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BANGOR – The Rev. Thomas G. Long sits through about 700 sermons a year.
He knows good preaching. He knows bad preaching. And he teaches preachers at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.
The advice, however, that the Presbyterian minister offered this week at Bangor Theological Seminary’s annual convocation focused on the pitfalls.
In what Long calls “the Seven Habits of Highly Defective Preaching,” Long, 60, urged the 250 or so students, faculty and alumni in attendance first and foremost to pay attention with a fresh eye to the biblical text on which their sermons are based.
“Sometimes we treat the Scriptures like a senile dinner companion,” he said Tuesday from the pulpit of Hammond Street Congregational Church. “We have the same old dinner conversation to avoid a direct encounter with the biblical text itself. … We need to use creativity in our approach.”
Long urged preachers who run into a “speed bump” or are stopped by a word in a passage to return to the original Greek New Testament text, then search other books of the Bible to see how the same word is used and make the connections between linked passages for listeners.
“In a time when sanctuaries have become TV studios, we need to pay attention to knowing how listeners will process the information they receive,” Long said of the second bad habit. “Listeners need a sermon to begin with a promise not to lose their interest.”
Long, 60, told pastors to turn transitions into turn signals to help parishioners better follow the flow of their sermons and to use analogies and meta-phors from their own lives and the lives of others to illustrate and illuminate the biblical text. Long also urged ministers to “get down to theological insights” to help members of their flocks who do not have the theological vocabulary their grandparents had to grasp tough biblical concepts such as judgment.
“Don’t erode the confidence and comfort people have in religious experience by imposing modern culture on a person’s experience,” he warned.
As a young minister, Long visited a family in which the youngest child had cerebral palsy.
The child seemed to be living just on the edge of other family members’ interactions until his mother one day saw Jesus standing with his arm around the boy. From then on, she became an advocate for her child and others who were pushed to the edge of society, schools and families.
Long urged pastors not to seek “logical” reasons for the mother’s change in attitude but to accept as fact that Jesus had appeared and shown her how to love her youngest child in avoiding the fifth bad habit.
“We hold out unattainable ethics to people – Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King – as examples for them to follow,” he said, instead of using small gestures such as simply feeding the hungry.
“We forget to preach the good news of the Gospel,” he said, citing the last bad habit.
When Long moved to Atlanta several years ago to teach at Candler, he and his wife went church shopping and settled on a large urban congregation, he said. At a dinner meeting for new members, each person explained why he or she had chosen the church. One said it was because it had a “cool” youth group for his teenagers while another said she joined to be a part of the church’s fine music program.
“But one man said, ‘I’m joining this church because God saved me in this church,'” Long recalled in his speech. “We’re there for the parking and he’s there for the salvation.”
Seminary students and pastors said Long’s speech would help them as they prepared their coming Sunday sermons.
The Rev. Elaine Hewes, pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Bangor and a seminary graduate, said she enjoyed Long’s lecture and other convocation events.
“It’s so refreshing to sit in the pews,” Hewes said Tuesday. “I’m always inspired, uplifted, theologically challenged, fed and nourished at convocation.”
Hewes’ desire to return to her alma mater for the three-day convocation is one the things that makes Bangor Theological Seminary distinctive among similar institutions, Long said after his lecture.
“There is a great richness of community here among meager resources,” he said. “The fact that many of the students and the institution are in the same boat financially creates solidarity in this community.”
Seven Habits of Highly Defective Preaching
1. Inattentiveness to the biblical text
2. Not being attentive to listeners’ communicational needs
3. Not having a coherent strategy for illustrations or examples
4. Not taking the theological plunge
5. Not taking the clash between the culture and the Gospel seriously
6. Holding up unattainable ethics as examples
7. Preaching sermons that are not the “Good News”
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