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. 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.”
From the first installment of Douglas’s series, “Wanted — A Congregation!” in the 8/5/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[This is from Part 1 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted — A Congregation!” This first installment was in the August 5, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. Douglas is talking about a minister who wants to enlarge his audience.]
“A very good place to begin this campaign of giving his gospel message a longer reach is among the faithful band that constitutes his present congregation. There is no reason why he should consider it a secret that his congregation is too small. Every member of it is quite as fully aware of that fact as he is himself. He need have no hesitancy about confiding to these good people his ambition to increase their number.
“What dreadfully poor psychologists some preachers are! How often they either candidly declare to their small congregations that ‘it is to be greatly regretted so few are out this morning,’ or hint the equivalent of that whine by some veiled allusion to the innumerable absentees, to the tune of a deep-fetched sigh. This is very poor advertising. The stranger who has put in an appearance for the first time that day surely has some justification for feeling that he was almost on the point of attaching himself to a lost cause.
“Let the minister leave off all his whimpering and endeavor to enlist the hopeful cooperation of his people in an attempt to secure a larger congregation. He will do well to take a solemn oath that never again will he commit the blunder of saying on Sunday morning, ‘If you only knew how depressing it is for a little handful to gather in this vasty place on Sunday evenings, you would come out and join us, surely!’ Yes — after an alluring advertisement like that — yes — surely (not). Where, oh where is his knowledge of human psychology who stands in his pulpit and begs his congregation to be more faithful in church attendance? No; one doesn’t get them that way.
“Our harassed friend is about to enter upon a campaign to recruit a congregation. He decides upon a favorable date for the opening of his bombardment. This date should be three or four weeks off, to give him time to plan the event with care. It should be a Sunday when natural conditions are friendly. Probably not on the twenty-second day of August.
“For the same reason that one should begin at Jerusalem before invading all Judea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth, it is better to launch this campaign in a little group of a half dozen trusted men around a lunch table. Let the whole matter be pushed out into the open. The preacher is tired of ambling along at his present gait. He knows he can preach if he can find enough people willing to listen. On October third, he is going to look for a crowd! They must help him to that crowd!
“Then — by personal letter, by personal call, by frequent conferences with selected groups of men and women, this minister should commit his sworn friends to the task of bringing as many people with them to church on Sunday morning, October third, as they can possibly influence.”
The front cover of Christopher Morley, Two Classic Novels in One Volume: Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop (Dover Publications, 2018). (From amazon.com)
As I mentioned in a previous post, Douglas had trouble coming up with a title for this sermon because the passage he quoted was about washing dishes. In the book, Morley’s character Mifflin talks about how he used to hate washing dishes until he realized that it slowed him down and gave him a chance to relax from his daily labors. As Mifflin says,
“Do not laugh when I tell you that I have evolved a whole kitchen philosophy of my own. I find the kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset. A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dishmop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself. The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the icebox pan is emptied, and the whole place is ‘redd up,’ as the Scotch say.”
Douglas comments on this passage:
“Now, all of this has set me thinking on the subject of our drudgeries, and to wondering if the search for contentment in life is not, after all, mostly a transfiguration of these petty drudgeries into desirable employments. I am fully aware that my original premise is not extremely popular. That one should seek contentment nowadays is almost equivalent to a confession of selfishness and moral lassitude. The way to behave, modernly, is to strive.
“Be busy. Be doing things. Be perpetually going through a multitude of motions. Don’t sit down. People might think you lazy. Don’t slow down. People might think you were losing your punch. It is best to lope about, watch in hand, with an expression of fatigue and anxiety on your face; then people will recognize you as a person of consequence. You really can’t be a man of affairs unless you are out of breath.
“It is also wise to talk a great deal about the pressure that is put on you from every direction. This is the easiest part of the performance, of course; and once you get going, it will come quite natural to you to speak of your congested program — almost to the exclusion of any other topic.
“This is the way we have been living in recent years, until the quest of contentment has come to be considered a very unworthy ambition.
“Now, I cannot believe that this sort of panicky living makes for permanent gains in the development of modern civilization. I don’t see how work that is done under such obvious pressure, and necessarily in such a great hurry, can contribute much to the lasting values of our time. There’s too much DO and not nearly enough BE in it.
“We have been chattering volubly about dynamics (one of the words that ought to collect double wages of this generation, for overtime). This, we say, is a dynamic age; and we are living in a dynamic country; and we are a dynamic people. If you want to say something pleasant about some active man, don’t forget to mention that he is dynamic.
“Now, strictly speaking, a dynamic is like the lights on a popular, democratic motorcar. So long as the car is in motion, the lights are on. When the car stops, the lights go out. A dynamic is under obligation to some other agency for its energy; and when that other agency takes a day off, so does the dynamic.
“I think it were about time we began speaking of the desirability of a static power — owing its energy to sources external to itself, to be sure; but not quite so slavishly dependent upon them. They can shut down for repairs if they wish, but the reservoir in which the static power has been stored is good for such period as it has provided for in the hours of its receipt of energy.
“To the storing of this static power in our lives, we need to give considerably more attention than we have been giving it, to a fine, well-balanced spiritual content.
“Whenever I get to the point, in high dynamics, that I must confess I have hardly time to eat my meals; am a stranger to my own household; haven’t read a book, other than that appertaining to my craft, for weeks, months, maybe; I may also seriously ask myself whether, in my abnormal life, lived under conditions artificial, unhealthy, and distinctly antisocial, my contribution to my age is likely to have very much in it of permanent value to mankind.
“I confidently expect to see, long before I die, a decided swing of sentiment away from this popular stampede toward a program of life embracing a little of dignified leisure for thought and a renewal of the well-nigh lost art of contentment.”
The rest of his sermon was about practical ways to find contentment. I’ll tell more about that in my next post.
One of the vexing problems in a busy pastor’s life is the necessity of giving the church secretary the title of a sermon long before it has actually been written. If the people are to be given a “bulletin” or “program” for the church service, it has to be printed, and the printer has to fit it into his schedule. Sometimes it’s done in-house, but not always; and even when it’s an inside job, the printer usually isn’t available at the last minute, late on Saturday night. And when the sermon is advertised in the local newspapers or on the announcement board outside, the title may be needed a week or more in advance.
That’s the problem Lloyd Douglas faced as the new year, 1920, began. His sermon on January 4 was titled, “Sermon.”
As he explained to his congregation, “I spent considerable time last week trying to find a name for this sermon. Once I thought of announcing that I would preach this morning to ‘Women Without Maids’; which idea was promptly rejected when I reflected that the discourse was of no less interest to me. I then half-decided to call it ‘The Proper Way to Wash Dishes,’ which sounded clap-trap. And while I debated the question, the bulletin went to press without an announcement of the topic — no very serious matter, I suppose, and hardly worth mentioning except that it furnishes me an introduction for what I am going to be saying today.”
This is just a brief word of encouragement to all you busy people out there: it happens to the best of us, at least occasionally. And when it does, the best thing to do is to admit it, perhaps with a touch of humor, and just keep going.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 