Phantom Congregations by D. M. C.

California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 3, 1874

Phantom Congregations.

By D. M. C.

“A great many sermons are preached to whose excellence there is but a single drawback—they are preached to the wrong audience.

“Sometimes on a battle-field a regiment comes gallantly to the front and delivers its fire right over the heads of the enemy. If they had been twenty feet up in the air, what havoc there would have been among them! So, often, a minister stands in his pulpit and preaches a sermon full of truth and earnestness, which only goes sounding into space and dies there, because it was not aimed at the people who sat in the pews. The preacher had before him a purely imaginary congregation. They were phantoms, ghostly exhalations from the books amid which he wrote his sermon, or from his own secluded musings; or perhaps they were the shadowy images of real congregations that lived and died a hundred or eighteen hundred years ago.

“A great many preachers in Christian communities seem always to have before their mind’s eye a company of Heathen. Sunday after Sunday they go on expounding the most elementary truths of the Gospel. They tell their hearers that they are sinners, that Christ died to save them, and appeal to them to accept him. They praise the Bible as the best of books, and extol Christianity as a divine system. Perhaps nothing could be better if it were addressed to people ignorant of these things. But the preacher’s congregation drank them in almost with their mothers’ milk. They no more question the excellence of the Christian religion than the necessity of food and drink. They have no doubt that in a general way they are sinners, though they may have very vague ideas as to what their particular sins are, and still dimmer notions as to how really to get rid of them.”

So says an eminent minister; and so nine tenths of the congregations in the land can testify to their sorrow. The ministers dig up the dead issues of the past and then show their valor in killing them again! Preachers, to be effective, must grapple with the living issues of to-day and preach right at the men before them in the spirit of the prophet when he said to the king, “Thou art the man.” This is the kind of preaching which tells, which reaches the conscience, and which God always blesses. No matter if it does hurt some one. Men have to be hurt sometimes before they will wake up. Try it.

D. M. C.