December 5, 2005

Our Preaching Past

One of the great assets of the North Alabama Conference is our history. Alabama has been the epicenter for some of the most notable movements in our nation’s past. Our church, at its best, has led in those movements; our church, at its worst, has been slow to see the Holy Spirit at work and to move forward with it.

One of the best things about being a United Methodist pastor in North Alabama is to have saints from the past looking over our shoulders today – inspiring us, prodding us, leading us from that “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 11), who cheer us on from the ramparts of Heaven.

Take our pastor at Gordo, Bill Brown, as an example. Bill grew up in Sylacauga. There as a little boy, he heard of the heroic preaching of Dan Whitsett. Dan was both admired and despised for his sermons. Sylacauga First both grew in numbers and lost members because of Dan’s courageous pulpit leadership. Dan Whitsett’s witness in the past is a present source of inspiration for Bill.

Bill gave me a sermon that he found in the library at Sylacauga First, a sermon that Dan preached on Independence Day Weekend 1953, “Fidelity to the Faith of Our Founding Fathers.” Dan began with history, recalling the faith of our nation’s founders in a land that would truly be a place of justice for all. He then spoke up for racial justice, specifically in regard to the schools of Alabama. He launched into an attack upon the evils of then-current McCarthyism in America. He reminded the congregation that while demagogic politicians were busy fighting change in Alabama, we are Christians who take our marching orders not from tradition, not the “Southern way of life,” but from Jesus.

I’m sure that Dan got some negative response to this sermon. Eventually, Dan left Alabama and continued his ministry in Massachusetts. (He returned to Montgomery for retirement.) Reading Dan Whitsett’s sermon reminds me of the awesome responsibility that we preachers of the gospel bear. I haven’t preached as powerful or courageous a sermon as Dan’s. But I ought to take him as my example, my homiletical mentor, a witness from the past who speaks us into the future.

Father John Wesley had this to say about the people-pleasing preachers of his day who presented a false gospel of only consolation and affirmation:

Why, this is the very thing I assert: That the gospel Preachers, so called, corrupt their hearers; they vitiate their taste, so that they cannot relish sound doctrine; and spoil their appetite, so that they cannot turn it into nourishment; they, as it were, feed them with sweetmeats, till the genuine wine of the kingdom seems quite insipid to them. They give them cordial upon cordial, which make them all life and spirit for the present; but, meantime, their appetite is destroyed, so that they can neither retain nor digest the pure mild of the word.[i]

In my first year as bishop, I’ve gotten maybe two dozen letters complaining about pastors who are under my appointment. Some complain that their pastors are spending too much time with the young and neglecting their duty to visit and care for the old. Other letters charge that the pastor is tardy in her hospital visitation or not sufficiently accommodating to the aches and pains of the congregation. Not one single letter complains about the biblical fidelity of the pastor’s preaching. I’m almost looking forward to receiving a letter like the ones that I am sure that the bishop got complaining about Dan Whitsett.

I’d give anything to get a letter saying, “Our preacher had better stop preaching the gospel, or we’re going to kill him — before he kills us.”

Our past is power for the Kingdom of God in the present.

William H. Willimon

————————————————————————– [i]John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 3rd, ed, (Thomas Jackson, ed., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker 1979) vol. 11, pg. 491.

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(C) 2005 North Alabama Conference

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