Zeal vs. Art: The Preacher's Dilemma
Calvin Miller
The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strengths on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness.
E. M. Bounds If conviction is the goal of preaching, what are the legitimate and effective means to that end?
Abraham Lincoln said, "When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees." Exuberance has its attractions, but zealous preaching also packs liabilities. Flailing limbs may so dominate the pulpit that the preacher's zeal upstages the sermon's intent.
On the other hand, pastors able to weave a literate spell with smooth oratory want to do more than impress a receptive crowd. The art of preaching is not intended to displace the aim: hearts moved to believe in Christ and follow his ways.
According to Calvin Miller, combining zeal, art, and results is no recent quandary. Even Old Testament prophets faced the dilemma. Miller, pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha and a popular author, strives to make both art and zeal serve his preaching and writing purposes. The Book of Jonah is the tale of a reluctant preacher. Jonah's message, as we have come to know it, is: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown" (Jon. 3:4). A brief eight words. Surely there is more: some clever and imaginative introduction lost in the oral manuscript. There must have been iterations, poetry, and exegesis. But they are gone, and those eight words are all we know. Such a miniature message seems anticlimactic. Even the king of Nineveh had more to say than ...
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