Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRODUCTION

No matter how much church ministry changes, some elements remain the same.

For many centuries, pastors have performed weddings and officiated at funerals, baptisms, dedications, confirmations, and community events.

Today, that role remains constant, but today’s context forces ministers to continually reexamine their approach.

This book focuses on these public occasions where the “priestly” functions are required.

How can pastors minister most effectively in these situations?

In keeping with the practical nature of The Leadership Library, each chapter comes from a pastor who writes out of personal acquaintance with the struggles and successes of these ministries.

These writers are candid about the possibilities and limitations of the pastor’s role, and they base their reflections on specific instances.

Chapter 1 looks at the overriding question: What is the pastor’s essential role in any of these public occasions?

The thoughtful response is offered by Eugene H. Peterson, pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland.

Chapters 2 through 5 focus on weddings.

Since the pastor is almost always involved with the couple before (and after) the wedding day, more is at stake than simply officiating at a ceremony.

How do we create a climate within the church that encourages lasting marriages?

One congregation that has wrestled earnestly with this question is Emmaus Fellowship in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Pastor Ken Wilson explains their direct approach in chapter 2.

One of the often-strained situations every pastor faces is when a couple unrelated to the church wants to be wed in the church.

Chapter 3 asks, “Should we marry the unchurched?” and Douglas G. Scott, rector of St. Martin’s Church in Radnor, Pennsylvania, tells how he handles this delicate but potentially redemptive situation.

Techniques of effective premarital counseling are shared in chapter 4 by Bruce Rowlison, pastor of Gilroy (California) Presbyterian Church, who coauthored /Let’s Talk about Your Wedding & Marriage/ (Green Leaf Press, 1985).

And finally, what does a minister need to keep in mind for the rehearsal and actual wedding ceremony?

In chapter 5, the important elements are reviewed by Kent Hughes, pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and coauthor of /The Christian Wedding Planner/ (Tyndale, 1984).

Chapters 6 to 10 deal with the pastor’s role in funerals and the accompanying ministry to the grieving.

The first step is preparing a congregation to face that inevitable enemy, death.

Rick McKinniss is pastor of Kensington Baptist Church in Kensington, Connecticut, but at the time he wrote this chapter, he was just finishing a pastorate at Emmaus Baptist Church in Northfield, Minnesota, where he saw firsthand the need to help a congregation get ready for death.

When death actually comes, what are the immediate steps a church should take?

Paul Walker describes how he and the Mount Paran Church of God in Atlanta, Georgia, minister to the grieving.

Ministry during the actual funeral and graveside services is considered by Calvin Ratz, veteran pastor of Abbotsford (British Columbia) Pentecostal Assembly.

Then, two specific problem situations are addressed: “Funerals of Those You Barely Know” by Mark Coppenger, pastor of First Baptist Church in El Dorado, Arkansas, and “Handling the Hard Cases” — such tragedies as suicide, infant death, and victims of violence — written by Roger Miller, minister at the Central Christian Church in Jefferson, Iowa.

The last section of this volume describes some of the other special events over which pastors preside.

Infant baptisms and dedications provide a unique opportunity to minister to the family and the congregation, as Garth Bolinder explains from his perspective as pastor of Modesto (California) Covenant Church.

Calvin Miller, pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska, writes about the obstacles he has to overcome in the baptism of adults.

Not all readers of this book will be involved in churches that practice confirmation, but Paul Anderson, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in San Pedro, California, points out the transferable principles that will help any church instill and confirm the faith for another generation.

Finally, Cal LeMon, pastor of Evangel Temple Christian Center in Springfield, Missouri, discusses the pastor’s role as community spokesperson, whether the occasion is a banquet invocation, a baccalaureate address, or a newspaper column.

These public occasions become milestones in people’s lives — and in our ministries.

Each time of joy or grief opens people, if only for a moment, to pastors and to the divine realities they represent.

And so these events deserve our continuing attention.

At a wedding, Jesus rejoiced.

At a friend’s graveside, Jesus wept.

At both, he worked miracles.

Jesus sensed these moments as dramas that held people’s rapt attention.

Through his ministry at these occasions, God became the leading actor.

That remains our present call.

— Marshall Shelley \\ Managing Editor \\ leadership

ONE

THE MINISTRY \\ OF CEREMONY \\ AND CELEBRATION

/One of the ironies of pastoral work is that on these occasions in our ministry when we are most visible — out in front giving invocations and benedictions, directing ceremonies, and delivering addresses — we are scarcely noticed./

Eugene H. Peterson

*P*astors enter and embrace the totality of human life, convinced there is no detail, however unpromising, in people’s lives in which Christ may not work his will.

Pastors agree to stay with the people in their communities week in and week out, year in and year out, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God works his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives that compose our congregations.

This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines, the empty boredom, and the unattractive responsibilities that make up much of most people’s lives.

It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain.

It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through stretches, sometimes long ones, of unaccountable grayness.

Most pastoral work takes place in obscurity: deciphering grace in the shadows, searching out meaning in a difficult text, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life.

This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.

But there are interruptions in this work, not infrequent, in which the significance blazes all of itself.

The bush burns and is not quenched.

Our work is done for us, or so it seems, by the event.

We do nothing to get these occasions together: no prayer meeting, no strategic planning, no committee work, no altar call.

They are given.

They are redolent with meaning and almost always, even among unbelievers, evoke a sense of reverence.

These interruptions of the ordinary become occasions of ceremony and celebration: weddings, funerals, baptisms and dedications, anniversaries and graduations, events at which human achievements are honored.

Instead of deficiency of meaning, which characterizes so many lives and for which people compensate in frenzy or fantasy, there is an excess: the ecstasy of love, the dignity of death, the wonder of life, the nobility of achievement.

These occasions burst the containers of the everyday and demand amplitude and leisure in which to savor the fullness.

No love was ever celebrated enough, no death ever mourned enough, no life adored enough, no achievement honored enough.

We set aside time, clear space, call friends, gather families, assemble the community.

Almost always, the pastor is invited to preside and to pray.

But when we arrive we are, it seems, hardly needed, and in fact, barely noticed.

One of the ironies of pastoral work is that on these occasions when we are placed at the very center of the action, we are perceived by virtually everyone there to be on the margins.

No one would say that, of course, but the event that defines the occasion — love, death, birth, accomplishment — also holds everyone’s attention.

No one inquires of the pastor what meaning there is in this.

Meaning is there, overwhelmingly obvious, in the bride and groom, in the casket, in the baby, in the honored guest.

The pastor is, in these settings, what the theater calls “fifth business” — required by the conventions but incidental to the action, yet, in its own way, important on the sidelines.

This is odd, and we never quite get used to it; at least I never do.

In the everyday obscurities in which we do most of our work, we often have the sense of being genuinely needed.

Even when unnoticed, we are usually sure our presence makes a difference, sometimes a critical difference, for we have climbed to the abandoned places, the bereft lives, the “gaps” that Ezekiel wrote of (22:30), and have spoken Christ’s Word and witnessed Christ’s mercy.

But in these situations where we are given an honored place at the table, we are peripheral to everyone’s attention.

*Where Is the Spotlight?*

At weddings, love is celebrated.

The atmosphere is luminous with adoration.

Here are two people at their best, in love, venturing a life of faithfulness with each other.

Everyone senses both how difficult and how wonderful it is.

Emotions swell into tears and laughter, spill over into giggles, congeal into pomposity.

In the high drama that pulls families and friends together for a few moments on the same stage, the pastor is practically invisible, playing a bit part at best.

We are geometrically at the center of the ceremony, but every eye is somewhere else.

At funerals, death is dignified.

The not-being-there of the deceased is set in solemn ritual.

Absence during this time is more powerful than presence.

Grief, whether expressed torrentially or quietly, is directed into channels of acceptance and gratitude that save it from wasteful spillage into regret and bitterness.

The tears that blur perception of the living, including the pastor, clarify appreciation of the dead.

At the baptisms and dedications of infants, the sheer wonder of infant life upstages the entire adult world.

The glory that radiates from the newborn draws even bystanders into praise.

In the very act of holding an infant in the sacrament of baptism or the service of dedication, the pastor, though many times larger, stronger, and wiser, is shadowed by the brightness of the babe.

At anniversaries and graduations, ground breakings and inaugurations — the various community occasions when achievements are recognized and ventures launched — the collective admiration or anticipation produces a groundswell of emotion that absorbs everything else.

Every eye is focused on, and every ear is tuned to, the person honored, the project announced, the task accomplished, the victory won.

The pastor, even praying in the spotlight and with the amplification system working well, is not really in the spotlight.

And so it happens that on the occasions in our ministry when we are most visible — out in front giving invocations and benedictions, directing ceremonies, and delivering addresses — we are scarcely noticed.

*The One Thing Needful*

If no one perceives our presence the way we ourselves perceive it — directing operations, running the show — what is going on?

We are at the margins during these occasions.

No one came to see us.

No one came to hear us.