WACO, Texas (ABP) – Before beginning his sermon on May 9 on the eve of his retirement, Raymond Bailey reminded worshipers at Seventh & James Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, that he was not preaching his “final sermon,” but merely his last sermon as senior pastor of the congregation he served for 15 years.
That clarification would not surprise anyone who knows Bailey and his love of preaching. During a ministry that spans more than five decades, Bailey has preached “too many sermons to count — unless I’m asked to count the good ones.” His first pastorate was when he was an 18-year-old sophomore at Baylor University. Although Seventh & James may be his last full-time pastorate, he doesn’t expect to stop preaching anytime soon.
The only thing Bailey has loved almost as much as preaching has been teaching the ministry of preaching, which he did for 16 years on the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., before moving back to his native state to lead Seventh & James. Even while teaching in Louisville, though, he continued to serve as a pastor. “I loved being a pastor, and I think it gave authenticity and relevance to my teaching,” he says.
Bailey estimates he has taught nearly 2,000 students over the years. And he’s excited about returning to the classroom this summer at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, where he will teach a course on preaching about social issues.
Associated Baptist Press interviewed Bailey just a few days before he and Pat, his wife of 47 years, moved to Frankfort, Ky., to be near their children and grandchildren:
Raymond Bailey receives an award at a reception honoring him upon his retirement as pastor of Seventh & James Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. (Seventh & James photo)
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Q: Who have been the major influences on your theology and style of preaching?
A: At Baylor I was introduced to James Stewart, the great Presbyterian preacher. Stewart said the test of every sermon should be, “Did someone meet God here today?” The preaching event should help the members of the congregation to encounter God in the worship experience. I have tried to apply that test to my preaching every Sunday. Two others were Leslie Weatherhead and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Weatherhead brought the discipline of psychology and the needs of persons to the preaching task. The sermon was needs-oriented and it dealt with a particular context. Fosdick was the first great preacher in America to adopt a needs-oriented approach. Fosdick identified the needs of the people and then identified how the Scriptures and God addressed those specific needs. On Saturday night he would review his draft of the sermon and then visualize individual people in his congregation and ask, how will this person and that person hear this? That’s something I have tried to incorporate into my preaching preparation.
Q: How would you describe your philosophy of preaching?
A: First, every sermon should be a particular message for a particular congregation in a particular place at a particular time. The sermon and the worship experience should be adapted to fit the particular worshiping community and the situation. Second, I believe preaching should be revelatory in nature rather than argumentative. The Bible records God’s revelation. A major movement in the United States in the 20th century was the shift to narrative preaching which lends itself to this approach. Fred Craddock is perhaps the best-known and most-effective practitioner of narrative preaching. Craddock’s inductive approach to preaching leaves the sermon open-ended. The listener has to supply the ending. The preacher attempts to lead people through the scriptural narrative in an open-ended way, recognizing that each person may come out differently through his or her encounter with Scripture and with God. The preaching event is three-sided: Scripture, preacher and congregation, with the Holy Spirit working from all sides.
Preaching is like drama. Most listeners already know the story and its ending. That was true with classical Greek drama. People knew essentially how the story would end, but the great playwrights told the story in such a way that it still captured the audience. The preacher-playwright brings the listener into the story so that it becomes a part of his or her story. Why and how did the story evolve? How might it have been different? How will it change the hearer’s story? Most listeners know the Jesus stories of the Gospels. So I look for new ways to engage the story and to find ourselves in the story. It might include considering what might have happened, to explore other options that were available to the characters in the story, or to identify ways that we wrestle today with similar challenges and choices.
Q: How would you describe good preaching?
A: Good preaching deals with the question of “so what?” [Paul] Tillich was right in his criticism of preaching: too often the preacher is answering questions that no one is asking. The pastor needs to bring to the preaching experience questions that emerge out of life experience. People aren’t interested in arguing the finer points of theology as much as they are interested in real-life issues, in the ways that faith and life intersect every day.
Good preaching is defined more by content than form or style. Good Christian preaching should be about Jesus, not the preacher. There must be theological content for it to be a sermon as opposed to other forms of communication. Theology is at root God’s story and how we fit into God’s story. Unfortunately, too many Baptists and others today have opted for entertainment rather than preaching.
Q: How have you managed to stay motivated and excited about the task of preaching week after week for more than five decades?
A: I have always loved reading and studying the Bible and preparing sermons from the biblical texts. The Bible is alive. I have never been bored with preaching or with Bible study. But I have also loved preaching because it emerges from the work of the pastor. The pastor can’t hide in her or his study all the time. You have to spend time with people, get to know them and to know their joys and their sorrows. I have found that there’s a lot of fodder for preaching — not just in the hospital room or the funeral parlor, but at Wednesday-evening fellowship meals and even in committee meetings. Ironically, I have found a lot of my material for preaching in the mundane stuff that many pastors hate to do.
Q: Are you hopeful about the church and about preaching?
A: I’m concerned but hopeful. I’m concerned that a lot of preachers today are trained to be successful CEOs of major corporations more than being trained to be ministers of the gospel as pastors and proclaimers. I’m concerned that too many pastors today have become chaplains of materialism rather than preachers of the gospel. I’m concerned about trends in our seminaries and theology schools that indicate many of our brightest and most gifted young women and men are not considering the vocation of pastoral ministry.
One of the reasons I remain stubbornly hopeful is that I was introduced early on to remnant theology. Even in the worst times when the American church takes on more of the culture than the gospel, I think there will always be a remnant of good preaching and faithful churches. The Anabaptists, among others, have taught us that even when the church is captive to culture, God is still going to find ways to do God’s thing.
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David Wilkinson is executive director of Associated Baptist Press and a member of Seventh & James Baptist Church.