Secular Sermons

"Many writers are far, far more relevant than Scripture" to contemporary man, says the Rev. Richard McFarland of Washington's Dumbarton Methodist Church. Accordingly, he is as likely to use a passage from Camus or Albee as a parable to bring home to his congregation an aspect of God's message. Well aware that pulpit time is dropout time for many churchgoers, more and more ministers are not only turning to secular sources as an inspiration for sermons but are trying more dramatic ways to vary the format of their preaching.

These days, a sermon is likely to start off with anything from a reference to Peanuts to a Bob Dylan song to a passage from Hugh Hefner's interminable Playboy philosophy. Dr. C. Edward Gammon of Fairlington Presbyterian Church in Virginia, for example, intends to base his Easter sermon on Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Gammon's point: George and Martha's play-long dialogue about their nonexistent son suggests contemporary man's inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. The Rev. A. Cecil Williams of San Francisco's Glide Memorial Methodist Church uses movies and folk-rock songs as themes. Last year he related one sermon to a line from Fellini's La Strada--Anthony Quinn's complaint, "All I want is to be left alone." Williams then argued that this gruff individualism denies a basic fact of life, which is that men must be together.

Disposable Products. Ministers also use some surprising visual aids to get across a point in contemporary terms. One Sunday, the Rev. Lon Chestnut, Methodist chaplain at Emory University, projected illustrations from Playboy onto the chapel wall. His theme was that Christians should not treat other human beings in the Playboy manner, as disposable consumer products. On another Sunday, the congregation of Cincinnati's St. Timothy's Episcopal Church was startled when one parishioner got up to leave in the middle of the sermon by the Rev. John Wesley Bishop. "Why are you leaving?" Bishop asked. "Because you are talking about irrelevant things," the man answered. Bishop then explained to his puzzled congregation that the incident had been carefully staged. He went on to make the real point of his sermon--namely, that the world will walk out on the church unless it is committed to acting upon man's real concerns.

Some ministers occasionally substitute movies, plays or poetry readings for conventional sermons. St. Clement's Episcopal Church, on the fringe of Broadway in Manhattan, frequently presents dramatic readings and even short playlets in place of sermons by its vicar, Father Eugene A. Monick. One Sunday, parishioners acted out a scene from Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. At another service, they put on a sketch about parish life, improbably called The Dynamics of Inter-Cultural Encounter, or How I Split My Scene, Dropped My Frock, Blew My Cool and Found God.

Ciay & Cardboard. Sometimes the search for the dramatic effect skates disturbingly close to pulpit gimmickry. In Birmingham, Mich., for example, the Rev. Robert Marshall of the community's Unitarian church once passed out lumps of clay and cardboard to his congregation, told them to sculpt themselves. His point: to make them meditate on the theme "What am I?"

Inevitably, some conservative laymen may grumble at such unconventional approaches. But in a recent issue of Christian Advocate magazine, Stanley Rowland Jr., editorial director of the United Presbyterian Church, argues that the search for new themes and forms is no different from what Jesus did in "interpreting afresh the faith" for his generation. Whether churchgoers like it or not, he says, clergymen are attempting to translate "information about the Word into the lifetimes of the people." Any theme or technique that makes God's message a living reality, Rowland suggests, has a valid place in the preaching of the church.

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