books – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5f: Old Friend Blue Again

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.

[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas says:]

“Readers of these articles will have noticed that whenever the writer would ease his mind of something a bit too rough and radical to be fathered with the first personal pronoun singular, he solemnly imputes the burden to one hypothetical D. Preston Blue, who serves in the capacity of official goat, and sends him forth into the wilderness. How do you like that ‘wilderness’ idea? Well – that’s where the goat went, did he not? But, we’re getting derailed here. Lend a hand, won’t you, and let us jack this thing up on the track again.

“D. Preston Blue, on vacation, has been suffering of severe misgivings over his ‘order of service.’ He has resolved to plan a brief ritual with some inspirational possibilities. After much careful and prayerful study, he has made a service which proceeds somewhat as follows. It will be recalled that Blue proposes to have the opening hymn sung without other announcement than is to be found on the printed bulletin. There is a great deal to be said about the bulletin for which no time or space is provided here – how it ought to be made, what purposes it should serve, and the excellent service it may render as an advertising medium.

“This opening hymn is frankly announced on the bulletin as ‘The Hymn of Praise’ – and it must be exactly as advertised. Blue reflects upon the time when a peripatetic tent-preacher had taken all Centerville by the ears, and a great (as to numbers) chorus nightly sang at the top of its lungs such doggerel as distinguished the singing evangelist’s own hymnbook (which was to be had at the opening of the meeting and during several impressive intervals thereafter, for the absurdly low price of forty cents) – that he, Blue, had temporarily adopted the book in his own services, at the request of a warmed-over brother who, in the tent, had found again something he declared he had lost (and never missed). So – for several weeks Broad Street began its worship on Sundays by singing ‘Brighten the Corner Where You Are’ or ‘You in Your Corner and I in Mine’ and several other ‘corner’ hymns which appear to have been produced, as to libretto, by Mr. Uriah Heep in collaboration with Pollyanna; the music brought forth by somebody who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to compose the score for a jazz opera, and had marketed his rejected offspring for the purpose indicated above. (If any blame attaches to these remarks, see Blue.)”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 4a: The Service of Worship

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page from Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted—A Congregation,” in the Christian Century, “Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship,” dated 9/2/1920.

[The following is from the fourth installment in Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted—A Congregation!” in the summer and fall of 1920. This installment, dated 9/2/1920, is titled, “Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship.” The series is about the Reverend D. Preston Blue, who is on a campaign to enlarge his congregation. This episode takes place after he has begun to succeed in building his audience.]

“It was ten o’clock. Stiff in every joint but entirely oblivious to his physical discomfort, the Rev. D. Preston Blue sat on the verandah of the borrowed bungalow overlooking the water, his mind disturbed by very serious reflections. An old man had said something to him that afternoon which had haunted his thoughts for hours. Doubtless the old fellow’s quaint remark, and the incident producing it, possessed some sermonic value. And while questing a possible spiritual significance, our friend had discovered that the cryptic words were aimed directly at one Rev. D. Preston Blue, pastor of the Broad Street Church of Centerville. As the conviction deepened that the words, ‘Thou art the man!’ had been spoken, Blue looked less and less like a carefree man on vacation. He sat with pursed lips, corrugated brow, flexed muscles, and accelerated pulse….

“From two to four that afternoon, stalled in mid-lake, Blue had tinkered hopelessly with a cantankerous little motorboat – an invention closely resembling a violin solo in that, when it is good there are only a few better things, and when it is bad there is positively nothing worse. The preacher had unscrewed all the nuts and taps that would come off the engine, had wiped each one carefully on his trouser leg, and, having inspected them with the gravity of ignorance, had screwed them back on again. He had cranked until he reeled with vertigo and reeked of perspiration. His knuckles were bloody, his throat was parched, his temples throbbed, and his patience was gone.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 3f: Leading the Way

by Ronald R Johnson

[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!” The third installment, dated 8/26/1920, was titled, “The Sermon Sample.”]

“We have seen the minister’s process of enlisting his congregation’s interest in his new aspiration to develop an inspiring crowd. He has sworn them in to the task of doing their utmost to get their friends out to church on the particular date he has announced. But, as he recalls their pitifully ineffective efforts to perform such service in the past, he decides that they should be shown the way. He resolves to suggest a process to them.

“He goes to his printer with a card in mind – a card 6 x 3-1/4 – to be placed in their hands for distribution. Wait a minute! One knows exactly what you are going to say – that Blue is wasting his money – that the people will make no use of these cards at all. Just hold up a minute, please! Blue has some ideas that may be new.

“The reason that most of the ‘envelope stuff’ that the minister usually issues for advertising purposes is a mere waste of time, money, and effort may be accounted for on the ground that the printing is cheap – looks cheap – and the text dull and trite. One cannot afford to be economical in this business. Oh, what stupid cards many preachers circulate among their people – cards composed with no care whatsoever – mostly in the nature of a sad note beginning, ‘Dearly Beloved’ and closing with ‘Faithfully yours.’ No – that is a waste of good money. All the people who will read a card beginning ‘Dearly Beloved’ will get to church without any assistance.

“Blue is going to preach on ‘Shipwrecks.’ Isn’t it the most simple thing in the world for him to inquire of the printer whether he owns a ‘cut’ of a ship? Well – the printer doesn’t happen to have one; but he does own a big catalog of a type foundry; perhaps if Mr. Blue will look through that book, he may happen upon the very thing he has in mind.

“This book is a great revelation to the Rev. D. Preston Blue. He had never known there was such a thing. Here he has access to all manner of little cuts – ships, dynamos, dredges, fire apparatus, trees – of all kinds and sizes – flowers, birds, patriotic eagles, doves of peace, bluebirds ‘for happiness.’ Why – just to sit and study that book for an hour is good for enough material to stock a dozen sermons. Blue tells the printer to order him enough of the tiny cuts to make a border (36 pt.) all around the card, and two cuts of ships (inch) for marginal decoration. He leaves copy for the card, as follows:

SHIPWRECKS

A SERIES OF OCTOBER SUNDAY MORNING SERMONS

At the Broad Street Church

By Rev. D. Preston Blue

October third – ‘THE TITANIC’

October tenth – ‘THE EASTLAND’

October seventeenth – ‘THE IBERNIA’

A cordial invitation is extended to you by ______.

“There are one hundred active families in Broad Street church. That is – if one is not too punctilious about fine shadings of such words as ‘active.’ Blue has decided that he will make up enough of these cards to supply every family with five, except about twenty homes which may be trusted to make good use of so many as ten each. He proposes to mail one hundred cards himself to ‘prospectives’ and out-of-town friends who are on his mailing list – former members of the church removed to other places, occasional benefactors to the work of Broad Street church. All told, Blue needs 700 cards. He orders them printed in two colors – an orange border, with blue for the composition and marginal cuts. Cuts never cost very much, if ordered out of the regular stock.”

Douglas wasn’t making this up. Here is the card he used for a series of sermons he preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan, in January 1916:

An invitation card used by the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor for a January 1916 series. In Douglas’s 1917 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

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

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 3a: Knowing the Value of Your Message

by Ronald R Johnson

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

[The following is from the third installment in Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted—A Congregation!” in the summer and fall of 1920. This installment, dated 8/26/1920, is titled, “Third Phase—The Sermon Sample.” The series is about the Reverend D. Preston Blue, who is on a campaign to enlarge his audience.]

“Late one afternoon when the Blues were sitting out on their front porch talking things over, a woman sauntered up the steps peeling an apple. She smiled pleasantly but said nothing; not even ‘how-de-do’ – just smiled and peeled. Neither did the Blues disturb the silence, so fascinated were they by the performance of the woman who was skinning the rind off that apple with a curiously shaped knife that turned work into play. After a moment, Mrs. Blue exclaimed: ‘Oh – do tell me where I can get a knife like that!’ ‘You may have this one,’ replied the woman, quietly – ‘for thirty-five cents.’ She took the money, left the knife, and, enroute to the gate, picked up two bags which she had parked behind a rosebush – a large bag and a small one. Said Mr. Blue as the gate clicked behind her, ‘The small bag is full of knives, and the large bag is full of apples – and the woman is full of wisdom.’

“Now it happens that this man, who is no other than our good friend, Rev. D. Preston Blue of the consuming ambition to preach to a large congregation, has been giving himself recently to a serious study of psychology – especially in its relation to the processes by which a demand may be created in the public mind for a thing of high value. For several minutes he was thoughtful after the agent had left, and then he said, half to himself, ‘That woman has a good head. She didn’t come up with a whole bagful of knives to make a long speech about their meritorious attributes. She didn’t muddle us with a lot of knives and arguments; she simply exhibited one knife – in operation.’

“‘Yes,’ responded Mrs. Blue, who guessed what was in her husband’s mind, ‘and she didn’t tell us what a good, kind man he was who owned the factory, or what kind of wood the handle is made of, or that she herself is selling them to support eleven starving children.’

“‘Exactly!’ approved D. Preston, nodding his head vigorously. ‘She knew the value of her merchandise and just let it sell itself by a demonstration.'”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2g: Preacher and Editor

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. He is talking about a minister who wants to enlarge his audience but was taught nothing at seminary about reaching the surrounding community through the local newspaper.]

“Anybody who is not more than two-thirds blind needs not be informed that most people derive their information and form their opinions from the papers. It is to be doubted if responsibility for public opinion rests so heavily upon any other man as the editor. That being true, this important individual should receive some moral support. He is entitled to the intelligent cooperation of the preacher. When he strikes exactly the right note in an editorial, registering on the side of honor, justice, and morality, he has a right to expect that his good friend the minister will call him up or drop him a line of appreciation and encouragement; not a long-winded, piously-phrased homily which may produce precisely the opposite effect than the one intended, but a mere, ‘Bully work, Jim! You are doing fine business! The people who count are with you to the limit! More power to your elbow!’

“Not only does a little recognition like this have the effect of keeping the editor buoyed up to his task, but it serves as a deterrent in moments when he is strongly tempted to trim and hedge in some situation where the nasty little virtue of Prudence is admonishing him to ‘keep in right’ with Big Tom of the Steenth Ward.

“If the minister is not too far absent in the spirit, and habitually has his ear to the ground to detect impending seismic vibrations likely to disturb The Morning Star and cause the tripod thereof to wobble, he will happen in about this time and invite the editor out to lunch. Two dollars spent in this manner will sometimes bring larger returns than invested in a volume of Thirty Thousand Thoughts for the Theologian.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2f: A Running Start

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. He is talking about a minister who received a request from the local newspaper for an abstract of his sermon from the previous Sunday.]

“Now, the introduction to that sermon had cost the preacher many hours of labor. He had toiled over it until it was flawless; not a tool-mark in sight; smooth, euphonistic, rhetorically sound in wind and limb. Not on any account could he escape the temptation to repeat this introduction in his abstract. Of course, the introduction was historical. It had dealt with the dramatic incident of Israel’s abandonment of the national ideal in the building of the golden calf. To clear the way for that theatrical event, Mr. Blue had backed up about a score of years, into the Valley of the Nile, so that he might get a long, running start at the calf story.

“Confronted, now, with the necessity of boiling the whole sermon down to a scant nine inches of eight-point, instead of jumping into the very ruck of things and hurling red-hot chunks of his appeal at the public in the first paragraph, the only method his inexperience could suggest was to begin with the calf.

“We are forever lamenting that the public knows so little about the Bible. The public knows more about the Bible than we suspect. It does not understand the causes of biblical events very well, nor does it have much sense of sequence, but the majority of the reading public can recite the more stirring stories of the Bible with considerable fidelity to detail. It knows, for instance, the story of the golden calf. It knows it so well that the mere mention of that incident acts in the nature of a narcotic.

“Well; Mr. Blue had squandered his five hundred words in riotous introduction. He had told the story of Israel’s defection, but there was nothing in it – except possibly in the last few lines, which nobody reached but the proofreader – even vaguely suggestive of a modern application. The editor had found nothing in it, so far as he had gone, to warrant an attractive caption. In fact, he had labeled it, frankly, ‘The Golden Calf – Dr. Blue Recites Well-Known Story – Idol Worship.’ Think you that anybody would read it, after such a recommendation? Verily, a silly question.

“Our friend’s pride nearly bleeds to death when he reflects upon the matter. He had been given a chance to preach to every man in Centerville on Monday morning, and this is the way he had done it – by rehearsing the moral lapses of another country and another age, as if he were afraid to approach America’s and Centerville’s lapses by less than thirty-three hundred years and seven thousand miles! To be sure, this wasn’t true of him! Anybody hearing him on Sunday would have admired his fearlessness – but he kept it very carefully concealed from the public in his report on Monday.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2e: Better Late Than Never

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. He is talking about a minister who was contacted by the local newspaper and asked for an abstract of ]

“Very much in earnest over this matter, Mr. Blue proceeds to do what he ought to have done back in 1905 when he lived in Robinsonville. He subscribes for several periodicals published in the interest of writers and pores over their contents with zealous industry. He is surprised and delighted to learn that he may have easy access to a voluminous literature on the subject of composition. He is heartened to find that the rules for newspaper writing are very simple. For example: he discovers that the newspaper reporter tells his story in the first paragraph – just the bare fact that John Smith robbed William Brown’s hen-coop and was assessed a fine of $50 and thirty days in the workhouse. If the reader is consumed with curiosity to learn all the thrilling details of this event – Smith’s former record, Brown’s attitude toward his bereavement, the fate of the fowls, together with such facts and fancies as the reporter may see fit to make public – is it not written in the story, further down the page? Mr. Blue discovers that this is a hard-and-fast rule in newspaper writing, that the reporter must throw down all his salient facts in the first three or four lines.

“Judging his feeble efforts in composing ‘sermon abstracts’ for the Monday papers on rare occasions by this inviolable rule indicated above, Blue smiles wryly over the remembrance of the stuff he had submitted. If it was never read by anybody – small wonder. He can easily understand now why he is so seldom asked for reports of his sermons. He recalls the day when he had preached a really remarkable sermon on the general subject of the danger of losing a national ideal. Very few had heard it. He had announced it in the Saturday column of ‘church notices’ under the title, ‘The Golden Calf.’ Blue never had known how to compose a sermon theme, though one scarcely needs be told that. ‘The Golden Calf’ is sufficient to explain Blue’s ignorance on this subject. But it was a good sermon; and if it had been given a fair chance, it might have drawn a better audience.

“It was so strong, indeed, that a discerning auditor had called upon the editor of The Morning Star, requesting him to print an excerpt. The editor had telephoned Blue, asking for about five hundred words. Blue had consented, somewhat gingerly, to furnish the required copy.”

[But all did not go well for Blue, as Douglas will reveal in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2d: Journalism and the Seminary

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.” Douglas is talking about Rev. Blue, a minister who has decided to increase his audience. Blue knows he must make use of the local newspaper as a means of communication, but he doesn’t know how.]

“Had the theological school which claimed D. Preston Blue among her alumni offered a short course in Journalism for Preachers, she might have done herself and her output more credit than she ever received for the painstaking interest with which she had explained the Apocrypha in the original. Indeed, had she given this man so little as ten hours instruction in the art of composition intended for the public press, she might have served him better than with her entire wealth of erudition anent the Minor Prophets.

“When the minister, twenty years out, compares what he studied in the seminary with the actual problems he has faced daily in his profession, he wonders how his theological alma mater could have contrived to miss the mark with such systematic completeness. Almost nowhere had his instruction even remotely touched his job. He had been loaded to the gunwales with the history of doctrines, which the public didn’t care to hear about; crammed with rules for the manufacture of sermons which, if carefully observed, were guaranteed to stultify any spontaneity likely to shine through the gloom; stuffed with dogmatics, apologetics, hermeneutics, liturgics, homiletics, catechetics, exegetics, and a host of lesser ‘ics’ – now happily forgotten. But nobody had ever considered it necessary to inform him how to prepare attractive and readable ‘copy’ for a newspaper or magazine, probably for the very excellent reason that not a man on the faculty was possessed of such information. Nobody had ever so much as hinted that there were at least two ways – a right and a wrong – of phrasing sermon topics for public announcement. Never had anyone talked about the close and helpful contacts possible and desirable between preacher and editor.

“Of course, great changes – laus Deo! – have been registered in recent years in theological schools. These matters are now receiving in some quarters just a very little bit of attention. But that doesn’t help D. Preston Blue, who acquired his B.D. in the good old days when the seminary graduate was equipped only with such information as might fit him to aspire to one of the professorial chairs of the institution that had graduated him.”

[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…]

Summer 1920 and The Christian Century

by Ronald R Johnson

The cover of the August 5, 1920, issue of The Christian Century.

I’ve told you before that Douglas debuted with The Christian Century by entering an essay contest. John Spargo’s article, “The Futility of Preaching,” was the subject, and a number of ministers responded to the editor’s call for rebuttals. Douglas was one of them. Through his essay, “Preaching and the Average Preacher,” Douglas demonstrated a style all his own, and the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison invited him to submit more of his writing to the Century. In fact, he urged Douglas to do it right away, while readers still remembered his name.

Douglas did better than that: he submitted a series of articles, and he framed them as a longer, more in-depth response to Spargo’s criticisms. He called the series, “Wanted — A Congregation!” In this series, he offered advice about how one might preach in such a way that people would flock to the church (as his own parishioners had been doing for the past five years at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan). Douglas had a dynamic personality and was especially powerful in the pulpit and at the typewriter, but in this series of articles he claimed that others could learn from his successes (and failures).

It may seem astounding that Douglas could have responded to Morrison’s invitation so quickly and voluminously, but this series was based on a book he had already written more than a year earlier. In January 1919, Douglas sent a manuscript of the book The Mendicant to the Doran Company. George Doran liked the style of Douglas’s writing but wanted the book to be more religious than it actually was. Douglas didn’t take Doran’s advice, and the manuscript sat in his file cabinet, waiting for the right opportunity to try again.

Douglas recognized Morrison’s invitation as that opportunity. Although The Mendicant was written as a series of dialogues, Douglas took the information that was in his manuscript and rewrote it as a series of essays. Over the next few weeks, I will share excerpts from those essays.