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| The Best Preacher It’s safe to say that there isn’t a pastor anywhere who wants to be known as a poor preacher. It goes against the very grain of everything we’ve imbibed from childhood through seminary. We think of preaching as an art, a science, if you will. The very word, homiletics, implies a craft which requires the application of tools, strategies, organization, and so on. Perhaps this is why preaching has acquired such an exalted position in the life of the church. And it invites the question of who’s the best preacher, or what makes a good preacher. Ever since Peter stood up at Pentecost and said, “Let me explain this to you ....these men are not drunk” (Acts 2:14-15 NIV), preaching has been seen as a powerful tool in the formation of the church. In most churches, the person behind the pulpit holds the power. To Spencer Burke of TheOoze.com, this seems odd (see The Homiletics Interview with Burke on page 9). In his own church, the teaching/preaching pastor actually answers to, or is responsible to, the worship pastor. It’s an acknowledgement that not all pastors are the most effective preachers and we ought not to equate effective preaching with effective leadership. But let’s face it. We come out of seminary and we want to be known for our pulpit power if nothing else. And to ensure that people have an opportunity to reinforce the impression that we’re the second coming of Billy Graham, we stand at the church door glad-handing those who might be in the mood to say a good word. Children, of course, are more honest. Girl to mother midway through a long discourse: “If we just give him the money now, will he let us go?” If you were asked who is the best preacher in America these days, you might say Barbara Brown Taylor, or any number of other pulpit pounders — although Taylor hardly fits the image of a pulpit pounder. There are only two preachers who can fill the Georgia Dome: Billy Graham and T.D. Jakes. No wonder, then, that Time magazine, in a cover story on September 17, 2001, anointed Jakes, the preacher of Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas, as the Most Effective Preacher in the U.S. You could make a case for others, like Haddon Robinson, Peter Gomes, Charles Stanley, Max Lucado or Chuck Swindoll. Yet, even they are not the grand masters of kerygmatic kabuki in America. Nor is Benny Hinn, or other chest-beating, helmet-haired evangelists with self-inflating egos to-ing and fro-ing on a television stage. Even T.D. Jakes unloosing a woman or a desperate housewife is not as good as the best preacher in America. And that preacher is someone sitting in your pews — or folding chairs. I revisited this idea after a woman in my church told me the story of a little annual fundraiser she and her family have for the Denver Rescue Mission. They hold a silent auction at a local community hall with items donated from businesses and individuals, and the family band provides music and entertainment. The first year they did this, they raised enough money to provide 149 meals. This year, a couple of months ago, they did it again, and raised funds for over 1,500 meals. The woman wept at how God had blessed this little ministry and how God is able to use people with simple faith to accomplish great things. I told her she needed to share this with the congregation, as it was a sermon that would have more impact than anything I could ever preach. This came on the heels of another experience listening to a woman in another church share the story of her faith journey, which went from doing booze and drugs and the party scene as an entertainer in New York City to working with inner city kids in a program for the Denver Public School District. When I was growing up, our church used to do this all the time. Such events were called “testimonies,” and they occurred with numbing regularity during the Sunday night service, or the Wednesday evening prayer meeting. Usually the stories witnessed to how God had made a gallbladder surgery unnecessary, and you felt like you were in the ER listening to operation stories. Many preachers, anxious to keep the testimonies coming, regularly had altar calls. Gene McAfee writes about his experience: “Every Sunday, every service, morning and night, ended with an altar call, and since the minister was preaching to the same crowd of baptized sinners week after week, in order to hedge his bets that ‘someone’ would respond to his heartfelt message, those of us who were already ‘saved’ were invited to ‘rededicate’ our lives to Christ if we’d gone off the boil. “One young woman I grew up with went forward to rededicate her life to Jesus with an astonishing regularity. We were adolescents at the time, and we were not so much inspired by Sally’s example, as piqued by her apparently debauched lifestyle. What on earth could she have been up to during the weeks between her trips down the aisle that she felt such a regular need for rededication? And, more important, why weren’t all those rededicatory trips to the altar doing the job? If her vaccination against rubella was as ineffective as her rededications apparently were, her parents would’ve sued the doctor.” No wonder this practice dropped out of sight in many churches. It may be time to reconsider. Henry Brinton, senior writer here at Homiletics, is the Senior Minister at Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia. He encourages this practice once a year on Reformation Sunday — important to both Presbyterians and Lutherans. Using Luther’s famous, “Here I stand,” declaration, he invites three or four people to prepare ahead of time, a personal account of where they “stand,” that is, how faith has intruded into their lives and made a difference. When people hear other people — like themselves — sharing how their faith makes a difference, it’s like drinking 8 ounces of Red Bull at 8 in the morning. They sit up and listen, and they’ll remember that witness better than the preacher’s sermon that morning. Our people, the ones we preach to, are the best preachers in America.
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