[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…]
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 