think hard, think well

I suppose the first part of my review of T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach has turned into something more than just a review–I offered reflections on culture, my own experience, blah blah….But this is my blog, so that’s my prerogative. I hope I can be a little more interesting and helpful than most (*cough* brown-nosing *cough*) reviews you find in RBL or at Amazon.com.

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In chapter three, “Johnny Can’t Write,” Gordon outlines the changes that our society has undergone since the invention of the telegraph and, soon after, the telephone. Along with the tremendous pluses of technological advancement have come the social costs. Gordon points out two problems this has created for discourse–preaching in particular. First, long-distance communication has dulled our ability to read non-verbal cues, since we speak on the phone or read e-mails. This was still a problem for written correspondence in times past, but now a much higher percentage of communication is not conducted in-person. For the act of preaching, this means that neither the preacher nor the congregants are skilled at non-verbal interaction with one another.

Second, because “talk is cheap” now, we overindulge–we have become a society of “telephone ramblers,” unable to speak or write concisely. We have less ability to focus on that which is significant, because we up to make up for our lack of discernment with sheer quantity of communication. I thought of an analogy: when we used to take pictures with a film-roll of 24 or 36 exposures, my mom was much more careful and artistic with the photos she chose to take. With a digital camera, we now take hundreds and thousands of careless photos, and usually a few turn out OK by chance–but there’s no longer an art to it.

Well, a preacher can’t afford to ramble for seven hours on a Sunday–he needs to be able to communicate concisely and clearly in the time allotted. I myself have a tendency to ramble in my teaching, which is much more conversational in style–which is why my limited preaching has thus far been from a manuscript. My words are more thoughtfully and carefully chosen (at least more than if I were simply working from an outline). Also, a manuscript gives me the freedom to speak extemporaneously if I choose, with the assurance that I have a place to return after my excursus.

Gordon concludes this chapter:

Our seminary curricula are largely identical to what they were around the First World War, but the entering seminarian is a profoundly different person than was the seminarian of the early twentieth century. Then, the individual was well-read in poetry, and had studied nearly a decade of classical language (Latin, Greek, or both), learning by reading poetry and ancient languages to read texts carefully. He had written compositions almost weekly in many of his academic classes, and often wrote letters to friends and family. In contrast, the entering seminarian today has the faculties of a sixth- to eighth-grader sixty years ago, and the seminary curriculum cannot make this seminarian an adult by the time he graduates. (68)

Gordon is certainly correct–all you need to do if you don’t believe him is read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie and the subsequent books in the series: what she had to learn in high-school by age 16 is more than I learned in college. I wonder whether economic advances have changed the sort of students that choose seminary education. Perhaps in 1820 or 1920, pastoral ministry was one of the best professional options for intelligent and educated young men, just as teaching was the only profession open to women. After the industrial and tech revolutions of the last 60 years, smart men have a much wider range of professional options now, so the best and brightest no longer choose ministry–just as WWII and the women’s-rights movement opened up other professions to women and made the teaching profession suffer.

In his fourth chapter, “A Few Thoughts About Content,” Gordon offers some prescriptive ideas to improve preaching. Acknowledging his Reformed context and the different opinions about the content of preaching (e.g., “Christ-centered,” redemptive-historical), he offers instead four failures of content in evangelical preaching:

1. Moralism — The great failure of Liberal Protestantism. Gordon remarks that “conservative moralism” today is really no different from the liberalism of the past, “liberal” referring in the previous era to an approach to the gospel rather than to a loose moral ethic.
2. How-To — Like moralism, it “pushes the person and work of the redeeming Christ out of the realm of the hearer’s consideration” (82).
3. Introspection — Sermons in this vein could all be subtitled, “I Know You Think You Are a Christian, but You Are Not,” terrorizing the believer’s conscience.
4. Social Gospel/So-Called Culture War

“None of these false surrogates for real Christian proclamation,” Gordon writes, “nourishes the soul” (88). Gordon’s hope is that a return to careful reading of NT texts will lead to true Christian preaching rather than these four substitutes. He concludes, “Johnny could preach, though he does so rarely now. Johnny is still made in God’s image, and has latent sensibilities that can be cultivated in such a manner as to make him a competent preacher, even though our culture does not cultivate those sensibilities in its ordinary course of events.” In other works, we have to try harder to make up for what our culture has robbed from us and our congregations.

Gordon argues in his final chapter that the best way to improve preaching is not simply further training in homiletics, or books on the subject. The proper cure is the “cultivation of those pre-homiletical sensibilities that are necessary to preach well” (96): reading and writing. He encourages those entering college with an eye toward ministry to major in English literature or classics, rather than in Religion, in preparation for seminary.

Furthermore, churches can support their pastors and young ministerial aspirants in this endeavor. They churches should provide (and pastors should welcome) annual reviews through the elders, so that the pastor can receive both negative and positive feedback; also, they should carefully delimit the pastor’s responsibilities so as to allow him adequate time to read, write and prepare for his sermons. Another gem:

Churches cannot continue to exact such a toll from their ministers while expecting them to preach well, because preaching well requires more than preparing sermons; it requires preparing oneself as the kind of human who has the sensibilities prerequisite to preaching. (107)

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When I began Gordon’s book, I was determined not to return to my hypercritical days in college and seminary, when I left church every Sunday feeling frustrated that something–the sermon, the music, the prayer–had not lived up to my arrogantly-conceived standard of perfection. I wonder whether he pushes his point a little too far, paints the situation as overly dire–but every author has to have a little urgency in order to convince his readers to continue reading.

Some parts of the book gave me pause. For example, Gorden recounts his confrontation of the ruling elder who hired a pastor who couldn’t preach and responded, “David, of course he can’t preach; but I’ve served on pulpit committees off and on for thirty hears, and nobody can preach. We just look for men who are gifted in other areas, and who are orthodox, but we accept from the outset of the search that we are not likely to find a person who can preach” (21). For someone like me who is fairly gifted in the areas of teaching and administration but struggles with the shepherding and compassion gifts, I consider pastors who don’t preach well but love their people well as having qualities to which I aspire. I know Gordon is not trying to minimize the other gifts. But honestly, the formative pastoral interactions in my personal and spiritual life have not occurred during a sermon; i.e., I don’t remember what they said, but what they did. All that to say: preaching ain’t everything.

But the point of this book is to sound the alarm about preaching, and provide something of a solution. It does that well. I wonder whether congregants should read this book, or just elders. Giving it to your pastor would have to be done very carefully and sensitively. Someone who has given 400 bad sermons over ten years probably knows he’s a bad preacher, and he needs encouragement, love and respect. But he also needs help, and this book has a lot of help to offer.

Congregants can also cultivate those sensibilities that make careful and attentive listeners. Also, the internet is a wonderful source for preaching and teaching in audio or video format. Keller, Ryken and Driscoll are a few of my faves. Quite a few seminaries, including Fuller, Reformed, Covenant and Westminster, have much or all of their class audio on the web for free. If you have a pastor who is gifted in other areas but is–shall we say delicately–“homiletically challenged,” you can love and appreciate him but also enjoy soul-nourishing preaching from some truly fine preachers through other venues.

Overall, I appreciated Gordon’s book, and I will strive to apply his wisdom in my teaching and preaching.

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon
ISBN: 9781596381162
Paperback, 112 pages
P&R Publishing, 2009
$9.99 on Amazon.com

It’s been a while since I’ve done an honest-to-goodness book review on this site. Part of the problem is that I’ve been too busy with anything other than school and teaching to read much of consequence that does not relate to those two ends. Perhaps at some point I will polish up a few of the reviews I did for my oral exams, since some of those books would be quite interesting, at least to some.

But as I settle into the thesis stage of my MTh, I’ve resolved to keep reading outside my narrow domain of the Persian period reception of Lamentations, and consume a steady diet of New Testament studies (thus my recent quotation of Ben F. Meyer), philosophy of history (Ricoeur), political philosophy, my beloved hobby of economics, and even a little sociology (I’ve been reading articles about “Fat Studies”–Google it).

I also read a short book this week entitled, Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 2009). Dr. Gordon teaches Greek and “media ecology” at Grove City College (formerly at Gordon-Conwell) and is ordained in the PCA. I heard him speak about this book on the Reformed Forum a little while ago. As a novice preacher pursuing ordination to gospel ministry, as well as an academic studying the reception and liturgical use of a book of Scripture, I was eager to see what Gordon says about preaching and what can be done to improve it.

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Gordon’s introduction explains his purpose and tone. This book was substantially completed in 2004 while he was undergoing aggressive treatment for a stage-III cancer, from which he has since recovered (thank God), but at that time he urgently wanted to pass on a career’s worth of academic and ministerial wisdom. His goal is to convince his audience 1) that preaching in evangelical churches is very bad; 2) that the reasons for the dismal homiletical state of the church are the changes in technology, education and media of the past half-century; and 3) that something can be done about it.

Chapter one, “Johnny Can’t Preach,” makes his first point: preaching today is bad, and most Christians don’t realize it. Gordon displays his own rhetorical skill with such dramatic statements as: “As starving children in Manila sift through the landfill for food, Christians in many churches today have never experienced genuinely soul-nourishing preaching, and so they just pick away at what is available to them, trying to find a morsel of spritual sustenance or helpful counsel here or there” (17). Gordon’s (Protestant) conviction is that the congregant is bound by conscience to the Word of God, and so s/he is only bound to heed the preacher to the extent that the preacher expounds the Word of God–any other sermon is “religiously useless.” Most sermons, he asserts, either have no discernable point or have a point that is not demonstrably from the text of Scripture.

Gordon relies in this chapter on Robert Lewis Dabney’s seven “cardinal requisites” as expounded in Lectures on Sacred Rhetoric (1870; republished in 1979 by Banner of Truth). He argues that most sermons lack most of these essential attributes:

1. Textual fidelity
2. Unity
3. Evangelical tone (“Does the sermon press the hearer to consider the hopelessness of his condition apart from Christ, and the utter competence of Christ to rescue the penitent sinner?”)
4. Instructiveness
5. Movement (“Do the earlier parts of the sermon contribute to the latter parts’ full effect?”)
6. Point (impact)
7. Order/Organization

The push in some churches for shorter sermons, or the use of media (PowerPoint, videos, movies) in sermons, he asserts, is really a symptom of the larger problem: preachers today can’t communicate effectively. The problem, Gordon argues, is the increasing aliteracy of the culture–hence the book’s title following the famous publications, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1986) and Why Johnny Can’t Write (1990). We don’t read or write texts anymore, and thus preachers cannot exposit texts or give coherent speeches. Because we can communicate so quickly via cell phones, texts, e-mails and IMs (let alone Facebook, which exploded soon after the writing of this book), we no longer read or compose discourses–everything is communicated through ten-second soundbites, Tweets and short comments. Also, communication is largely image-based; if “a picture is worth a thousand words,” why not just use images? Anyone who attends the presidential debates, or compares newspaper articles from the 1910s to those of today’s paper, or watches a half-hour sitcom, will have to agree with Gordon’s take on media (who echoes his influences: McLuhan, Ong, Ellul and Postman).

We have therefore, as Gordon argues in chapter two, lost the ability to read literature for its own sake. Our preachers, let alone our congregants, no longer read significant texts, prose or poetry. The biblical texts, rather than functioning as literary works that engage our minds and hearts and shape our thinking, have become merely “use[d] as mnemonic devices to recall what [we] already know” (49-50). Gordon points out that reading texts (particularly poetry) for its own sake “cultivates the sensibility of significance” (51). We learn to appreciate the gravity of God’s Word expressed in dense, thoughtful human words. “Mundaneness is, I believe, part of the curse of Genesis 3….Verse is a common-grace gift that enables us, through the fog of images and sounds, to again see ourselves and others as bearers of the image of God” (52).

Television, he argues, is rarely able to depict the realities of a fallen world and God’s grace, and “is at its best with the superficial and trivial” (53). This rang true for me: my frustration with TV drama is its serial nature which does not easily admit a narrative ending. Last year, I deliberately stopped watching one of my favorite shows, because I liked the way some of the story-arcs had ended, and didn’t really care about the cliffhangers that were left at the end of the season. I chose to end the story where I wanted to end it, and it bothers me (slightly) that it’s still on. The other shows I like are largely satirical takes on pop culture, which is sort of sad that the best pop culture can do when it comes to “significance” is to lampoon its own triviality.

(To be continued…)