PREACHING TO ORDINARY PEOPLE
Pastors don't preach to eager scholars, but to silent sufferers in every pew.
Lewis B. Smedes
October 1, 1983
I was just about to bend my six-foot-four frame into our eggshell blue 1952 Plymouth, to drive to a little church in the decayed center of Paterson, New Jersey. I was going to be ordained into the Christian ministry, a passage for which I felt tremblingly unprepared. Before getting into the car, I turned to my friend and former seminary teacher George Stob, who was standing by, and asked him: "George, do you have one last good word for me before I take this plunge?" George shot his answer back, as if it were long coiled tight in his mind, the one thing he thought I still needed to know. "Remember," he said, "that when you preach, you will be preaching to ordinary people." Thanks a lot, I thought. For this kind of wisdom you get to be a professor in a theological seminary? As if I didn't know! Anyway, I stuffed his bromide into the bulging bag of expendable data I had garnered from seminary teachers and drove off to be ordained as a minister of the Gospel. As it turned out, though, in my early years of arrogant innocence, I did not really know much about ordinary people. I did not know then, not in the depths of my being, not where the issues of a preacher's authentic attitudes are decided. I was ripe with scholarly insights. I was tuned in to my theology. I was tuned in to the craft of sermonizing. But I was not tuned in to the ordinariness of the people who listened to my idealistic preaching. The poignant, painful book and film Ordinary People gave many of us a new definition of human ordinariness. A perfectionist mother tried so hard to crowd her little cosmos into her complete control, but could not cope when the foundations of her life quaked at the death of her favorite son. He drowned, and her power to love drowned with ...
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