I think I mentioned a year or so back that my grandmother, who passed on in 2002, spent several years of her preteens as a travelling preacher. I have a difficult time figuring out what exactly that must have entailed, aside from the little she told me, but I found this story about boy preacher compelling. One reason was that some of his responses to questions about his preaching sounded familiar. My grandmother said that she just preached whatever the Holy Spirit inspired her to preach about, and that sometimes when her parents didn’t like the topics she chose, she’d tell them that she was about her Father’s business, not their business.

Her post-teen life was a pretty hard one, and the role she played in it wasn’t always consistent with her childhood vocation. Her first marriage was to a gay man from a wealthy family whose mother had arranged the marriage for the sake of decorum. My grandmother hadn’t known this and was shattered when she found out. Her husband’s mother gave her a house in an effort to keep her in the family, but she turned her back on all of it. Funny thing is that I never heard her speak of her first husband with anything but affection. I’ve always wondered to what degree she was naive and religiously “touched” in her late teens and how that played into that relationship she found herself in. She drank pretty heavily for quite a few years, and her second husband, my grandfather, doesn’t seem to me like much of a trade up from her first husband. He was highly intelligent but also mean and lazy, by most reports. Growing up, my own mother occasionally referenced him as a warning to me.

So back to the preaching. Why would God make child preachers? What’s the actual gift here? Innate or occasional? The gift of gab? The ability to assimilate and recreate oratory? If Shirley Temple had been raised in a Pentecostal home, would she have been on the preaching circuit, rather than the song and dance circuit? Has the phenomenon changed over the last century, or are kids like these a common element of God’s work in time? I think your position would depend on where you think the facility comes from. I think that if God can give me something worth saying (from an eternal perspective) to a specific group of people at a specific time, then He can give that to anyone willing to speak, regardless of age (and perhaps language). Last April I actually gave my first sermon (why do I naturually incline toward the term “gave” and not “preached”?) and I’d have to say that it wasn’t the fruit of any theological savvy I might have or any mastery of words, but something outside me. I know this because I only came to truly understand what I was talking about in the weeks and months after I spoke, and what I said was what I had needed to hear. That experience gave me a lot more respect for preaching, or at least for its potential. Obviously, it’s not an either-or thing when it comes to answering the question of origin. I’m sure that some of the child prodigy preachers went on to make a life of selling whatever seemed opportune to them, others lost “the gift” when they moved beyond the influence of their parents.

At my small, traditional, mainline (but still evangelical) church, one potentially divisive topic is that of women pastors, and one of the keys to resolving that question is the definition of “pastor.” One fellow congregant made an interesting distinction between teaching and preaching when I asked him if he thought it would be wrong to read a book on theology or practical faith authored by a woman. Ok, I was laying a trap, but I’m not sure who got stuck in it. Of course not, he said, it’s preaching that shouldn’t be done by women. Which brings me to ask why it is that one would find pulpiteering more authoritative than writing a book? Is it that one can forget who the author of a book is, but sermon delivery brings one face to face with another person? Maybe it’s the direct confrontation with personal presence and charisma, both components of “leadership” that lend to this strange distinction, inasmuch as persuasion and direction are part and parcel of leading. I think that when preaching is a personal call to spiritual accountability, the real questions pop up, should pop up, since gender isn’t the only pastoral issue on the table.

On a related vein, our church bought out two showings of The Passion of Christ a couple of weeks ago at a local theater. People in the congregation and church school then bought and distributed all 400 tickets. I’m on the ministry council at my church, and at a meeting before the showing, our pastor said that he intended to give a short “message” and “invitation” at the end of the movie. I’m all for the speaking of truth and the call to accountability to it, but the idea of doing that at the end of a film, especially this sort of film, gave me the heebie-jeebies (or the willy-wonkers, as my wife would say). I told him that I would have a hard time with being talked to after a heavy movie like that, and that I expected others would too. I remembered other films I’d seen, like Dead Man Walking, after which I declined to talk to anyone, including my wife, on any topic until the next day. My opinion gave him pause, but on the afternoon of the showing, he was obviously prepared to give the post-film talk. He asked people to sit down as the credits began to roll, and just about everyone did. Then he talked about Jesus’ sacrifice and the forgiveness of sin and led a sinner’s prayer that many in the audience echoed out loud. Then he passed out cards to everyone that included a space to indicate whether a new decision to follow Jesus Christ had been made. At our next council meeting, it came up that out of the 400 seats in the theater, 107 people had indicated that they had made a new decision to accept Jesus’ work on their behalf. I don’t know what that check mark meant for each individual, but for me it indicated that I am out of touch with something important. Part of it, I think, is that my demographic (25-40, educated, “culturally-aware”) possesses an underlying cynicism and heightened sensitivity to irony which it expects to be widely shared. I don’t think it is, and I think that the implications of that are broad. I think breaking down my related assumptions and questioning them has to be important.

One last tangent. A recent CNN article talked about how Osama bin Laden had rewarded his children with horses after they’d memorized the Koran. They’d memorized the Koran?! On the other hand, my grandmother was able to recite fairly large sections of the King James Bible from memory, and like the kid in the article, claimed that it was more beautiful and easier to understand than other translations. I, on the other hand, finally got a different translation last year and have enjoyed reading Scripture more with my new Bible than I ever have in the past, when I had only my King James Bible. You’d think that someone like me would be a likely candidate for preferring the KJV, what with all my experience with Shakespeare and medieval lit, but that’s not the case. At this point in my life I feel like I want the shortest path to meaning; there’s still plenty to work out without the language being an obstacle, even if it’s a small one.