Confessions of a preacher

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Sorry to disappoint everyone, but this article isn’t going to be about the ancient and unholy alliance between sex and religion. It was good clickbait though, wasn’t it. Perhaps you saw the title, thought you might find something juicy and salacious, and discover instead that it’s just me rabbiting on. (Pauses to allow half of his audience to leave.)

Right: now that they've gone, I want to say to everyone remaining in the circle “Hi, my name is Murray and I’m a pulpit addict”. This habit of mine goes back a long time: I have been hooked on preaching for thirty years of my life. That’s fifteen years of 25-minute sermons as a Baptist pastor and fifteen more of seven-minute homilies as an Anglican school chaplain. I shudder to think how many hours of earnest addresses I have delivered during those decades. (When I was at theological college, one of the lecturers commented that the average churchgoer would sit through 4,000 sermons over the course of a lifetime, and then asked what we thought this hypothetical listener would have gained after all that time. Some wag down the back called out “Haemorrhoids!”)

For me, preaching was both a challenge and a sort of guilty pleasure. It was a challenge to come up with something different each week; it was even more of a challenge to present it in a way that didn’t have the congregation switching off in the first sentence, especially when you are addressing a school chapel full of restless teenagers who don’t want to be there. And although the negative connotations of words like “sermonising” and “preachiness” show that people hate being lectured at from above, I believe that there is a place for thoughtful words which remind listeners of what really matters in life. Good preaching, like good writing, can be a healthy antidote to some of the poisons of the age.

The guilty pleasure was this: I was actually quite skilled at it, and I used to get some enthusiastic feedback from the congregation. As a man of the cloth I was supposed to be above that sort of hunger for approval and emotional stroking - but as a normal needy human being I depended on it to bolster my faltering sense of self-worth. So if no one made any positive comments after a sermon I would go away feeling like a failure. Many of my friends see me as a confident and successful person; those who get past the surface are surprised to find how much insecurity I hide beneath that front. I have all too often equated being loved and accepted with being approved of as an effective preacher and pastor and teacher. The struggle to value myself just for who I am has been a long and ongoing one.

One confession leads on to another, which brings us to here and now: as a pulpit addict I am suspicious of my own motives in doing this writing.

On the one hand, I really enjoy setting thoughts down on paper or screen, and I’m not afraid to address the hard realities. Not everyone shares so openly about illness and mortality as I have done here; for some people, that is scary, but for others it is refreshing, and they tell me how special it is to be included in this journey. The dialogues that open up through this writing have already brought richness into my life - you folk have given me a great gift in your expressions of friendship and your thoughtful responses.

On the other hand, I am wary of climbing back into a pulpit, “six feet above contradiction”, using my illness as an excuse to set myself up as some sort of revered sage. It’s really hard to show your wounds from a platform; it’s much easier to present a sanitised public persona. Preachers do that all the time. I do it. In fact, what I wrote in an earlier email about “desperation and dignity” was not the full truth. That’s the sort of stuff you say from a pulpit. It sounds nice, and dignity is definitely something to aim for. But the real person that I am is often desperate: desperate to avoid suffering, desperate to make meaning of what is happening to me, desperate for love and acceptance.

So the purpose of this post is to start myself on a 12-step Recovering Preacher programme. Step One, right here and now, is to get out of the pulpit, lock the door behind me, and come back down to floor level. I’m a flawed and vulnerable human being facing death, and I’m reaching out to other vulnerable people, and hoping for help and support. It’s a two-way process, and I’m in the same place as you. I need your support.

The other Steps will require me to reveal vulnerability and reality in any further posts on this site. I have a team of close relatives with alarmingly effective BS-detectors who will let me know if I fail to do so!

Well, that’s enough self-revelation for one post. And while it may not have been a story of stirrings under the cassock or steamy encounters in the vestry, sometimes ordinary confessions from an ordinary person can reveal a lot more reality.

And having done a bit of soul-searching about all this …. I’m going to keep writing.