To Whom Do You Preach?

Helmut Thielicke, perhaps Germany’s post influential-in-America pastor-theologian of the 20th Century, when shuffled to an area for pastoring for which he was not prepared — he was an academic sort who suddenly had to start communicating with more ordinary folk — relates what he learned about preaching in that first experience:

Even as early as my first attempts at preaching, I had a good feeling, and my enjoyment increased each time I mounted the pulpit. Gradually I also acquired a certain rhetorical élan, which I let myself be carried away by, especially since I noticed that the congregation responded in a favorable and lively way and that attendance increased. The thing I enjoyed most was gazing into thoughtful young faces.

While I spoke, I always fixed my attention on a select group of people. It was mainly to these that I addressed my sermon. I even learned that a good method of public speaking is to concentrate on a single member of the congregation and to enter into an intellectual dialogue with him. All the other people in the congregation would then listen of their own accord. If, on the other hand, one wants to include everyone and to give something to all of them, one’s sentences dissolve into generalities, and one produces the most dangerous reaction possible in preaching, namely, the feeling on the part of the listener that the sermon is not addressed to him.

Notes from a Wayfarer, 132.