THE KING’S BUSINESS
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of evangelism into a one-man affair. Re solved, that America is large enough, or should be, to recognize more than one edi tor, statesman, pastor, evangelist or pop corn merchant! ......... Evangelists who will stoop to selfish, hog gish strategy to hold dates and keep other men out of places when they know 'they cannot give a date for one, two or •three years; who will hold a city on the expec tant list for a term of months or years, and finally cancel a promise- for a date, until preachers have to journey half across the continent to compel them to live up to their agreements; while they juggle dates back and forth and claim to be billed ahead for one, two or three years, and then turn down some engagement when a better finan cial proposition looms up, are as. conscience less as alligators, and need a work of grace in their hearts, as truly as any gibbering gangster in New York City, or petty poli tician in Chicago. Resolved, that pastors who Condone such tactics and call such wire-pulling in evangelism “good strategy,” as I have heard it Called by a prominent pastor: in the west, need to seek the Lord while He may be found, and call upon Him before He spues them out of His mouth. ' Pastors who complain that evangelists are illiterate, unscientific, ignorant exhorters, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, are so jealous . by nature that they will hot stand by a high-class evangelist who can really Create and deliver a masterfully logi cal and eloquent address. The preaching ability, and sermonic genius of evangelists in some instances, has been kept below par because pastors in some cities do not want an extraordinary thinker, preacher or lec turer to appear in the form or person of an evangelist. They prefer a man whom they
can ridicule as to faulty English, diction, enunciation, style, grammatical inaccuracy, rhetorical boorishness, vulgar mannerisms,: and various and sundry crimes and misde meanors. When God endues and endows a man with mental balance, and prepares him to go forth minus waffs, excrescences, ex traneous or cancerous growths ; who has neither pip, botts, distemper, mites, heaves, string-halt, .cholera, plagairitis or aboulia; who can preach a sermon or deliver a lec ture of the highest quality ; whose delivery is on a par with that of Henry Grady, and whose eloquence is compared with that of Demosthenes, the superficial preachers of these times will cry : “Away with him ! Give us a sermonic pirate, who gobbles every’ fanciful picture from Emerson and Ingersoll to John L. Sullivan, and other poets. Give us a man who can run twelve nautical miles by submarine measurement every time he ‘Victrolaizes’. some other man’s sermon. Give us a big show-^-a scream—an orgy of the death struggles of harmony, melody and rhythm—ragtime Gos pel music; and an heterogeneous combina tion of theological epilepsy and emotional debauchery!” Pastors who run the gamut of such car nality, involving cheap, spectacular methods for the sake of getting new members, will have to employ a three-ring circus to cause their additions to grow in grâce and in the nurture of such unspiritual eruptions raj Resolved, that all pastoral and evangelistic work be done “decently and in order” ; for “every man’s work shall be made manifest ; for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try evèry man’s' work of what sort it is.”"
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