In Memoriam: Fred Craddock

Fred Craddock
1928 - 2015

Fred Craddock is arguably one of the great preachers of the past 50 years. A professor of homiletics, he developed a story-telling style of preaching called "inductive." His goal was to bring the experience of the sermon to the people. Preaching isn't about logical argument, in Craddock's view, but about living in the sermon, overhearing the message coming to life.

I first heard Craddock in 1981 when he was the preacher for our denominational clergy gathering. I was blown out of the water. I had never experienced that style of preaching. I (along with all my colleagues) were moved in ways we never would have believed. I realized it was a style that fit my personality and my understanding of the Gospel. Fortunately his series of sermons were recorded and we could buy them. I wore out the set listening to the sermons over and over as I was driving around my ministry tasks. I started utilizing his method in many a sermon.

My preaching was changed in every which way possible. (Hopefully for the better.)

Again in 1992 I had another opportunity to sit and absorb his style. He was as good as ever.

RIP Brother Fred. Well done, good and faithful servant.

Wiki Link

After hearing of Fred's death the other day I went online and found a sermon of his. I don't know the date. He was a guest preacher that Sunday at Peachtree Christian Church. It was a joy to hear that drawl and watch the eyes. I love that little laugh he gives. They are as ever. I noticed he was slower than he used to be, although he was always deliberate. His pauses were a few seconds longer than they were before. But oh, can he put the message together. You are lulled into his down-home style; you kind of sit there enjoying what he's doing and saying as he builds his message.

Then, there it is- the Gospel.
There He is.
And you are touched by grace.

The God of Hope from Peachtree Christian Church on Vimeo.

Buechner on Preaching

I will be preaching tomorrow at the church where we are now members. I came across this on Facebook from Fredrick Buechner, preacher, writer, storyteller extraordinaire. I will let it speak for itself about preaching. (I have edited the presentation of it, but not the content, to show my emphasis.)

I HAD NEVER understood so clearly before what preaching is to me. Basically, it is

• to proclaim a Mystery before which, before whom, even our most exalted ideas turn to straw. It is also
• to proclaim this Mystery with a passion that ideas alone have little to do with.
• It is to try to put the Gospel into words not the way you would compose an essay but the way you would write a poem or a love letter—putting your heart into it, your own excitement, most of all your own life.
• It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding but of new life both for the ones you are speaking to and also for you.
• Out of that life, who knows what new ideas about peace and honesty and social responsibility may come, but they are the fruits of the preaching, not the roots of it.

-Originally published in Telling Secrets

Reflecting on Mission

Last Sunday was Mission Festival at a local church. I went to hear what the speaker- a dynamic young man with the Board of World Mission had to say and to worship in support of the ideal of missions. Mission Festivals have been a significant part of the life of the Moravian Church (and others) for a long time. The Moravians were the first Protestant missionaries, sending the first workers to the West Indies in the early 1730s. They went to share the Gospel with the slaves, not a particularly popular thing among the slave owners. The first missionary even went so far as to proclaim that he would become a slave if he had to in order to share the Gospel with them.

When I became a Christian at age 15 it was through a mission-oriented Baptist congregation. There was a mission training facility a few miles up the road and one of the sons of the congregation was a mission worker through them. Every year or so he would come home on furlough and share his work with the congregation which was giving him financial support. In addition we would regularly get letters from him outlining what he was doing. This was out version of the Mission Festival and always was moving and exciting to me.

So it should come as little surprise to anyone (but me, of course) that when I found a denomination that I felt called to be part of and to be ordained in, the Moravian Church, mission pioneers, was where I settled. I have been part of the church now for over 43 years, forty of those as an ordained pastor. Mission work has, of course, changed and, in reality, expanded to something I find even more exciting than I did back in my high school years. Mission has become far more than the sharing of the words and promise of the Gospel. It is now sharing the heart, life, healing, and soul of the Gospel where it needs to be shared.

This, too, was part of the early Moravian mission work and there are many stories about care and concern beyond simply converting the unbelievers. But it has been the changes in world cultures, technology and the self-understanding of the church that has made the biggest impact, taking the basic understanding of mission into more than it ever was.

One of the ways I understood this was to begin with the people at home and introduce them to mission as something THEY do, something they are engaged in. It becomes, at that point, a combined educational and missional experience. I first learned this through a Lutheran Church in Greenwich Village when I was doing an internship in Bethlehem, PA. The church in New York would bring youth from outside the city into the Village for a weekend of what the city was about. They had a mission to runaways and, in those days of the early 70s that was significant. It was quite an experience. When I moved to my first Moravian congregation, I signed up to take a group. Later we went to another Moravian Church on Staten Island to experience the city and its potential for mission.

You see what I learned at Operation Eyeopener was that when you enter New York City you are simply placing a big magnifying glass over the problems and needs. The same problems and needs are to be found in your local community. Once you can begin to see them, you can begin to minister to them. To me that was an essential and basic understanding of what the Christian Church is to be. Without that, we are nothing but a country club. (I do have a way of exaggerating for emphasis.) A few years later I moved to Wisconsin where a “mission trip” movement was beginning at the church I was called to serve. The day I was installed as pastor, one of the members was in Alaska on a mission trip. The point was not lost.

Three years later I arranged a trip of about 15 youth and adults to travel east from Wisconsin to New York City where the denomination had a food program for the homeless and were about to open housing for older people who had been homeless. We raised the money and traveled by train in what may have been one of the first such mission trips from the Western District. Others began to organize trips for adults to Central America and the West Indies. It took off- and hasn’t stopped.

There was some initial push-back from others, though not usually from the congregation itself. Other pastors would periodically say that we shouldn’t be spending the money that way or that it wasn’t really mission. We were simply doing tourism. While there is some truth in that, it is as much educational as it is mission so that when we got home we were more mission-aware. Adults or youth would invariably comment that they were touched, moved, changed by the experiences. Interestingly some of those clergy who raised concerns would later go on their own mission trips and become convinced of the importance and power of the experience.

As a result of some major work in the Southern Province along with a number of lay people from the Western District the whole mission trip experience expanded in the 90s and 2000s to include a number of different opportunities. Some of us even began to also take youth to places like the West Indies, Jamaica, or Native American reservations. Friendships were made, rebuilding work was done, mission was expanded.

I thought of all those things last Sunday listening to the next generation of mission leadership challenging us to keep our vision. The work of the church – what we call “mission”- is alive and well. It is just as essential as it ever has been. No, it is not always bringing people to Jesus. It is often more like taking Jesus to them.

I am excited for the future of the mission of the church. The “church” is at a time of change and uncertainty. Politics and fundamentalism have combined forces in our world to distort the message of Jesus into something I don’t believe Jesus would recognize. It is not a triumphalist attitude that mission work promotes. It is just the opposite. It is like the first Moravian missionary, willing to become a slave in order to share the Gospel.

A Song for the Day - and 40 Years

Horace Silver Quintet and Jon Hendricks

The Preacher

You better talk to the preacher tell him how you feel

And listen close to the preacher tell you false from real

He’ll lead out of the darkness—into the light

You’ll find out happiness lies in treating people right

The preacher preaches on Sunday all through the day

And those who go there to listen and hear what he say

He’ll lead you out of the darkness into the light

You’ll find out happiness lies in treating everyone right

Just Keep Saying It

After 40 years of preaching, 50 years of listening to sermons, I have come to the realization that there is not much new to say about the Bible, God, Jesus, Church, etc. As the wise old preacher in Ecclesiastes (1:9) put it:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (NIV)

I came to this not-so-new-or-unique thought sitting in church last week. The First Lesson was from the Hebrew Bible where Moses chooses a group of Elders to assist him at God's urging. It was the text for the sermon from a younger pastor. His message was well done, nicely put together and right on target. It was, however, enough to make me sit up and pay attention.

It was the same message I heard preached when I was a new Christian in my teen years. It was the same message I heard in my Old Testament class.
It was the same message as I preached every few years.

Sure there were different illustrations and contexts, but the message was always the same based on the same interpretation with the same goals in mind.

At first I was disappointed. I wanted to hear something new, something unique, something exciting and challenging for the 21st Century. "Come on," I thought, "you can do better than that. Say something new."

At which I almost started to laugh. How can he say something new and unique about a 3000 year old story!?! The story hasn't changed. The need for what the story tells hasn't changed. Only the audience has changed.

Plus (and this was really humbling!) we haven't done such a great job of putting it into practice. In spite of my sermons and the countless others on this passage, not much has changed.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Twenty years ago James Hillman wrote a provocative book titled, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse When some more conservative pastors I was with heard that title they smugly responded with a kind of "See. Psychotherapy isn't all it's promoted to be."

I just smiled back and said "We've had 2000 of years of Christianity and not much has changed."

I had to learn that again last Sunday. The world of human nature doesn't change much from generation to generation. Human nature pretty much remains human nature. The message is the same.

We just have to keep saying it.

The Need For Grace

Here from Internet Monk last week, a post that resonates.

How much preaching we hear from the lips of men and women who give us no way of knowing that they were themselves once upon a time passionately moved by the gospel, which they proclaim now with so little apparent passion. Let them preach about the moments of grace in their own lives. Let them preach about the flesh-and-blood reality of those moments and about how, even though there are many other moments when grace seems faint and far away, those moments of grace remain their richest treasure and dearest hope.

Or if for some reason they shy away from preaching about those moments — either because they seem too precious or perhaps too threadbare and elusive to tell — then at least let them preach out of them because not to speak from the heart of where their faith comes from is to risk never really touching the hearts of those of us who so hungrily listen.

from The Longing for Home
by Frederick Buechner

I would go even broader and deeper than just in preaching. The need is for people to live that grace and share that hope that grace brings in all they do. It is what I know happens at 12-Step meetings, for example when, in AA's words people share their "experience, strength, and hope."

For Christians who have known grace in their lives, preacher or not, the principle to practice in ALL OUR AFFAIRS:

Grace.

Why Do I Like Preaching?

I preached in church last Sunday for the third time in about six weeks. One person came up to me after worship and commented that it was apparent I like to preach. I had to agree. For the past 18-20 months my preaching has been limited to an occasional substitute worship for a friend at a nursing home. More than that, I have not preached regularly for almost six years. I can't say that I wish I could do it every week. Not with a full 40-hour a week job that doesn't include 10-15 hours to write the sermon. I do miss it when I do it.

So I thought I would spend some time reflecting on preaching over two or three posts over the next few weeks or so. Part of what I have spent a great deal of time doing over these past 6 years is pondering the nature of the church, of church membership and being a Christian. Since I now sit in the pew as just another member and not the preacher, I have had many opportunities to reflect from this side of the pulpit. I wrote the series, If I Went Back which is linked on the right sidebar as a more general reflection over 2 1/2 years ago. There I talked about the things I missed and didn't miss.

So, why then do I enjoy preaching? Well, the cynical, smart-aleck answer is that I like the power of "Thus says the Lord" or the apparent "holier-than-thou" attitude that says I know something about God that you don't. In other words, perhaps, I like being the center of attention.

Another side of me says that I need the discipline of researching, praying and writing a sermon in order to work our my own faith. I began writing this blog the year we switched my ministry position to be more out in the community and my wife did the worship/sermon leadership. The blog and my journaling gave me the way to both write and share. Putting it out in public makes me more disciplined and hopefully more concise.

Some of what I like is the "teaching" aspect of sermons where I have the opportunity to give people new insights or open them (and me) to new, different possibilities. My hope in doing that is that others will grow more deeply into their faith and closer to their spiritual rootedness in God.

That was once reinforced after I announced I was leaving that congregation for a new call. A member and friend came up to me and asked, "Now how am I going to get my weekly spiritual therapy session." As we talked I realized he was talking about how my sermons helped him develop an inner dialogue and exploration. Someone else once commented that he felt when sitting in church and I preached that we were having a conversation in my living room. I would be asking him questions or sharing what's going on in my life for him and others to be able to share.

Such is the background for this several part series on preaching. This is what has spurred my thinking this time around. I hope to take a look at what the role of preaching might be. I will look at my style, particularly mine, and put it into some context. What that will be, we will have to see. More later in a week or so.