own audacity. He mustn’t expect to stir up the animals on Sunday, and be reported in the papers on Monday, with the hope that everybody will forget what he said on Thursday. Not a bit of it. He will find himself in the predicament of the man who caught the bear by the tail and was afraid to let go! He will be bombarded from both sides – if he has been fair – for both sides are almost equally culpable, unreasonable, and selfish. If he has told the truth about them on Sunday, there will be certain elements on both sides heartily agreeing with him and hoping he may have the courage and patience to continue making his contribution to the cause of justice and the common weal.

“It is time the church spoke! Roger Babson [entrepreneur, economist, and founder of Babson Institute (later Babson College)], in his regular letter to his constituency [to whom he sent economic statistics], dated April 18 [1921], says, ‘The need of the hour is not for more factories or materials, not for more railroads or steamships, not for more armies or navies – but for more education based on the plain teachings of Jesus.’ Babson is not speaking to the Central District Conference of the So-and-So Church, either; but to some twenty-thousand of the biggest and brainiest businessmen of this country!

“It would indeed be a cause for considerable chagrin to the church of America if secular business had to lead the way toward a new appreciation of Jesus Christ.”

Agents of Spirituality

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to fellow ministers about how they never get to hear any sermons other than their own. He writes:]

“Occasionally we attend conferences with our fellow ministers and selected groups of devout laymen; but there the program consists mostly of the mere buttons-and-pins of church methods, the discussion of administrative problems, and consideration of workaday statistical reports. Not infrequently it turns out the that promised ‘inspirational address’ with which the conference was to reach its ennobling climax deftly maneuvers its way from the pulpit to the receipt of custom, where it attains to such magnificence of appeal that the baskets are passed again – this time in the interest of some undeniably worthy cause that had come ‘to the parting of the ways,’ and was ‘facing an hour of crisis,’ and ‘now throws down an heroic challenge to the sacrificial courage of the red-blooded!’ And so forth. Ad lib.

“But even this drench of distress on behalf of an excellent movement, involving the re-reconstruction of the preacher’s puny purse to the jeopardized philanthropy, does very little to assuage his heart-hunger for spiritual nourishment. To be sure, the traveling secretary of the bankrupt board tells him that the most effective spiritual tonic known to the profession is self-administered by the act of turning one’s pockets wrongsideout; but the preacher, however salutary may be the moral results of charity, or sweet the uses of adversity, still longs for some genuine inspiration, just once, that doesn’t find its ultimate goal in his jeans.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Hearing Sermons

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to his fellow ministers. He writes:]

“Our profession seems pretty thoroughly committed to the belief that hearing the gospel preached week after week is so excellent a safeguard and stimulus to correct living that public morality is greatly influenced by the Christian pulpit. Sometimes the doubt is expressed that people who habitually deny themselves the moral and spiritual uplift from the pulpit may order their lives as becomes good Christian citizens. If this proposition has a leg to stand on, what is to become of us who never have a chance to hear the gospel preached, except as we ourselves interpret it, from one year’s end to the next?

“It is not the object of this writing to imply that preachers, as a class, are misbehaving themselves; for such is not the case. Although our ministerial ordination guarantees no immunity against the common weaknesses of mankind, the public expects us to exhibit a high-grade morality. That this demand has been met in a manner fairly satisfactory is evident from the respect generally accorded the clergy as leaders in the moral life of their communities. Once in a while, we are rasped to spluttering indignation over the front-page prominence given to the story of a moral lapse committed by some weak brother whose name had never meant anything until it had contrived to associate itself with odium; but, if we only stop to reason, this is a sort of awkward, left-handed compliment to our vocation. It means that ministers habitually carry themselves with such circumspection that a mistake on the part of any one of them, however obscure, deserves to be played up as sensational news. Were such delinquencies frequent, they would not startle the public; neither would they earn widespread advertisement.

“But it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss the preacher’s morals so much as to inquire somewhat concerning the means at hand for the conservation and development of his spiritual capacities and aspirations. As for the majority of us, we rarely have a chance to hear anything that inspires us to higher thinking or nobler action. Such advices are customarily offered on the first day of the week, at a time when we ourselves are busy with our well-meant, though sometimes ineffective, endeavors to build up a stronger consciousness of human-divine contacts in the souls of our parishioners. We are simply agents and jobbers of spirituality, ourselves menaced with spiritual insolvency due to lack of inspirational income plus a steady drain of expense at that point; starved in the very process of retailing to the ultimate consumer the finest provisions we can lay hands upon – sometimes blissfully unconscious of the pernicious anemia that has sapped our spiritual vigor.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Lloyd Douglas on “Saving the Minister’s Soul”

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.

[The following is from an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on April 14, 1921, under the title, “Saving the Minister’s Soul.” He writes:]

“So steady a character as the Tarsan [St. Paul] once candidly admitted that, having preached to others, it was by no means certain he himself might not become a castaway. These were brave words coming from the self-confessed pioneer of an exalted moral code engaged in its first struggles to gain a following. It would have been easy for Paul to say to his congregation, ‘I have discovered two forces at work in you – virtue and vice; so inextricably mixed that, even when you would do good, evil is present!’ It was quite another matter when he declared, ‘I find two laws within me – a law of my mind and a law of my members, and these two laws at war; o wretched man that I am!’

“The present-day preacher who would thus phrase repentance in the first person singular might give his congregation an uneasy moment for fear he was about to make some startling disclosure of moral turpitude. It is considered much more becoming in him to speak of sinfulness in the third person; or, at most, in the second person. It is assumed that he himself bears a charmed reputation and inviolate character, safe as Caesar’s wife from the ordinary frailties of the race.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, as published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. The photograph is taken from Douglas’s 1920-1923 Scrapbook. The green item in the upper left side of the picture is a cloth “snake” that the Bentley Library provides to help lay pages flat while being photographed.

Lloyd Douglas continued making controversial comments in The Christian Century in an article entitled, “The Music of the Church,” published in the January 13, 1921, issue. This time he took aim at church music.

He began by describing the pastor who doesn’t feel it’s his responsibility to supervise the church’s music. And that, he says, explains why “his church treasurer is always blue over a bank balance that is always red.” Douglas continues:

“Nor need this good man [the pastor] quest an ampler reason for the habitual listlessness of his congregation on the first day of the week, if it is listless, or for the diminutive size thereof, if it is small. Of course, there may be other excellent reasons, but this one will do quite nicely.”

Douglas employed a number of writing techniques that were unusual for the time and especially for Christian magazines. Here’s an example: he pretends that he’s being interrupted by one of his readers.

“Our young brother in the second balcony heckles us to state a few of these other reasons [why the pastor’s congregation might be listless or small]. We dislike to be interrupted [Douglas jokes, since he’s actually interrupting himself], but the question is fair. Well – for instance – something may be wrong with the preacher’s sermons. Their dimensions may be at fault – too long, too deep, too narrow. They may be blighted with a chronic pessimism. Weekly information to the effect that the world is going, if not already gone, to the dogs, and that the whole of nature groaneth and travaileth to the exclusion of any other lawful pursuit gets to be an old and not very attractive theme after a while. And people get tired of hearing, constantly, that they are miserable sinners – a fact too obvious to demand such frequent repetition. When they have enough, they quit. That is one reason, and a mighty good one.”

[And there are others, which Douglas will mention in my next post. But he’s actually going to talk about church music. That’s all coming! To be continued…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 3d: Launching the Sermon

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Third Phase—The Sermon Sample,” in the August 26, 1920, issue of The Christian Century.

[The following is an excerpt from the third installment of Lloyd Douglas’s series about the fictitious minister, Rev. D. Preston Blue in the Christian Century during summer/fall 1920. The series was called, “Wanted – A Congregation!”and the third installment, dated 8/26/1920, was titled, “The Sermon Sample.”]

“Blue has resolved to begin no more sermons with the remark, ‘According to Usher,’ – so-and-so is this-that-or-some-other-thing. He has promised himself that he will never start another sermon with, ‘Scientists tell us that’ – whatever-it-is-that-they-tell-us. He has vowed himself a solemn pledge that he will never dig around again in a volume of canned stories for some tale wherewith to anaesthetize the saints. Never again will he spin a marine yarn about a shipwreck unless he is able to give the actual data. He is done with all disasters at sea that begin, ‘The story is told of a vessel foundered on the reef.’ No more will he attempt to point out a moral by telling a story of ‘a young man who broke his mother’s heart by his dissipation.’ No, sir; if he is going to deal with such a situation, he must make it glow with life and color, as did the Parable of the Prodigal – until, when he is well into it, his congregation knows that young fellow so well that they could almost draw a picture of him sitting among the hogs, ragged and ruined.

“Blue’s new trouble is to decide which is the very best of ten illustrations of a single point, instead of mooning over his dusty old books searching for some incident that may or may not have occurred back in 1842. Indeed, he is becoming so embarrassed with homiletic riches that he can’t pack everything into one sermon that properly belongs there. This leads him into the business of preaching most of his sermons in ‘series.’ It may take him three or four weeks to get through with one idea. For example, take the matter of shipwrecks. What causes shipwrecks? He had thought of preaching about it. He can do a sketchy job of outlining these causes in a single sermon, but he knows that there is material here for several sermons. He resolves to preach a series of sermons on ‘Shipwrecks.'”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 3c: Automobiling and Religion

by Ronald R Johnson

“Since pretty nearly everybody in Centerville is interested in automobiles, Blue, after a long trip in his little car during his vacation, decides that he can do no better than preach a sermon on ‘The Courtesies of the Road,’ which he announces as of special interest to every man who drives a car. He has been in the ditch and has been dragged out at the end of a stranger’s rope. If he can’t find an illustration in that worthy to be mentioned in connection with the story of the Good Samaritan, he is a preacher who has no right to run a car! ‘Let your light so shine that men might see your good works,’ muses Blue as he waits, blinded by some discourteous fellow’s glare, fearful to go on lest he slip off the road. Indeed, as he figures on the possibilities of this theme, his little car becomes alive with illustrations – flat tires, flooded carburetor, defective ignition, overcharged battery, burned-out brakes! Blue begins to understand why all Palestine had followed him about who had made homiletic capital of everything he saw along the road – men building houses, children at play, farmers plowing, women baking, fishermen casting nets, fruit growers mulching a fig tree, camels being unloaded to pass a narrow gate, merchants driving bargains, threshers wielding flails, masons laying brick. Surely, if it did not undignify the Great Preacher to light up his sermons with illustrations about brooms, crumbs, chaff, pennies, dogs, birds, grass, yeast, mustard-seed, and manure, he, Blue, could at least afford to keep his eyes open for the significance of the little, homely facts in common experience.

“If this mention of Blue’s new interest in sermonic materials seems to be slightly off the subject of his great desire to recruit a large congregation, one may justify the digression on the ground that no amount of advertising is going to help Mr. Blue’s pulpit unless the preacher is prepared to interest his audience when he gets it. He recalls with humiliation the ingenuously brutal remark of his own small daughter who, when asked why she didn’t want to go to church, replied, ‘Oh, church is nothing but a lot of old men sleeping, and nice old ladies waving fans!’ That had been a pretty hard jolt – doubly shocking because of its strict adherence to the truth!”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 3b: Samples of Sermons

by Ronald R Johnson

“Our friend Blue is becoming more and more convinced every day that the way to call the public’s attention to the alluring attractiveness of the gospel is to come before the people occasionally with an interesting sample of it. He has been practicing on the composition of sermon abstracts for the Monday papers. They are so readable that people are coming to look at them, now, with eagerness. Already there is an appreciable increase in his congregation due to the publicity his pulpit is receiving from this quarter. His little homilies in the papers deal with some one fact of common interest, introduced with a simple illustration chosen from people’s everyday experience.

“Moreover, he has decided that if this is a good method to pursue in print, it is no less correct in the pulpit. He discovers, with some chagrin, that he has been consistently ‘overshooting.’ His sermons have been made up of abstractions – true and edifying, but bromidic. Noting, now, the way the eyes of his auditors light up when he leads a sermon with some practical illustration, Blue has begun to cultivate a ‘homiletic mood.’ No event, however trivial, gets by him these days without giving a good account of itself as a possible illustration of some spiritual verity. The woman with the apple puts him on the track of a brilliant idea about concentrating people’s attention on a single concept and making that one concept so attractive that it needs no argument. Indeed, Blue is going about now with his eyes and ears open. He snaps the electric switch beside his study door and gets no light. What is the matter? Is the trouble in the lamp or up in the attic inside the fuse box, or down on Tenth Street at the powerhouse? Clearly it is not at the powerhouse, for the neighbor’s lamps are brightly burning. And while he hunts for the cause of the annoyance, he is evolving a perfectly corking illustration which he means to use as the lead to a sermon on ‘The Darkened Room.’ Nothing in the Bible to fit it? What is the matter with the Parable of the Virgins?

“Of course, he does not rush to his pulpit with this matter until he has had time to think it all through carefully. He goes down to the powerhouse and talks to the manager, explaining exactly why he wants to know all the causes of defective lamps, interrupted power, broken wires, and burned-out fuses. Incidentally, while learning something useful, he makes a new friendship.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2c: The Crowded Church

by Ronald R Johnson

Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.

[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. The Reverend D. Preston Blue is excited thinking about increasing the size of his audience.]

“Moreover, Blue has learned upon inquiry that there is no room in the crowded church for such petty annoyances and puerile squabbles as customarily prey upon the frail vitals of the less prosperous. Little rackets which might do serious damage in a puny church are smothered, ignored, and forgotten in the crowd. Deacon Edgewise, peevish because his wishes have been disregarded in some minor manner, may announce to his fellow members of the Fifty-Percent-Efficient-Church that he is going to withdraw – he and his wife, man-servant and maid-servant, heirs and assigns, ox and ass, money, influence, prayers, and presence – thus creating sad havoc in Zion and necessitating the minister to undignify himself, his profession, and the cause he serves by trotting around to the Edgewise headquarters with his trusty molasses bucket. But if the Edgewises belong to a church habitually crowded, they will be somewhat cautious about ‘checking out’ in a moment of irritation, being fully aware that they will be missed about as seriously as a handful of clover blossoms plucked from a forty-acre meadow.

“All things considered, Blue believes that a crowd would mean the salvation of his church. He resolves to have one, if it is to be achieved by honest means. He lays out a definite campaign. We have seen his early efforts to line up the people who are already of his following. Now he has arrived at a decision to make his pulpit known to the general public. The most natural medium is the newspaper. He is going to avail himself of it. Only one condition holds him back. He hasn’t the faintest idea how to go about it.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2b: Long Step Toward Happiness

by Ronald R Johnson

[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted — A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase — Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. Douglas is talking about a minister who has decided to stay with his current church and seek a wider audience there, rather than going elsewhere.]

“It is worth a great deal to our hero to have found out so much as that. Just to have stopped his continuous chatter about ‘the peculiar conditions which obtain in this town’; just to have ceased poring over the column of ‘Calls and Resignations’ in his weekly church paper, in quest of some utopia where the SRO sign would be hung on the church door Sunday mornings at 10:20; just to have left off petting his fatuous dream of Elsewhere — constitutes Mr. Blue’s first long step toward happiness in his ministry.

“This man has given himself to prayer and fasting over his problem. He knows now that there is just one thing in this world that he wants – a crowd! He is conscious of a message burning in his heart – a message so highly potential that if only he could face a large congregation with it, there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind about its value. He recalls the few times he has occupied a pew in a crowded church; the strangely magnetic quality of the audience; its tense attitude of expectancy; how the congregational singing of the hymns seemed to carry a rich overtone almost supernatural in its uplifting power; how vividly the Book poured out its inexhaustible treasures when read to that responsive crowd – a crowd that had been welded into one solid chunk so that it saw, heard, thought, and felt as with the eyes, ears, mind, and heart of one man!

“And the sermon! Inspired! Nothing less than that! Why, almost anybody could preach under such circumstances! The minister seemed fairly lifted up and borne along by the intense interest of his congregation whose size lent new significance to the belief that the gospel is, in very truth, the hope of the world! With such support, Blue knows that he, too, could preach. With the promise of such a congregation, Sunday after Sunday, he could hurl himself into his task of sermon preparation with all the zeal and abandon of a prophet.”

[To be continued in my next post…]