Karen Schlack
Wipf & Stock, 134 pages
A good book on preaching is always valuable, and this concise book is designed to help preachers make their sermons even better. Author Karen Schlack draws on her real-life experiences with a trusted mentor who helped her improve her preaching over a remarkable 15-year tutelage.
Karen is the recently retired pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Elgin, Ill. Like many students, she came to Louisville Presbyterian Seminary as a second-career student, in her case after serving as an accomplished professional in the medical field. She forged a fast friendship with F. Morgan Roberts, the Director of Field Education. From those earliest days, Morgan reviewed drafts of her sermons and heard her deliver them in her field education parish.
After graduation, Karen sent written sermons — several weeks in advance — to Morgan by email and eventually shared videos of her proclamations from the pulpit. Some sermons and video links are included in the book so that readers can absorb not only the sermons as written but also as delivered.
Full disclosure — I have known the “Morgan” of the book’s title for 40 years. I have heard him preach on numerous occasions and consider him one of the top five preachers of the Presbyterian Church during the last decades of the 20th century. He has been a pastor to me during the most difficult days of my own life, and we have coauthored two books together. He has served churches from the Northeast to the Deep South, and his sermons reflect his consuming desire to take the Bible seriously. He has been one of God’s greatest gifts to me and to others — a pastor who is a devoted friend, a preacher who teaches with authority.
One of the overwhelming themes in Morgan’s mentoring is his emphasis on the sermon as oral communication. This is sometimes forgotten in seminary classes in which a sermon manuscript is the goal of the homiletics assignment, but Morgan carefully and compassionately helps Karen shed the syntax of the written word in favor of the word as spoken. A good sermon that reads well is not nearly as effective as a good sermon that people hear well. That was a lesson that I learned only partially and with difficulty.
Morgan also encourages and prods Karen to free herself from her manuscript. One of his suggestions is to “whisper deliver” each sermon 15 times before preaching, for he argues that if you say the sermon that many times you will have memorized it almost completely.
This is more than a book on homiletical technique — it is also a story of how a mentoring relationship grew through years of conversation. It contains crucial theological insights as well, as Karen’s biggest lesson in ministry is that she must fix her eyes on Christ. “All the circumstances that clutter, cling, tear away our certainty — we must turn from them and fix our eyes on Christ.” And she realizes keenly that she learned “to graciously receive the help of others,” not only from her mentor but also by learning to listen to her patient parishioners. For her, preaching becomes what it should be a communal endeavor, not a solitary struggle.
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John M. Mulder is former president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary and professor of historical theology.
