From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship,” in The Christian Century, 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. He is on vacation with his wife, taking stock of the recent improvements.]
“Now, there comes a time in the experience of every minister who has been party to such a resurrection of the dead, when his new responsibility makes him very humble. He does not come by this sensation at first. Just the sheer wonder and delight of witnessing the miracle occupies his whole attention. His feeling of gratification knows no bounds. He had always wanted a live church and a magnetic congregation – and now he is getting it! Hallelujah!
“Every Sunday there are many more new faces before him, and he is spurred to his best efforts by their challenging expression of an appraisal that seems to be saying, ‘Well, we’ve heard about it, and here we are; wonder if it’s as good as advertised!’ Yes, there is that period to be gone through – a time of delirious excitement over the hitherto untasted joy of seeing the pulpit actually function.
“Then comes, with a shock, the almost terrifying sense of responsibility to do something more for these eager people than merely preach to them. D. Preston Blue had now arrived at that stage. As he sat gazing wide-eyed but unseeingly into the night, his heart was very heavy. He had wanted a congregation. His dream was going to come true. People would come to his church in increasing numbers. But why did people go to church? Why should they go? To hear a sermon? Was that all? Was there not another – indeed, a primary – function of the church that he, Blue, had almost completely ignored? Was he helping to satisfy that irresistible heart-hunger of the normal human soul for a closer contact with the Infinite? Was he doing anything to deepen the desire and increase the capacity of his people for worship? After all, wasn’t this the main business of the church – to offer a service of worship so reverential and inspirational that it would serve as a spiritual tonic to souls in desperation to escape the tyranny of material things, almost frantically eager to catch occasional glimpses of an intangible heart-kingdom where the youth of the spirit is renewed until it mounts up on eagle-wings?”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship,” in The Christian Century, 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. He’s on vacation with his wife, thinking back over how bad things were in his congregation until he turned things around.]
“Then came the rosy morning when D. Preston Blue resolved to ‘buck up’ and avail himself of the natural opportunities at his command to call Centerville’s attention to the message of his pulpit! Perhaps there was just a little bit of sporting blood still drifting, sluggishly, in his arteries; or, maybe some adventurous ancestor in him had whispered, ‘Come on, Preston, old boy, let’s run her nose right into the gale and see what comes of it!’ At all events, Blue had found himself. After careful investigation of certain psychologically-sound methods of dignified advertising, he had begun to experiment with these new processes of stirring the public’s curiosity. Already he had realized astounding results, and not half his scheme was in operation! Whatever anxiety and timidity he had felt about his new program at first was quickly dispelled. He knew that with the resumption of his work after vacation, he could fill Broad Street Church – galleries and all! When he had left town, his membership was buzzing with delight over the unexpected prosperity and interest that had developed in their church. It was exactly as if some new kind of fuel had been thrown into the furnaces of a central power plant; the dim lights had begun to grow brighter; there was a genial warmth in habitually cold radiators; erstwhile reluctant wheels were spinning merrily! Every department of the church had cheered up. The Sunday School superintendent, who had flatly declared in April that he wouldn’t take the job another year if they offered it to him on a golden platter garnished with orchids, had recently spent an evening at the parsonage outlining his program for the autumn with an enthusiasm that left Blue blinking with bewilderment. It was becoming easy to gain the consent of efficient people to serve as committee chairmen. Yes; the preacher knew, now, that Broadstreet was about to be a going concern.”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship,” in The Christian Century, 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. He is vacationing in the woods with his wife, reminiscing about how serious his situation was before he caught his “second wind.”]
“One of the chief benefits of a preacher’s vacation is the opportunity it affords him to get far enough away from his job to look at it with telescopic vision. Its little details, which loom up so ominously at close range, fade so nearly out of the picture that they cease to clutter his view of the things that really matter. It is so easy for the preacher’s life to settle into mere humdrum, so easy for it to wear almost inescapably deep grooves in his circuit of daily duties and the weekly performance of conventional tasks, so easy to accept and follow certain ways of doing things without stopping to inquire into their adaptability to meet changing conditions.
“This season’s vacation was bringing a flood of new light into the mind of D. Preston Blue. In the past few months, he had got his second wind. He had taken a fresh grip on a ministry that had almost lost its earlier attractions. Indeed, he had fallen so low in spirit, just previous to his new resolution, that it was only economic necessity that held his flanges to the rails. Had his assets consisted of more than a little piece of overtaxed yellow clay environing a small house that needed a roof and a group of dilapidated farm buildings, plus a few thousands of life insurance which couldn’t be collected so long as he insisted upon remaining alive, there was a moment when he would have given it all up as a bad job and retired. His forty-fifth birthday had been spent in sackcloth. Here he was – forty-five – when he should be just entering upon the most active and useful period of his ministerial career, conscious that he not only hadn’t grown an inch or gained a pound as a preacher since thirty, but that he had actually slumped! He wasn’t the man he had been at thirty! Not only had he been unable to lengthen his tent-ropes – his interests were narrowing! Forty-five! – and still pursuing the petty round of more or less aimless and purposeless parochial visits, pushing door buttons four afternoons a week, for all the world like a policeman ringing up headquarters, every fifteen minutes, to let the sergeant know he was still on his beat; increasingly serving as an errand-boy and general roustabout for a score of church auxiliaries with long names, short memories, frequent meetings, and feeble achievements; preaching dull sermons on Sundays to a small group of drowsy people who occupied less than one-fourth the seating space in his church auditorium – forty-five and a failure! It shamed him to reflect that his only reason for staying on the job at all was not unlike the explanation the Unjust Steward gave for the doubtful transaction to which he resorted – he couldn’t dig, and he was ashamed to beg!”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship,” in The Christian Century, 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. He’s on a fishing trip, and he’s stranded on the lake, unable to get the engine of his boat to work.]
“Whereupon, old Nate Ruggles had chugged alongside in his funny little tub to inquire what ailed her – a query that had been gradually arising in the minister’s own mind for some time. He said exactly that; though this satirical delicacy was quite wasted on Nate, whose palate had never been trained to appreciate such lemon-flavored rhetorical dainties. The old man cackled in the self-assured treble of native wisdom aged seventy-eight, dragged his rheumatism over the rail, and fell to examining the object of Blue’s solicitude with judicial eye and confident fingers.
“Presently he reported on his findings. Dexterously shifting his quid to a position which made articulation possible, Nate remarked, sagely, ‘Parson, you’ve a-flooded ‘er with gasoline, and your batteries is a-runnin’ low. Yessir, them two things is wot ails ‘er. She’s a-been gettin’ too much gas, and not enough spark!’
“And now it was ten o’clock. The turtles were yawp-yap-yap-yap-yoodle-hooing down by the boathouse, but D. Preston Blue did not hear them. The three-quarter moon had flung a long bridge of gold across the lake, but Blue failed to observe it. His wife sat at his elbow, but he was only half-conscious of her presence. Since early twilight, the preacher had been at grips with a serious problem. Suddenly rousing from his apparent torpor, he exclaimed, ‘I’ve got it!’ ‘Yes?’ queried Mrs. Blue in a tone of mingled interest and amusement. ‘I am so glad you have, my dear. I have been horribly lonesome. So tell me what it is that you have got!’ And he told her. It took him nearly all night to tell her; for it was a long story.”
After the publication of Douglas’s book, Wanted: A Congregation, he continued to write articles for The Christian Century. Over the next three years, he published 18 essays in the Century:
“Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” November 25, 1920 “The Music of the Church,” January 13, 1921 “The Demotion of Death,” January 27, 1921 “What About Lent?” February 3, 1921 “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” April 14, 1921 “In RE Sermons on Wages,” May 12, 1921 “The Galilean Psychology,” January 12, 1922 “The Church’s Self-Respect,” January 26, 1922 “The Minister Between Sundays,” October 12, 1922 “The Human Preacher,” November 2, 1922 “The Minister in the Sick Room,” November 9, 1922 “‘Earth to Earth,’” November 30, 1922 “Sweetening Soured Saints”, January 25, 1923 “‘For Better, For Worse,’” March 8, 1923 “The Minister’s Mail,” May 31, 1923 “The Loyalty of the Laity,” June 26, 1923 “The Patriotism of Hatred,” October 25, 1923 “The End of the World,” December 27, 1923
As a cursory glance at this list will show, most of these were about some aspect of the ministry. When writing for the Century, Douglas considered other ministers his audience – particularly younger and less experienced ministers – and he tended to give advice. He gathered these thoughts into a book that was published in 1924 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. It was called, The Minister’s Everyday Life. Sounds fairly predictable, doesn’t it? He’s going to talk about preparing sermons, visiting the sick, etc. Except that Lloyd Douglas never said the expected thing.
The opening chapter compares the ministry to other lines of work, and he offers vivid images of what it’s like, for example, to be a telephone operator or a customer service representative at the local department store. And as someone who has spent years answering customer service calls over the phone, I can tell you that he nailed it. Most ministers wouldn’t have been able to do that.
I’ve been trying to convey to you, through these blog posts, what was distinctive about Douglas. The Minister’s Everyday Life is a good example: he talks about what it’s like to be a minister, and yet he sounds like a normal person with a great sense of humor and lot of common sense. Here are some examples:
If you want to know what hell is like: “…accumulate a miscellaneous assortment of unpaid bills” (p. 87).
On visiting someone in the hospital: “If a prayer can be offered without unduly exciting the patient’s alarm for himself, the minister may make a definite contribution here. It is much better to say, ‘Shall we offer a prayer together – you and I – for courage and strength?’ than to suggest: ‘Would you like to have me say a world of prayer for you?’ If prayer is offered, convince the patient that he is responsible for it, wants it, and is helping to present it” (p. 120).
About raising kids: “…the lot of ‘the preacher’s kid’ is not always an unmixed delight. [Douglas himself was a PK, remember.] The same sort of fawning solicitude which is the minister’s portion by virtue of his position is exhibited, to a degree, toward the whole household of the prophet. If the youngster has any sense at all of the serious obligation he owes his father to walk circumspectly, he is almost sure to develop into what the parish calls ‘a model boy,’ which will make him magnificently despised by his contemporaries. Presently he will face the problem whether he is to be, in very truth, the fine little fellow who will add lustre to his father’s reputation as a prophet, in which position he will live the life of an outcast in his relationship to his natural social group, or decide to show his schoolmates that he is a regular feller, despite his hereditary place in life…. Remember that while your boy is the minister’s son, he is a boy…. Be very sympathetic…. Let him live a normal life, in so far as that is possible” (pp. 24-25).
On living in a parsonage: “Your church is your landlord. You are the tenant…. If you never rented a house and do not know what a tenant’s obligations consist of, you should inquire of your lawyer friend for a lease and study it” (pp. 69-70).
When someone objects to you taking time off because “the Devil never takes a vacation”: “Unless it is presumed that the minister should try, as far as possible, to model his programme after that of the hypothetical person just mentioned, that objection points no moral” (p. 196).
On varying how you end your sermons: “Be careful about falling into the habits which inform the congregation exactly when you are tapering off and making ready to stop. If you do not watch yourself, you will always quit in the same way. The congregation will have come to understand that when you shift your voice to a slightly lower register and achieve a certain degree of fervency in your utterance, it is high time they began to fumble about under the seats, feeling for their over-shoes. Surprise them with the novelty of the sermon’s close, just as you surprise them with the originality of its introduction” (pp. 215-216).
(They don’t tell you any of these things in seminary, by the way.)
The Minister’s Everyday Life was his second book aimed at an audience of clergy. In his next one, he aimed at a wider audience – people who attended church and those who didn’t – and he set out to tell them what it means to follow Jesus. The book was called, These Sayings of Mine, and it will be the subject of my next post.
For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C. Douglas, fill out the form below:
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 