Pastor’s Blog

The following is one of a dozen or so book reviews that I am doing for the Doctor of Ministry course.  I’ve done four so far.  I decided to post this one because I had a strong reaction to the book.  Tell me if you’d like to see the others.

Note that the review starts out with general overview and reaction and moves on to specific topics of interest to the reader (me).

McDill, Wayne V. The Moment of Truth. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1999. 197 pages. ISBN: 0-8054-1827-X.

The Moment of Truth is about the act of preaching – standing in front of a congregation at a moment in time and communicating God’s truth. McDill says “We are dealing, of course, with sermon delivery, but we must not think of it as the mere presentation of a persuasive speech on a religious theme. Preaching is much more than that. God has ordained to use man as His agent of revelation. He has sent His agent forth to preach. This is His method. It is His way of keeping the original vision alive. It is His method of teaching and renewing his people. . . of communicating the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. On every occasion preaching has this potential. It is the moment of truth.” The burden of the book is to help the preacher to prepare for this moment. Thus McDill addresses God’s plan for preaching and emphasizes that preaching is oral communication, and that it requires a communicator. He tells pastors that like-it-or-not, they are a model and an example, and that the effectiveness of their preaching does depend on the quality of their character. The remaining chapters develop details of the oral communication process: a model for communication; the use of voice and body language; preaching style; preaching method (memorized, text, notes, extemporaneous); designing a sermon to fit the method and finally, some thoughts on what is happening as the preacher preaches.

McDill’s thesis that preaching is oral communication dominated my interaction with this book. Under the rubric of that thesis, McDill does present some information that I appreciated. For example, his various lists of ways to think about the audience were good, especially the types of audiences. His model of communication, while not original, was well developed. However, it seemed to me he spent an inordinate amount of time on voice and articulation without really being able to communicate how these things can be changed or improved (a limitation of the written medium he’s using to promote oral communication). He then goes on, again in conventional fashion, to emphasize that most communication takes place non-verbally. In this chapter he argues both for and against the use of a pulpit, and even addresses issues of clothing, grooming, and personal space, with a level of detail probably suitable for a Baptist seminary but not necessarily for a wider audience of preachers.

On the other hand I really liked his chapter on preaching style, and found the chart in which he rates such characteristics as ‘stiff . . . informal’ and ‘obscure . . . clear’ to be helpful.  What I really tripped over was chapter 8, in which he makes an extended argument for preaching extemporaneously, which he does not, fortunately, define as ‘without preparation’, but does define as ‘a well prepared sermon delivered with few notes or none at all’. The chapter argues for this position by arbitrarily dismissing the other options (memorized, manuscript, notes) and poorly supporting his idea from history. McDill spends seven pages listing the advantages of preaching without notes and two pages on the risks. He spends almost no time on the advantages of preaching from a manuscript.

Why does this bother me?  You can probably guess that I preach from a manuscript, and have done so on most occasions for 17 years of ministry. I find the other options unsatisfactory for various reasons.  I do consistently preach with no notes when doing first person messages: I still write out a manuscript, but by repetition I get very familiar with the material and with the flow of scenes, emotions, etc. so that when I stand to deliver it, I can do it ‘from memory’ without having memorized most of the words.  I get the impression this is what McDill wants me to do every week, but the simple truth is that the investment of an extra 12 hours to accomplish this is unworkable, and in my case the advantage is minimal.  Though the manuscript does mostly tie me to the pulpit, I can pick up sentences and whole paragraphs so effectively that most people do not know I’m using a manuscript.  It does not interfere with eye contact, gesture, facial expression or verbal style.

But there is a more important reason why I take exception to McDill’s advocacy of ‘no notes’, and it is related to his definition of preaching as oral communication.  While I agree that oral communication is vitally important to preaching, and that in past ages it was the only method of communication available for the preacher, I don’t think that’s true anymore.  For the past five or more years I have been experimenting with supporting oral communication on the visual channel.  Primarily this has meant some very sophisticated Powerpoint to go along with the sermon.  My thesis, which I hope to pursue in this D. Min experience, is that in a culture that has been exposed from birth to television, movies and other integrated forms of communication (sound and picture), we will reach our peers not by making them come in and close their eyes while they listen to a lecture, but by communicating on both the audio and visual channels.  As a model, consider The Civil War as chronicled by Ken Burns.  Burns pioneered the use of archival images with narration and music to communicate in-depth the history of that conflict.  I’m trying to do the same thing for exegetical preaching, putting on the screen not just any image, but images that communicate exegetical facts, by words and pictures, on the visual channel.  The result is that my sermon manuscript becomes much more like a script that I can share with those who help me create Powerpoint and those who operate the computers during worship.  If I was to preach without notes the cues which cause the visuals to progress in support with the words would almost certainly be forgotten (by me), missed (by the Powerpoint operator) or obscured.  Thus I reject all of McDill’s fine arguments for not working from a script and affirm that in our culture preaching needs to be not less but more than merely oral communication.  Scripting is the norm for all of the media to which we are constantly exposed; scripting is what makes it work; scripting is necessary for communicating with this culture. 

This post gives a little behind the scenes insight into the 3d Bible Scenes that I have been creating for Powerpoint. Some of you may remember a number of scenes of the temple at Jerusalem. After laboring for way too many hours on the temple itself, I had even more trouble with the Jerusalem houses. Below is a detail from a scene that is supposed to be looking up the hill to the temple.

 

The trouble is that the vegetation is way too sparse, the houses are not scaled well, and many of the houses do not quite sit all the way down on the ground, because of the slopes of the terrain. In addition, modeling each house makes the rendering much slower, and placing each house is incredibly time consuming.

But the most recent version of my scene generation software, Vue, has a capability called eco-systems, which allows you to specify that certain rocks or trees or plants or really any object should be distributed across the terrain randomly. So if I could make an eco-system with houses, I could populate the city of Jerusalem without individually placing even one house. In revising the temple scenes for the commercial version of 3D Bible Scenes I decided to try it.

The first step was to create just three simple house models. Simple, in this context, means ‘low polygon count’, because the more polygons you have in a picture, the longer it takes to render. So I went into my 3d modeling software, Silo, and created three houses with different dimensions and windows, but otherwise just simple boxes. The simplest looked like this:

Okay, so we save that as a generic object file, and then we open our 3d scene software, Vue. We pull the simple house model into view, and then we apply three material definitions to it, one for the roof, one for the walls, and one for the windows. The window material is transparent, but strongly tinted brown, because it is supposed to look like you are seeing into the shadows of the house. When we’re done the simple house looks like this:

Okay, now we open our previous Vue model of Jerusalem, and delete all the houses. Yea! We go into our terrain definition and tell it to be an eco-system. Then on one layer of the eco-system we put typical things like Middle Eastern trees, dry bushes, a little green grass and some rocks. On another layer of the eco-system we pull in our three simple houses, telling the ecosystem to use the ‘biggest’ of the three houses half as much as the other two.

Now, after a little tweaking, a similar detail of the hill up to the temple looks like this:

Debatable, I suppose, but I think it’s an improvement. To see the full ‘up the hill’ picture, click on the above detail.

So that’s how it works. Things like that eat time like brownies, but on sabbatical I’m hoping to have enough time to clean up five or six sets of pictures (Abraham, Bethlehem, Sodom, Tabernacle, Temple, etc.) and put them up for sale on a commercial web site. Keep your eye on www.3dbiblescenes.com for the grand opening.

An outfit called Olympiki.com, somehow associated with the Texas Water Safari, has posted high quality data about the Safari to their website, including finish and split times for each boat. Being slightly fanatic, on sabbatical, and inherently interested in numbers and charts, I plotted distance versus time for seven Trinity-related boats. The result is shown below: if you click on the chart you will get a larger version.

One of the things a pastor rarely gets to do is to participate in outside activities that occur over the weekend. But a privilege of the sabbatical is doing just that. In previous years I have been able to ‘follow’ the Texas Water Safari only on Saturday, the first day of the race. After that I had to come home to preach. But this year I got to follow the whole race from it’s beginning in San Marcos to the finish 260 miles later in Seadrift, TX. This year was an especially appropriate time for me to have this opportunity, because for the first time two of my daughters were paddling. Abbie paddled with Tim in a boat called ‘Turtle Hunting’ and Hannah paddled with Sarah Walliser and Holly Nelson Orr in a boat called ‘Texas Sweethearts’ or just ‘the girls’.

Here are some pictures and descriptions from the race, June 9^th to the 12^th, 2007.

 

The day before the race is spent preparing the boats, the provisions and the paddlers. Here Stephen Rask goes through the supplies that are required on each boat with one of the Safari officials, while others, including Hannah, look on and make other preparations.

 

The DeGray clan and close associates just before the beginning of the race.

Sometimes it seems that those who follow the race face as many dangers as those who paddle. This tree limb (that’s just a limb, not a whole tree) fell for no apparent reason at 1:13 a.m. on Friday morning, and landed within two feet of a tent where two people from the Trinity young adults group were (to that point) peacefully sleeping.

 

Each boat is supported by a team. All food, equipment and provisions have to be aboard the boat when the race starts, but the team can supply water, ice and information as they meet the boats every twenty miles or so. Here Bethany waits with the support team for Abbie and Tim’s boat. Abby Kittle was team captain, Ruth was assistant team captain, and Jonathan Kittle drove the support team through all hours of the day and night.

Abbie and Tim looking good in ‘Turtle Hunting’ early in the race. Actually they looked good throughout the race. The water was high, and all the boats set a fast pace, but Abbie and Tim held their own throughout. They finished in 39 hours and 48 minutues, seventh overall and second in their class and only 16 minutes slower than Peter and Kathy Derrick’s mixed record (which, unfortunately, was broken by the first boat in their class).

 

Holly, Hannah and Sarah at the same point in the race. ‘The girls’, as they were known, looked strong throughout the race and had a great time. They were the only all-female team in the race, and thus took first place in that category, but they also beat the previous record for fastest women’s team by over an hour. They finished in 44 hours and 51 minutes.

 

Peter and Philip Rask approaching the bridge at Palmetto State Park. The picture also shows the setting of one of the scarier moments we had while following the race. On the gravel up-river and to the left are the support teams for Peter and Philip (Doug Rask, captain) and for Holly, Sarah and Hannah (Holly’s mom, Janet Nelson, captain) and a number of others who were following these paddlers. After the boats passed a good sized group decided that instead of scrambling up the poison ivy infested bank, they would walk down the left side of the river (left side of the picture). The lead contingent in this group included Bethany and Michael DeGray, Mikayla Norman and Janet Nelson, closely followed by Janet’s son-in-law, Holly’s husband, Bill Orr.

As the group approached the bridge they moved just a little too far to their right, into the turbulence you can see in the picture. First Janet and then the other three (but not Bill) were swept into the bridge, which is really more of a ford than a bridge. It has spaces at the top for water to pass through and over, and tunnels or openings for water to pass through. Since the water was high, it was about six inches above the bridge but also flowing very forcefully through the bridge. It was into this undercurrent that the people were drawn. Bill, seeing what was happening, braced himself and began to help Mrs. Nelson. Bethany had hold of both Michael and Mikayla, but all three were being drawn under. She first gave Michael’s hand to me (I had been standing on the bridge taking pictures) and then lunged to try to help Mikayla, at the same time losing any hold of her own. Between her and Bill they managed to get Mikayla into the hands of Jim Walliser, who was on the bridge, and he pulled her out. Bethany then slid under, almost completely under the bridge, but Bill grabbed her hand and pulled her back, and someone (unknown) on the bridge grabbed her.

In the end there were no injuries more serious than bruises and scrapes, but it was a scary moment and we thanked God for his provisions that made it no worse than it was.

 

Despite the incident on the bridge, it was still a good place to take pictures. Here Stephen Rask, paddling solo, approaches the standing wave at the front of the bridge.

 

Holly, Hannah, and Sarah at the same spot.

 

When we reached the finish line at Seadrift, Michael continued to pursue his favorite part of the Safari, fishing. According to his report he caught ten fish, including the catfish shown. He also caught a small snapper which he cleaned (actually Jonathan Rask cleaned it) and brought home on ice. He had the tiny fillets for lunch with mild enthusiasm.

When most (but by no means all) of the boats have come in, an awards ceremony is held at Seadrift. Here Abbie and Tim have received their plaque for their seventh place finish. Abbie said that given such a good time and fast time for her first safari, she might just quit while she was ahead. We’ll see.

 

The girl’s took home a boat load of trophies, including the cup for first place women’s team. With Holly are her mom (and team captain) Janet Nelson and her husband Bill Orr.

There isn’t space or pictures enough to tell all the stories from even one Safari. But all the Trinity-related paddlers did well:

Place 6, boat 6, Tommy Yonley, 38:04 – Sunday 23:04

Place 7, boat 105, Abbie and Tim, 39:48 – Monday 00:48

Place 12, boat 175, Jonathan Yonley, 42:30 – Monday 03:30

Place 14, boat 17, Jonathan and Rebecca Zeek, 44:23 – Monday 04:23

Place 16, boat 221, Stephen Rask, 44:49 – Monday 05:49

Place 17, boat 259, Hannah, Sarah and Holly, 44:51 – Monday 05:51

Place 20, boat 109, Peter and Philip Rask, 47:06 – Monday 08:06

Place 23, boat 110, Max Feaster and Stephanie McFerren, 47:33 – Monday 08:33

Place 59, boat 84, Jordan Mills, 68:04:00 – Tuesday 05:04

(apologies to anyone we missed)