To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and WorkMoule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Religion
To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work
Moule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Pastoral theology
Put yourself often, my dear Brother, while I do the same, into the
position--which we once occupied always, and often do still--of the
hearer. You, the Curate, or the young Incumbent, have recently come into
the parish, and you are full of a young man's energy and enterprize, and
a little infected perhaps with a common and natural belief of your time
of life, but a belief not quite true to facts, that the world is made
for young men. And among your hearers, week by week, as you preach from
that pulpit, sit men and women who were working, and thinking, and
perhaps believing, literally long before you were born. Put yourself in
their place. Into many of their experiences, and their sympathies born
of experience, you cannot possibly enter personally. You cannot _feel
personally_ how this or that innovation of language or manner, this or
that too crude statement of your message, this or that baldly new and
perhaps by no means true theory, aired as if it were all obvious and of
course, must look and sound to them. You cannot _feel_ it all; but you
can think about it. Perhaps these are educated and refined people, and
accustomed all their lives to value clear thought and pure diction, in
any case accustomed to carefulness in the matter and manner of the
sermon. You cannot enter into all their mental habits in your own mental
workings; but you can take account of them, and in a loyal and
thoughtful _considerateness_ you can remember them in practice, and
honestly aim so to prepare and to preach as to conciliate the thoughtful
and the elders.
Such considerateness will not mean the stifling of prayerful conviction,
or the failure to be faithful as the messenger of the Lord. But it will
mean a severity upon yourself as regards the tone and spirit of your
thoughts, and also as the manner of your utterance. You will take pains,
even at a heavy cost to self (and such costs are always gains in the
end), so to minister as to attract the attention of the flock, not to
yourself, but to your blessed Master and His Word; preaching "not
yourself, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and _yourself their servant_ for
Jesus' sake." [2 Cor. iv. 5.]
With this aim of Attractiveness, then, in our minds, and with this
motive of Considerateness beside it, let us come to some thoughts in
detail about the matter of preaching.
And here first I must bring in another word to meet the word
"attractive." That word is "faithful."
WRONG KINDS OF ATTRACTIVENESS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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