City Sermons: Preaching from a Downtown Church
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149 - | A Lover's Quarrel with the World City Sermons: Preaching from a Downtown Church |
A Lover's Quarrel with the World
By R. Maurice Boyd
Burlington, Ontario, Welch Publishing Company, 1986. 151 Pp. $8.95.
City Sermons: Preaching from a Downtown Church
By Bruce McLeod
Burlington, Ontario, Welch Publishing Company, 1986. 132 Pp. $8.95.
Homiletical textbooks and "how to" monographs on preaching are so numerous in this decade that they are elbowing one another for accolades on being the last word on pulpit discourse. Earlier in this century (ca. 1920-1950), this was true of books of sermons by the Fosdicks, Sockmans, Stewarts, et alia of that generation, whereas treatments exclusively on method were numerically in decline. With the fading away of the era of the fifties and sixties when people were in rebellion, interest in the essence and character of traditional worship and preaching revived and both preachers and teachers of preaching have ditched their fetishism for the ninety and nine pilot projects and are resolved now to retrieve the one thing that seemingly was lost.
Curiously enough, in this popular stir in the telling and re-telling of homiletical do's and don'ts, there has not been a revival of interest in books of sermons. Publishing houses will not touch them, simply because they do not sell. Why? Perhaps because lay persons no longer read them, unless their sermonic characteristics have been disguised under the facade of moralistic essays. More likely, however, it is because homiletical helps for preachers are abundantly available from scores of religious publishers today and certainly cost less than bound volumes. Also, bound volumes date themselves rather quickly and, therefore, the weekly or monthly packet of sermonic ideas is a more profitable investment.
These two books are included in a new and promising venture entitled, "The Canadian Pulpit Series." The authors are ministers of the United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. One is the senior minister of the Metropolitan Church in London, Ontario; the other, the minister of a downtown church in Toronto, the Metropolitan United.
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150 - | A Lover's Quarrel with the World City Sermons: Preaching from a Downtown Church |
The first volume, by R. Maurice Boyd, takes its title from the epitaph, self-chosen, on the tombstone of the American poet, Robert Frost, and has the flavor of a classic Irish education. Here are twelve sermons with strong contemporary impact by a preacher who knows human nature and is able in a perceptive sentence to show us who and what we are and the reasons for it. These messages are in topical format with scriptural anchorage and invariably person-centered. Generally the spirit of them is middle-evangelicalism with an analysis of the human struggle and the adequacy of the gospel of the New Testament as an antidote. Boyd's engaging sermonic style is notable: terse sentences (sometimes blunt); arresting imagery; aphorisms once worn smooth are dressed up in new clothes; orderliness of arrangement (versus the modern penchant for a stream of discrete impressions); many apt quotations (maybe too many, especially by Muggeridge, whom strangely he almost canonizes) woven into the fabric of the message without seeming to press an IBM button for the right one to pop up. We have here a fresh literary style for preachers, a confluence of the classic with the best of the vernacular.
What of his message? Boyd faces up with courage and penetration to many of the serious questions that trouble this generation. His is clearly a personal religion without many references to national and world issues. Generally his message is affirmative. He is inclined at times toward a certain fuzziness, confusing, for example, immortality with resurrection to eternal life. Jesus comes through as our companion in the great enterprise of our maturing in the Christian faith, but it is not made clear how it is that we are saved. These are very full sermons; they are overly long. This reviewer was exhausted emotionally at the end, although rumor has it that Boyd's preaching is exhilarating and attracts capacity congregations to his spacious sanctuary.
The second volume of sermons is by Bruce McLeod, a Canadian product with a doctorate in preaching under Paul Scherer at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and some years ago one of the youngest moderators to be elected by the United Church of Canada. His church has a more pluralistic congregation in the downtown of Canada's largest city. Whereas Boyd is personal, McLeod is more social in emphasis, although his overall message is that of reaching the latter through the former. Each sermon has one major point which is handled by a system of faceting (a' la George A. Buttrick) and illustrated by human references to and perceptive observations of our common inner makeup. Scripture figures in each sermon, but not always contextually. McLeod achieves realism through contemporary facts, which he uses admirably in vivid descriptions. He is a teacher in the pulpit, and the definitions he frames are fresh, striking, and hence easily remembered. His burden is often the whyness of things, and he makes clear his own sensitivity to the agony, pain, and suffering of the city's disinherited and unloved. In every sermon, he appeals to the imagination and sets in motion our individual creativity as he gives us blueprint and tools and invites us to work out the Christian enterprise for ourselves.
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151 - | A Lover's Quarrel with the World City Sermons: Preaching from a Downtown Church |
What do these books say about the preaching of these two leading Canadian churchmen? On the positive side, there is an urgency and immediacy about these messages that make the Scriptures become for us a matter of concern. Anyone hearing these sermons could say with Fosdick, "he's bowling down my alley." Boyd and McLeod are kneedeep with their people in the human struggle and predicament. On the other hand, if there is something we miss, it is the broader sweep of the theological enterprise being brought to bear upon the failures and foibles of our human nature. Is there not a fuller christology leading us to a crisis of decision when the insufficiency of the human precipitates us into the sufficiency of the divine? Moreover, in dealing with biblical stories and events, is there not the danger of slipping into the discredited allegorizing of the early church when we merely retell a story, put our own selves into it, and try by means of the symbolic to make things fit? Somehow some of our preachers have missed out on or skipped a theological chapter, and maybe they should, as Samuel Miller of Harvard once said, "find the point again."
DONALD MACLEOD
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey