A PROFESSIONAL FRIEND?
By Robert Meyers

They can say all they want to that there is no business like show business, but there is one business that makes show business seem tame and predictable. That’s the preaching business, where the ups and downs rival any roller-coaster in the world and where people react to the spoken word in sometimes incomprehensible ways.

Just a few minutes before I sat down to write this I opened a letter from a woman who had heard me speak on Sunday. The sermon had to do with Christian stewardship of the land, and as I spoke of ecological culprits I included the government and greedy business men and ignorant farmers as occasionally guilty. I closed by remembering how my father, a farmer, had loved the land he farmed, and enriched it, and seen it as a gift from God.

But the letter seized upon ten seconds in the sermon and took me to task for referring to ignorant farmers. “If it wasn’t for the farmers who till the ground, where would we all be?” my correspondent asked. I threw up my hands in utter disbelief and called my colleague at the church building to tell him how lucky he was that he did not have to expose himself to the pulpit each Sunday.

He, however, had just returned from a call at the home of the most eminent heart specialist in our state, who told’ my colleague that he was delighted with what he heard from the pulpit and was becoming a member of the church after many years away! It is a dizzying experience to touch such extremes within a matter of moments, and it might be fatal if one allowed either one to influence him very much.

I find in my files under “Preaching” that I have kept some remarks made by a Unitarian minister who published them in The American Scholar a few years back. They are as timely as they were then and I wish to share them with readers of this journal, all of whom either preach or listen to preaching.

The writer argues that “busyness” tempts ministers to become frauds. They try to do the things their fellow church members believe are important until it becomes almost impossible for them to be what they should be. Effectiveness in significant work, he says, has its own timetable and its own obscure ways, and it cannot be drummed up by all the well-meant energies in the world.

He feels that there is a sad lack of vision and intellectual power in the modern American ministry and he blames much of it on the concept that “busyness” is the proof of a successful minister. He thinks that ministers have been convinced that their principal job is to be friendly and pleasing to the largest number of people, to glorify the conventions of their times, and to stay away at all costs from anything that sounds new, creative, or radica1. But the real aim of preaching, he insists, is to contribute to the transfiguration of life by following an encounter with holiness.

“Preaching is strenuous for the preacher emotionally as well as intellectually,” he feels. “Whatever it is, it is not speech-writing on religious topics. It is devouring and bears down horribly on a man’.s energies and emotions, and like every other job, in one way or another, it will cost a man his life. It is a vocation.”

But ministers in enormous numbers yield to distractions and the popularity contest, he laments. “His temptation is to become a Professional Friend, or hypocrite. ‘Call your minister,’ a Presbyterian tract muses fondly, ‘to share your moments of joy! Call him when a son or daughter is going off to college!’ Possibly no great harm can come of such airy daydreaming, but the outline of the Professional Friend is in the background like a menacing shadow. Clearly, he has no upper limits to his friendliness and is on call at all hours, for it would take something from the spontaneity if you had to schedule an office appointment to share your moment of joy.

“A real man, with a gift for friendship and rapport, must at some time call a halt to any steady drain on his energies, but the Professional Friend blandly tolerates all because he gives so little beyond his manner. The little sparks that leap between people leap less often from a minister like this, but he is almost invincibly secure because he Gives The People What They Want …”

“If a man feels that he cannot afford the reputation of being unfriendly, and if he thinks that saying no to people’s requests will be interpreted this way, he will take things on agreeably and spread himself thin: a morning with an alcoholic, an evening with a desperate married couple, a talk to the Senior Citizens, a visit with an elderly cancer patient, a conference with the church school superintendent, a form to fill out, a letter to write, arrangements with a Girl Scout leader for use of the church hall, chaperoning a youth square dance, an interview with a nonmember who wants her daughter’s illegitimate daughter christened—anything a minister might be asked to take on, or volunteer for …”

Too much of this, our man thinks, is distraction and makeshift, two activities that have eaten their way into the heart of the Protestant ministry. He calls for intellectual concentration and spiritual intensity and says that the minister must learn to resist the thoughtlessness of many of the demands made upon him.

The essay, as you might guess, stirred considerable controversy. I feel myself that it may be terribly hard to know at times what is trivial and thoughtless and what is important. Probably some who read the essay would feel that it hints that reading and meditation are more important than some of the pastoral work one is called to do. I doubt that the author means this. I think, rather, that he is pleading for a restored balance in a ministry that has given itself far too much to busy work and too little to communion with God and great ideas.