[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 has just described a typical conference of ministers, in which nuts-and-bolts presentations and requests for money predominate. He writes:]
“If this matter has been overstated, the exaggeration may easily be pointed out and denied by fellow-craftsmen who have failed to observe that the end and aim of most of our ‘inspirational’ conference addresses is fiscal rather than cardiac. One must never forget – and one isn’t at all likely to be permitted to forget – that it takes money, and lots of it, to operate the kingdom, as modernly constituted; but it also takes something else that money cannot buy. It is of this somewhat [in]tangible but highly important ‘something else’ that we need to think seriously these days.
“In the course of his daily activities, the preacher – commonly and erroneously presumed to possess singular opportunities for the culture of his own soul – is almost as beset with secular duties as the busiest man of affairs in his congregation. No cloistral seclusion is permitted him, and it is uncertain he would avail himself of such insular protection were it offered. The nature of his ministerial labors has altered so completely within the past two decades that he is no longer in the mood for that peculiar type of spiritual culture which distinguished our predecessors of a generation past. The modern minister gets little opportunity to develop what our elders used to call ‘piety,’ and so infatuated has he become with the newer features of his business that the very term ‘piety’ is not the most popular word in his working vocabulary. He shies off, uncomfortably, when he meets it, suspecting it of distasteful designs upon the length of his countenance and the manner of his speech or dress.”
[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 