Ministry Network

• Home
• Ministry Alums
• Books of Note
• How You Can Help
• Conference on Christian Ministry
• Ministry Reunion
• Newsletter

Georgetown College Annual Pastors Conference Ken Chafin Award  · Golden Years
2007 Graduates · A Memorable Field Trip to Chicago

A Memorable Field Trip to Chicago

Dwight A. Moody, Dean of the Chapel

Eleven students took their place in a semi-circle of chairs on the first day of my “Christian Preaching” class. Nine of them I knew, as their names were on the list sent to me by the registrar.

"My name is Jennifer,” said the tenth. We were halfway through the first-day ritual of introductions. “I am a transfer student from South Carolina.” Her soft voice made it difficult to understand her words.

“Do you live on campus?” I asked.

“I live in Louisville,” she responded.

“My name is Bruce,” said the young man next to her. “I have served four years in the U.S. Marines and I have come from Alabama to Georgetown to play football.”

I had no reason to suspect the two young adults were a couple even after he also said he lived in Louisville.

“Do the two of you ride to campus together?” I asked, thinking this classroom introduction of one to the other might assist them both in transportation costs.

“Yes,” he said. “We live together.”

Whether the shock I felt registered on my face I have no way of knowing. I nodded to the next student and pretended to listen while he presented his name and classification. I could not, however, take my mind off the two students who had just confessed to living arrangements that, while not quite the scandal they used to be, are nonetheless rare among those who sign up to learn how to prepare and preach a sermon.

From their comments in class I could not tell whether either of them was a Christian or had any interest in vocational ministry, two things I normally assume about students who enroll in the class. Nor did I know if either of them had completed the two course pre-requisites—Introduction to the Bible and Basic Public Speaking.

I debated with myself the proper course of action. Should I question them further in private? Should I speak with the registrar? Should I ignore their personal situation and accept them, as I have many students in other Religion classes who are living outside the boundaries of even their own moral convictions. Or should I forbid them from taking the class at all, citing either their lack of preparation or their unacceptable housing arrangements?

I launched into my initial classroom presentation: an introduction of the small book I was using for a text, a list of my well-known “Ten Forbidden Words,” and my plans to take the entire class on a field trip to Chicago.

“We will leave the campus on Thursday afternoon and arrive about midnight at our dorm at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary,” I said. “On Friday we will visit the Billy Graham Museum on the campus of Wheaton College. On Saturday evening we will worship at the famous Willow Creek Community Church. On Sunday we will attend, first, the early service at Glenview Community Church (UCC), and then travel to the south side of Chicago to the New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church.”

What I did do, after I dismissed the class, was walk straight to the Athletic Department and speak to both the football coach and women’s basketball coach about Jennifer and Bruce. Both coaches knew of their enrollment in school but little else; and when, later, I asked the former what to do about taking the two students on my three-day field trip to Chicago he said quickly and plainly: “House them separately.”

The unusual classroom situation did not dissuade me from the two teaching strategies that I had adopted for the course. The first was an emphasis on my list of “Nine Marks of a Good Sermon”. These marks are, in large part, applicable not just to sermons but to speeches of any sort. For instance, number one states simply: “A good sermon develops one clear and strong idea.”

Rule two is the one most particular to the preaching task. It is an effort to focus attention on the Bible as the primary source and inspiration for preaching. I spent several weeks showing students how to meditate on a text, when to turn to the commentaries for serious study, and why it is important to identify the central idea or phrase and use that as a theme for preaching.

The second strategy for the class was inspired by a DVD loaned to me by our Campus Minister. “Have you ever heard of Rob Bell?” she asked.

I hadn’t; she told me what she knew and handed me a 15-minute recording of the Michigan minister sitting at his desk and speaking straight into the camera. “The question is not: do you believe in God? But rather: does God believe in you? The good news of Jesus Christ is a resounding YES to that second question.”

That is a fair summary of his message, which doesn’t explain why the video is entitled “Dust.” Nor does it explain why these DVDs are so popular, which they are—especially among young people with a passion for following Christ wherever he leads.

That experience, plus the phenomenal rise of home-made video on web sites such as YouTube and My Space, was enough to push this preacher (and preaching instructor) in a new direction. In my younger days, I had been inspired and instructed by the old suit-wearing, standing-behind-a-pulpit-holding-a-Bible protocol of preaching, and had spent my professional life delivering 25-minute monologues. I told my students I was abandoning my traditional syllabus and committing myself to assisting them to prepare a five minute video suitable for posting on their own web site. I wanted them to take from the class their own video, one that would contain a gospel message suitable for this iPod generation.

Along the way, I chastised them for writing and speaking long, complex sentences. I forced them to use clear, crisp language.

“There are exceptions to this style,” I have told them repeatedly. “As you mature as a preacher, you will find your own voice, your own style. But here is the foundation for all speaking: simple sentences, strong assertions, and a single message.”

Each of which was ably illustrated by the three preachers in Chicago.

Two years earlier (in 2005) a preaching field trip to Chicago had taken us to Willow Creek when a singer rather than a preacher was center stage. Randy Travis was well-known to that earlier group of aspiring communicators of the gospel; he did well in speaking and singing his witness to Christ. Perhaps seven thousand people filled the sanctuary that night and we sat in the second balcony. This year (2007) I made sure the preacher was our former Kentucky minister Mike Breaux. For five years he was the powerful, persuasive preacher at the largest congregation in central Kentucky, Southland Christian Church. Many of our students gravitated to his compelling exhortations, and I still remember most of the sermon he preached in our college chapel. I was sitting on the front row, listing to him list his five favorite movies and to the student all around me laughing at his description of “What About Bob.”

This year at Willow Creek, we found seats on the ground floor and listened to a message entitled, “Waiting for the World to Change.” It was as strong an appeal to the will as I have heard in a long time. He challenged us to quit waiting for some body or some event to change the world: “You get up, do something, and make a difference! You change the world!” I don’t think I misrepresent his message by summarizing it with these words.

My students were impressed by the service and pumped by the message; but they were as memorably moved by the 40 minutes of time Mike gave to us in the Welcome Center of the church immediately following the service.

“He got on an airplane this morning at four in the morning,” an assistant whispered to me, which made his time with us all the more precious.

I know what I remember about that preacher-to-student conversation: the very first question. One of my students, who shall remain unnamed, asked the first question, and it went something like this:

“Dr. Moody teaches us not to use certain words—what he calls his “Ten Forbidden Words”—but you did not seem to mind using these words in your sermon. What is your philosophy about this?”

Mike was gracious and eloquent in response to this awkward situation. It was a good question, though, and he made his case for platform language taking its cue from street language. “I just want to communicate with people in public like I do in private,” he said. His casual attire sent a silent confirmation of that ministry strategy and the thousands of people who had come to hear him preach was equally compelling.

Sunday morning brought a very different style and substance to our preaching experience. Glenview Community Church is affiliated with the United Church of Christ. It would be tempting to say that its services are much more liturgical than Willow Creek, illustrated by the five-page order of worship handed to us as we entered.

“These contemporary churches,” I explained to my students on more than one occasion, “do not engage in free-form, spontaneous worship. True, they do not provide as much printed detail to their attendees, but their services are as carefully planned and closely choreographed as any service on the planet.” I was remembering Mike Breaux’s successor at Southland explaining to another group of my students how he had transgressed his 18 minute time limit: “I must cut two minutes out of this message by morning,” he had said following the Saturday evening service.

Howard Roberts is the pastor of Glenview Community Church and I have known him from our days together at Georgetown College. Neither the elegance of the sanctuary nor the sophistication of the congregation was able to camouflaged the plain-talking, pretense-shunning minister that still takes his bearing from his up-bring in the hills of Kentucky. I was glad when he took his text from Genesis and talked about Isaac; it is a name I gave to my second son. The word means “laughter” and Rev. Roberts delivered a sermon about the laughter of God.

“When something unimaginable,” he said, using the title to introduce the sermon, “intersects with something improbable, laughter often is the result. This certainly was the situation when laughter is first mentioned in the Bible.”

“He wanted us to understand something,” I said later to my students. “He was addressing the mind, the understanding, and the intellect.” I then asked this question: “How is that different in style and substance from a sermon that seeks to move the will?”
We talked about that a good part of our bus ride home to Kentucky, hours after Rev. Roberts took us to a parlor on the second floor of the church building and described his journey from the Baptist world of the American South (Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia) to the epicenter of American Protestantism (mainline and evangelical) in the great city of Chicago. I watched my students and wondered how their ministerial vocation would take them in directions they could not even imagine.

Only one of them knew what to expect when we arrived at the old sanctuary of the New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church on the south side of Chicago, and that was because he had been with me two years earlier when we had made this same expedition to East 77th Street. I refer to the “old sanctuary” because between the time we were ushered to our reserved seats near the front and the time you are reading this true and faithful account of our adventure, this congregation of African-American, Pentecostal-style Baptists will have moved into their new $11 million facility. I can hardly wait until another “Christian Preaching” course appears on the class list and I can seat my students in the resplendent surroundings of that new edifice. “The seats and carpet are purple,” we were told.

A sixty-voice gospel choir filled the old loft behind the preacher; a six-piece instrumental ensemble kept things humming; and by the time the Rev. Stephen Thurston, Sr. stood to preach, we were all ready for what was about to happen. What happened was this: an experienced preacher took a difficult text and allowed its truth to provoke us into a fresh experience of spiritual enthusiasm. He was calling and we were answering: standing, swaying, raising our hands in exultation, singing a song, a new song, unto the Lord. Deacons lined the altar and before the service was over at least a dozen people—mostly adults—came to signal some sort of decision.

“To what did he appeal?” I asked my students later.

“To our emotions,” they said quickly, and we talked about the homiletical appeal to the feeling. “No important decision is ever made,” I reminded them, “that does not appeal to the emotions. Just as the first preacher gave principle attention to the will, and the second to the mind, so this one touched our emotions.”

Not that any of the three ignored other aspects of the preaching task; in fact, each was a polished and persuasive professional at the craft of preaching. But all the students agreed that it was the final service that made the most impression upon us; but likewise we all agreed that it was the very first service of the trip—one I have not yet described—that made the entire trip so memorable, so unforgettable, so once-in-a-lifetime, even for a minister.

Just like we had planned, we departed the campus at 4 pm on a Thursday afternoon. There were six students from my preaching class, three from my course on C. S. Lewis (and yes, we did visit the Wade Center at Wheaton), one driver and one spouse, plus myself. Two others intended to go—Jennifer and Bruce—but at the last minute their ride from Louisville to Georgetown fell through.

“My car was repossessed,” Bruce had told me four weeks earlier, over the phone, explaining why he and Jennifer had missed a week of classes.

“As providence has it,” I responded, “my parents are in a nursing home just minutes from your house. I will come by for a preaching tutorial in a few days.”

One tutorial turned into two, and three, and more. Through it all, I never mentioned their living arrangements and their marital status. But reading the Bible and preparing to preach has a way of working on the minister; and at the end of my third visit, Bruce asked a question: “Do you ever perform weddings?”

Nothing was said, except my simple affirmative, until the next week, when once again Bruce waited until the end of the tutorial: “We want to get married. Will you marry us?”

“You get the marriage license,” I responded, “and I will make the necessary arrangements for a wedding.”

So it was that on Thursday afternoon at precisely four in the afternoon our bus departed Georgetown College and stopped at a modest home in eastern Jefferson County. Bruce escorted Jennifer out of their home; both were beautifully dressed, as if for a wedding.

“Where are we going?” I asked. Earlier in the day, as we planned the event, I told them to secure a church where we could perform the ceremony.

“To Southeast Christian Church,” he said; and off we went, to Room 205, a lounge just above the spacious entry hall of the church.

I stood at the mantle; Bruce and Jennifer held hands; and eleven other young adults, some with cameras and all with tears, stood silently to witness these two young students—accidental travelers, as it were, on a preaching expedition to Chicago—pledge their faithfulness one to the other. I then surprised them with a gift: a room for two, not in a seminary dorm with all the rest of us, but in the Hyatt Place Chicago. It is the first time, I announced, that I have officiated at a wedding and then accompanied the newlyweds on their honeymoon!

The journey to Chicago and back was good, as I have said; and we all learned much of what needed to be learned—about preaching, and vocation, and ministry. But nothing can compare to those moments in Room 205 by which we created the most memorable field trip of my teaching career.