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It is a truism that no two preachers preach alike. We all have our own ways,
our own understandings of what preaching is and how it works, to say nothing
of the styles, quirks, and mannerisms that shape what we do in the pulpit.

It is not only our styles and procedures of preaching that are different,
however. The theologies and philosophies that each of us holds have a
powerful effect on our preaching as well. Even in this, though, no two of us are
ever alike. So when we offer our preaching for others to hear, whether "live" or
with recordings, as on this web site, it is important that we try to say something
about why we do it like we do.

My own theological orientation to preaching was not shaped, as so many from
my generation were, by Karl Barth's theology. Like them, though, in the 1960s I
certainly had to read my share of his writing. And while I liked the essays I
found in places like Barth's The Word of God and the Word of Man, his
theology, with its adamant certainties and otherworldliness, simply did not take
account of life as I was coming to experience and study it. Barth was, in my
judgment, living in a world far removed from mine.

Instead, it was in reading Paul Tillich that I found an orientation to theology,
and ultimately to preaching, that made sense to me. I read everything I could
find of Tillich's, and while in retrospect some of it now seems dated, it was,
looking back, profoundly compelling in making sense of what I was living
through. Particular essays by Tillich, in fact, made as profound an impression
on me as William Willimon says his reading of Barth, at the same time in the
early to late 1960s, made upon him. Ironically, when I finished undergraduate
school in 1964, ready to go to graduate school, I made a decision, under
Tillich's influence, not to go to seminary. I would postpone that and, instead,
go to graduate school to study "communication."

I was one, like Tillich, who did not take the problem of the "relevance of the
Gospel" as a turn-off, as Willimon says that he did. I was one who came early
on to believe that the Gospel had indeed lost its way in the emerging culture,
that the churches were emptying out then because the Gospel, or rather the
preachers and teachers of the Gospel, had lost touch with people. People,
particularly young people, were rapidly changing, and the Church was losing
the ability to communicate with them. That's what I found in Tillich that
influenced me so deeply. I found it a heady ride as I entered the University of
Illinois in 1966 to study the new, composite discipline of communication
theory, always with the Church and the Gospel in the back of my mind. Even
today, I have no regret about having done that. I did return to the seminary, an
undertaking which I had merely postponed for twenty years.

One such essay by Paul Tillich that make a lasting mark on my orientation to
preaching was written in the early 1950s, a short piece that shaped my outlook
and practice in ways that I could only comprehend over the years. It is the
concluding essay in Tillich's book from that period called Theology of Culture.
The essay is titled, "Communicating the Christian Message: A Question to
Christian Ministers and Teachers." Over the years I have read it many times,
and still like to turn to it today. The essay was unique in that it distinguished
cleanly and clearly between "theology" and "preaching." It did not fold the
two together. In effect, the essay gave each a validity and a role to play in the
process, as Tillich said, of "communicating the Christian message." In fact,
Tillich argued that few things can subvert the Christian gospel more than poor
or misguided preaching. That, for me, became a compelling and driving idea.

The essay begins with Tillich asking a question. But the question was not,
though, "What is the Christian message?" The question he asks was, rather,
"How shall the message (which is presupposed) be focused for the people of
our time?" How, in other words (with the "how" in his italics) can the Gospel
be communicated as it should be? But that question, Tillich says pointedly, is
not a "persuasion" question. It is not: How can be persuade people to accept
the Gospel? The true question facing the preacher, Tillich says, is "How can
preachers communicate the Gospel so that people "are able to decide for or
against it?" It is a communication matter, not a persuasion matter.

"The Christian Gospel is a matter of decision," Tillich writes.

It is to be accepted or rejected. All that we who communicate this Gospel can
do is to make possible a genuine decision. . . .True communication of the
Gospel means making possible a definite decision for or against it. We who
communicate the Gospel must understand the others, we much somehow
participate in (their) existence so that their rejection means partly an ejection, a
throwing it out in the moment in which it starts to take root in them. To this
point we can bring them, and that is what communicating the Gospel means.

This is the essay (in 1952) in which Tillich introduced the idea of
"communication [as] participation," an idea that through the turbulent two
decades that followed was picked up by countless young Christian activists.
Daniel Berrigan, for example, would later write a series of essays growing
directly out of his concept. To see a sampling of them, find Berrigan's book,
They Call Us Dead Men. "Where there is no participation," Tillich wrote,
"there is no communication." And "participation means participation in [the
existence of others], out of which the questions come to which we are
supposed to give the answer." The power of this orientation to
"communication" is what drove me to graduate school when I was young. The
Church, in my view then, had to hear what Tillich was saying, and have some
idea about what all of this meant, what all of it required.

This is also the essay in which, in what is probably its most powerful form,
Tillich outlines, for preaching purposes, the idea of the Gospel as The New
Being. Those who know Tillich will recognize this as what became the title of a
collection of Paul Tillich's sermons, some of the best written sermons one can
read, as far as I am concerned. "The Church," Tillich writes there

is the place where the New Being is real, and the place where we can go to
introduce the New Being into reality. It is the continuation of the New Being,
even if its organization seems always a betrayal of the New Being. And the New
Being which is behind all this is the Divine Being. But the Divine Being is not a
being beside others. It is the power of being conquering non-being. It is
eternity conquering temporality. It is grace conquering sin. It is ultimate reality
conquering doubt. From the point of view of the New Being it is the ground of
being, and therefore the creator of the New Being. And out of this ground we
get the courage to affirm being, even in a state of doubt, even in anxiety and
despair. The New Being includes a new approach to God which is possible
only to those who are under the despair of doubt and don't know the way out.

At the end of this essay is one of the most memorable and important [for me]
distinctions in all of theological literature, Tillich said he wanted to look closely
at "the term 'stumbling block.'" He then points out that in the church there
are two kinds of "stumbling blocks:"

One is genuine, the one implied in what was said at the beginning of this
chapter about genuine decision. There is always a genuine decision against the
Gospel for those for whom it is a stumbling block. But this decision [Tillich
writes] should not be dependent on the wrong stumbling block, namely, the
wrong way of the communication of the Gospel-our inability to communicate.
What we have to do is to overcome the wrong stumbling block and enable them
to make a genuine decision. Will the Christian churches be able to remove the
wrong stumbling blocks in their attempts to communicate the Gospel?

End of essay. Ironically, I have been motivated all my life in the church by that
paragraph. Everything I have written for years, and particularly in my books
over the past decade and a half, has been an attempt to address and seek to
remove that "wrong" stumbling block. I have not been concerned about
"persuasion;" in fact, persuasion is not a concept that I have ever overt
addressed or advocated in any of my books. But my concern has
overwhelmingly been what I take to be a widespread failure on the part of too
many preachers, many of whom are not even aware of it, to communicate in a
compelling, passionate, effective decision-invoking manner.

If one reads my book, Preaching Without Notes, or any of my other books on
preaching, that is the sole purpose behind them. If one comes to the audio
sermons on this web site knowing that that orientation to effective
communication is what lies behind them, they will be heard in the light in
which they were originally spoken.