The Day I Brought a Skunk to Church
Gordon MacDonald
The cure for dullness in the pulpit is not brilliance but reality.
P. T. Forsyth
The common people are captivated more readily by comparisons and examples than by difficult and subtle disputations. They would rather see a well-drawn picture than a well-written book.
Martin Luther In preaching, the best time to hook a congregation is at the outset. The moment is ripe. Catch it, and thoughts travel with you; lose it, and minds dim like lights in a brownout.
To begin a sermon with spark is half the battle. And a well-chosen illustration can ignite that spark.
Sometimes the illustrations practically write themselves. Those are the blessed Sundays. Other times, the dread monster, Sermon Block, rears its ugly head, scaring away any great beginnings — or even mediocre ones for that matter — and we wonder if we can get anything across before the congregation signals one by one that the lights are on but no one's home.
When he was pastor of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, Gordon MacDonald needed a desperate skunk to provide the perfect illustration for his sermon one Sunday.
In this chapter, MacDonald, now president of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, does not simply tell how to illustrate; he illustrates it. I was driving to church when I first saw the skunk in the middle of Grant Street, a quiet thoroughfare in my hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts. Skunks are a common sight in the early morning hours, but this one was different. It was violently careening back and forth from one curb to the other, blinded and crazed by what seemed to be a box jammed over its head. I looked closer. The skunk had apparently raided someone's garbage can during the night, found a cocoa box with a few grains of chocolate in the bottom, and decided ...
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