‘The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on his lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher.
‘Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?’
I love the above quote from Frederick Buechner’s memoir Telling the Truth. Beuchner, a Pulitzer-nominated novelist and American Presbyterian preacher, was no evangelical (although he was reasonably theologically orthodox and did spend a semester as a guest lecturer at Wheaton College), but his prose wonderfully captures something of the drama of preaching in a way that I suspect would seem foreign to many contemporary evangelical preachers from the Reformed Evangelical world that I inhabit.
