Note: I originally wrote this post seventeen years ago. It has been updated, corrected, and expanded.
Many Christians are surprised to learn that their pastors use the material, outlines, and sermons of others when preaching. Years ago, Polly and I, along with our children, visited more than 100 Christian churches. (Please see But, Our Church is Different!) We heard a variety of preaching, ranging from atrocious to outstanding. We also heard a number of stolen or adapted sermons. In our experience, Rick Warren was the favorite preacher to steal from. I find such behavior scandalous.
In 2005, we attended a church for about three months led by a pastor who morphed into Rick Warren every Sunday. The dead giveaway was his liberal use of numerous Bible translations — a classic Warren trait. I suspect I was the only one who knew the source of this preacher’s sermon. One man gave a glowing testimony one Sunday regarding the pastor’s wonderful sermons. I wanted to stand up and shout, “AMEN, thank God for Rick Warren.”
Why is there such a problem with preachers stealing the material of others? I believe the problem is threefold:
First, many pastors are lazy. The ministry provides great cover for men with poor work habits.
Second, a number of pastors feel threatened by the smooth, well-produced sermons of megachurch/TV preachers. They know their church members listen to these slick communicators, and they are afraid of falling short in comparison.
Third, there are many pastors who should not be in the ministry. God equips whom He calls, and it seems that some men and women lack basic speaking/preaching skills. They try to cover it up by stealing the material of others. I have heard far too many sermons that lacked in any semblance of order or content. I was the assistant pastor of one church where the pastor’s thrice-weekly sermons were downright awful. This man couldn’t even make a basic sermon outline. He attended the same college as I did, but evidently he wasn’t paying attention in speech/homiletics class. Either that, or he simply didn’t have the requisite skills necessary to be a competent public speaker. I tried to teach him how to make an outline, but “learning” from a 20-something greenhorn (he was in his 40s) proved impossible.
I preached a few sermons out of a book of outlines when I first started preaching, but since that time, the 4,000 sermons I preached were my own. Good, bad, or indifferent, the sermons I preached were the result of my own work. I read the work of others. I profited from commentaries. But, at the end of the day, my sermons were mine. I believed then and still do today, that it is unethical to use the work of others; to preach sermons or give speeches that belong to someone else.
In July 1983, I started the Somerset Baptist Church in Somerset, Ohio. I was 26 years old. The church began with 16 people — four of whom were my family — in an old, dilapidated storefront. Our rent was $100 a month. A few months later, we moved to the Landmark Building — a huge two-story building that used to house a farm co-op. We rented the upstairs of the building for $200 a month. We would remain here until we bought an abandoned Methodist church building for $5,000, five miles east of Somerset.
In the fall of 1983, I had my sister’s pastor from Montpelier, Ohio come to our church to hold a revival meeting. This man was the new pastor of the first church I worked for after I left college, Montpelier Baptist Church.
As was my custom, I asked this man of God what his plans were for the week. He said to me, “what would you like me to preach? I have numerous sermons of other people I have memorized. How about Greg Dixon’s sermon, The Sinking of the Titanic?” I was shocked by his question. I told him, “That’s okay. Just preach what the Lord lays on your heart.”
I knew preachers used the materials of others, often without attribution, but to preach another man’s sermon verbatim? How lazy can you be? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.
I realize that I am an atheist, and have little credibility among preachers these days, but I still believe that so-called spokesmen for God should use their own work. (And yes, I have seen similar laziness in mainline churches. We heard numerous sermons in mainline churches that were nothing more than pastors reading word-for-word from the lectionary.)
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
I was an Independent, Fundamentalist-sin-hating, Devil-chasing, pulpit-pounding, King-James-waving Baptist preacher. I prided myself on HARD preaching, just like old-time Baptist preachers.
If people were happy with my preaching it meant I wasn’t preaching hard enough.
Cecil Hodges, an old IFB preacher from Georgia said one time:
“We hit our people over the head with the sin stick so often that they duck when we begin to preach.”
I was one of those kinds of preachers.
Preach long. Preach loud.
No subject was spared.
Preaching the whole counsel of God required preaching about EVERY sin, even the unpopular ones — such as chewing gum during church, writing notes in church, and using the bathroom during the sermon.
One young preacher I heard about was upset over people getting up to use the bathroom during his sermon. He sternly told his flock:
I don’t want anyone using the bathroom while I am preaching. If you need to use the bathroom, pee in your shoes. You can wring out your socks after the service.
He was fired several weeks later.
In IFB churches, the pastor is god. He’s the law. What he says goes. The Church CAN fire him, but it is often hard to do. After all, in many cases, the pastor started the church. He has a following no matter what he says or does.
When the pastor stands up and preaches, whatever he says is taken to be the gospel. A good IFB church member hates what the pastor hates and loves what the pastor loves. To go against the pastor usually meant you were looking for another church to attend.
Two incidents stand out for me that I think would illustrate how I preached.
Two school teachers attended the church I pastored. They were husband and wife — good people. They joined our church after the congregation they attended had a split (a common occurrence in IFB churches). I will call them The Smiths.
The Smiths taught high school. Mr. Smith was a girls’ high school basketball coach and taught English. Mrs. Smith taught business classes. Both of them were members of the teacher’s union.
One week, the teacher’s union took a policy position that was contrary to what I thought the Bible taught. I concluded that a Christian who was right with God could NOT be a member of the teacher’s union.
Sunday came, and I entered the pulpit ready to do battle with the sin of being part of the teacher’s union. I preached long and hard. I exposed the sin of belonging to the teacher’s union. I called on all teachers in the church (all two of them) to leave the teacher’s union.
They left all right.
The church.
Early in my ministry, I became convinced that the Masonic Lodge was a Satanic organization. The local Masons had come to me and asked to use our church bus to attend a Masonic function in a nearby city. I told them absolutely not, and then proceeded to let them know how Satanic the Masonic Lodge was.
On the following Sunday, I entered the pulpit ready to do battle with the sin of being a member of the Masonic Lodge. I made it very clear that a person could not be a Christian and a Mason, and no one who was a member of the Masonic Lodge could be a member of our church.
There were several members of the Masonic Lodge visiting our church.
They got the message.
We never saw them again.
I am sure some of my more liberal Christian readers are saying WOW about now. You should be.
I was taught in Bible college that God often builds a church by subtraction. Losing people could be a good thing. Ultimately, fellowship is a bunch of fellows in a ship all rowing in the same direction (often right over a waterfall).
When people left it was never my fault.
After all the Bible says:
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. 1 John 2:19
I saw leavers as carnal, soft, weak people who had no stomach for real, hard, Holy Ghost-inspired Bible preaching.
I was wrong.
I do not have enough life left to repent of all the foolishness I did in God’s name. I ran off a lot of good people — people who had the misfortune of thinking differently from me.
I was not an oddity within the Baptist church. In Independent and Southern Baptist churches, I would have been considered typical, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. As many of the readers of this blog can testify, preachers such as I are quite common. Legalism and cultic control of people (now called spiritual abuse) is far too common, not just in Baptist churches, but in every branch of Evangelicalism.
I should note that I did not remain the preacher described in this post. Over time, I came to realize how abusive I was. In the late 1980s, I learned to preach expositionally, and doing so helped to get me away from the type of preaching with which I started my ministry. Towards the end of my ministry, I was considered a liberal by many of my Baptist preacher friends. They thought I had gone soft (and from their perspective I had).
A survey of atheists and agnostics will certainly show that a large number of them were raised in rigid, legalistic Christian environments. Fundamentalism extracts a huge price from everyone it touches.
Were you raised in a church that prided itself on hard preaching? How did this kind of preaching affect you psychologically? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
Charles asked:
Could you still preach a sermon today?
As an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five years, I preached lots of sermons — three to seven times a week, 4,000 sermons, in all. I am a seasoned public speaker, and according to the approbation of others, pretty good at it. Preaching never came hard for me. I was a consummate outliner, rarely saying anything I didn’t intend to say.
I am confident that I could still preach a sermon if asked to do so. Preaching is a learned skill, so I didn’t lose my ability to preach just because I deconverted. Evangelicals assert that preaching requires the filling of the Holy Spirit, but this is a faith claim, not one rooted in fact. Scores of Evangelical zealots have told me that I never was a Christian. If this is so, and effective preaching requires being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, why was I able to preach 4,000 sermons as an unsaved, apostate child of Satan? It seems to me, that effectual preaching requires skill, dedication, passion, and commitment, none of which requires the Holy Spirit.
Over my lifetime, I have heard many phenomenal preachers; men gifted with the ability to passionately and effectively preach. I have also heard over the years, many preachers who couldn’t preach their way out of a wet paper bag. Men who lack basic preaching skills, these men of God have no business preaching. They might be good with people, but these preachers can’t preach sermons that challenge and move people. My father-in-law was one such preacher. His sermons were awful. Often, they are rabbit chasers who think “getting up there and winging it” is a sound strategy. It’s not, and just because people praise your sermon after the service doesn’t mean they aren’t lying. (I stopped shaking hands at the door after the service for this very reason.)
Could I still preach an effective, passionate, call to action? Absolutely. Now if I can only find a church that would let me put my words to the test. 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Emmanuel Baptist Church, Buckeye Lake, Ohio, Bruce Gerencser’s ordination April 1983
I was raised in the Evangelical church. My parents were saved in the early 1960s at Scott Memorial Baptist Church (now Shadow Mountain Community Church) in El Cajon, California, pastored at the time by Tim LaHaye. From that time forward, the Gerencser family attended Evangelical churches — mostly Bible, Southern Baptist, or Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) congregations.
In the spring of 1972, my parents divorced after 15 years of marriage. Both of my parents remarried several months later. While my parents and their new spouses, along with my brother and sister, immediately stopped attending church, I continued to attend Trinity Baptist Church in Findlay, Ohio. In the fall of 1972, a high-powered IFB evangelist named Al Lacy came to Trinity to hold a week-long revival meeting. One night, as I sat in the meeting with my friends, I felt deep conviction over my sins while the evangelist preached. I tried to push aside the Holy Spirit’s work in my heart, but when the evangelist gave the invitation, I knew that I needed to go forward. I knew that I was a wretched sinner in need of salvation. (Romans 3) I knew that I was headed for Hell and that Jesus, the resurrected son of God, was the only person who could save me from my sin. I knelt at the altar and asked Jesus to forgive me of my sin and save me. I put my faith and trust in Jesus; that he alone was my Lord and Savior. (That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. Romans 10:9-11)
I got up from the altar a changed person. I had no doubt that I was a new creation, old things had passed away, and all things had become new. (Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)
The next Sunday, I was baptized, and several weeks later I stood before the church and declared that I believed God was calling me to preach. For the next thirty-five years, I lived a life committed to following Jesus and the teachings of the Bible.
After confessing to the church that God was calling me to preach, my youth director, Bruce Turner, took me aside and told me it was time for me to get busy preaching the Bible. Bruce took me under his wing and helped me craft my first sermon; one that I would deliver to the junior high youth department. My chosen text was 2 Corinthians 5:19-20:
To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.
My sermon was short, sweet, and to the point:
We are Christ’s ambassadors
He has committed unto us the word of reconciliation
We are to implore people to be reconciled to God
Over the next four years, I would preach occasionally at youth events and Word of Life preaching contests. I didn’t begin preaching in earnest until I left to train for the ministry at age nineteen at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. My father-in-law, a Midwestern grad, had been holding Sunday afternoon services at the SHAR (Self Help and Rehabilitation) House in Detroit. After his graduation, Dad asked if I would be interested in taking over his ministry at the drug rehab facility. I told him sure, so for the next two school years, I regularly preached at SHAR House. This gave me a lot of preaching experience by the time I left Midwestern in 1979.
I preached my last sermon in April 2005 at Hedgesville Baptist Church — a Southern Baptist congregation — in Hedgesville, West Virginia. All told, I preached 4,000 sermons — preaching three to six sermons a week, plus revivals, special meetings, Bible conferences, youth rallies, and nursing homes.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
In the late 1980s, while I was the pastor of Somerset Baptist Church, I purchased a 1984 Chevy Cavalier for $2,900. It had 19,000 miles on the odometer. The car was spartan in every way: crank windows, vinyl mats, AM/FM radio, and no air conditioning. I used the car for my ministerial travels, and we also used it to deliver newspapers for the Zanesville Times-Recorder and the Newark Advocate. If this car could be resurrected from the junkyard, it would have stories to tell about Bruce and Polly Gerencser zipping up and down the hills of Licking, Muskingum, and Perry Counties delivering newspapers. All told, we put 160,000 miles on the car without any major mechanical failures. Tires, brakes, and tune-ups were all the car required.
If the car could talk it would certainly speak of being abused:
Polly hit a mailbox, denting the hood and cracking the windshield.
Polly hit some geese, damaging the air dam.
Bruce hit a concrete block that had been thrown on the road on a dark fall night.
Bruce hit a black Labrador retriever who was sleeping on the road, causing damage to the front of the car.
Bruce hit a deer, causing damage to the bumper and radiator.
A tree limb fell on the car, further damaging the hood.
A woman drove into the back of the car while it was parked alongside the road in Corning, Ohio. We found out later that this accident broke the rear frame member.
By the time we were finished with the car, it looked like it had recently been used in a demolition derby. We carried personal liability insurance on the car — no collision — so no repairs were performed after these accidents. We certainly extracted every bit of life we could out of the car. It went to the happy wrecking yard in the sky knowing that it faithfully served Jesus and the Gerencser family.
Our Chevy Cavalier is a perfect illustration of our life in the ministry. Unlike Catholics, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preachers don’t take a vow of poverty. That said, the eleven years I spent as pastor of Somerset Baptist can be best described as the “poverty years.” I put God, the ministry, and the church before my wife, children, and personal needs. We did without so the church could make ends meet, thinking that God would someday reward us for our voluntary poverty.
Pastoring Somerset Baptist was a seven-day-a-week job. I was always on call, with rarely a day off. And as a workaholic, I liked it that way. During the late 1980s, for example, I was preaching on the street two days a week, teaching Sunday school, preaching twice on Sunday and once on Thursday. On Wednesdays, I would preach at the local nursing home. On Saturdays, I would help visit the homes of bus riders and try to round up new riders. I also helped start a multi-church youth fellowship. We had monthly activities for church teens. And then there were revival meetings, special services, Bible conferences, watch night services, pastors’ conferences, and the like. Throw in visiting church members in their homes and when they were hospitalized, and virtually every waking hour of my day was consumed by the work of the ministry. And lest I forget, we also took in foster children, many of whom were teenagers placed in our home by the Perry County Court. I believed, then, I could “reach” these children and transform their lives through the gospel and regular church attendance. I was, in retrospect, quite naïve.
But, wait, there’s more! — I am beginning to sound like a Billy Mays commercial. In 1989, I started a tuition-free private Christian school for church children. I was the school’s administrator. I also taught a few classes. Polly taught the elementary-age children. Many of these children have fond memories of Mrs. Gerencser teaching them to read. Students have no such memories of me, the stern taskmaster they called Preacher.
Our hillbilly mansion. We lived in this 720-square-foot mobile home for five years, all eight of us.
For the last five years at Somerset Baptist, we were up at 6:00 AM and rarely went to bed before midnight. When I started the church in 1983, we had two children, ages two and four. Eleven years later, we had six children, ages fifteen, thirteen, ten, five, three, and one. Our home was patriarchal in every way. Polly cared for our home — a dilapidated 12×60 trailer — cooked meals, and changed thousands of diapers — and not the disposable kind either. Polly used God-approved cloth diapers with all six children. She also breastfed all of them.
Why did Bruce and Polly live this way? The short answer is that we believed that living a life of faith on the edge poverty was how Jesus wanted us to live. After all, Jesus didn’t even have a home or a bed, so who were we to complain? If God wanted us to have more in life, he would give it to us, we thought. Much like the Apostle Paul, we learned to be content in whatever state we were in — rich or poor, it mattered not.
I left Somerset Baptist Church in 1994. I am now a physically broken-down old man. Some of the health problems I now face were birthed during my days at Somerset Baptist. There’s no doubt, had I put my family first and prioritized my personal well-being above that of the church, that we would be better off financially and I would be in better health. As it was, I spent years eating on the run or downing junk food while I was out on visitation. I know we surely must have sat down to eat as family, but I can’t remember doing so. Of course, I can’t remember us having sex either, and our children are proof that we at least had sex six times. 🙂 All I know is that I was busy, rarely stopping for a breath, and so was Polly. It’s a wonder that our marriage survived the eleven years we spent at Somerset Baptist. It did, I suppose, because we believed that the way we were living was God’s script for our marriage and family. We look back on it now and just shake our heads.
I am sure some readers might read this post and not believe I am telling the truth. Who would voluntarily live this way? Who would voluntarily sacrifice their economic well-being, health, and family? A workaholic madly in love with Jesus, that’s who. A man who believed that whatever he suffered in this life was nothing compared to what Jesus suffered on the cross. A man who believed that someday in Heaven, God was going to say him, well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord. I viewed life as an endurance race, and it was my duty and obligation to keep running for Jesus until he called me home. No one can ever say of Bruce and Polly that they didn’t give their all — all to Jesus I surrender, all to him I humbly give.
$200 beater. Polly HATED this car. What’s not to like, right?
Of course, my devotion to God, the church, and the ministry was a waste of time and money. One of the biggest regrets I have is that I wasted the prime of my life in service to a non-existent God. While certainly I helped many people along the way, I could have done the same work as a social worker and retired with a great pension. Instead, all I got was a gold star for being an obedient slave. I am not bitter, nor is Polly. We have many fond memories of the time we spent at Somerset Baptist Church. But, both of us would certainly say that we would never, ever want to live that way again. We loved the people and the scenery, but the God? No thanks. We feel at this juncture in life as if we have been delivered from bondage. We are now free to live as we wish to live, with no strings attached. And, there’s not a dilapidated Chevrolet Cavalier sitting in our driveway. No sir, we have electric windows, electric seats, air-conditioning, and the greatest invention of all time for a back ravaged by osteoarthritis — heated seats. We may be going to Hell when we die, but I and misses sure plan on enjoying life until we do.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Thanks to churches and ministries putting sermons online, the words of many Evangelical preachers are readily available to anyone who wants to access them. Throw in books, blog posts, and other forms of media, and the public has more access to the words of preachers than at any other time in the history of mankind. I preached 4,000+ sermons during the twenty-five years I spent in the ministry. Many of my sermons were recorded on cassette tapes. However, it has been eighteen years since I preached a sermon that was recorded. I suppose it is possible that someone somewhere has a sermon tape or two of mine in a storage box in the back of their closet. I have asked former church members if they had any of my sermon tapes. If so, I would love to have them so I can put them online. Sadly, the tapes have either been discarded or recorded over with Highway to Hell by AC/DC. 🙂 Thus, I am somewhat safe from accountability for things I said in the past. All readers know about my sermons is what I tell them. They must rely on me to be truthful about the content of my sermons. That’s not the case today. Every word many Evangelical preachers say is readily available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Rarely does a week go by without conflict or outrage over something an Evangelical preacher has said in his sermon. Preachers can and do say awful things in their sermons. Evangelical preachers are known for attacks on the “world” and other Christians who disagree with them. The culture wars are verbalized Sunday after Sunday in Evangelical pulpits. Attacks on LGBTQ people, science, atheists, Muslims, liberals, progressives, and mainline Christians are common. Preachers frequently serve up advice in their sermons about marriage, sex, raising children, mental health, clothing, and all sorts of issues. In many churches, pastors are viewed as know-it-alls, God-called, Holy Spirit-filled dispensers of knowledge, wisdom, and truth. The opportunities to say something stupid, ignorant, or hateful are legion. The question, then, is whether these preachers MEANT to say what they did.
Generally, people say what they mean the first time they say it. When preachers say outlandish things in their sermons, they mean to say them. When criticism comes their way, preachers tend to either double down, explain that they were misunderstood, or on rare occasions say they were wrong. Evangelical preachers aren’t very good at admitting wrong. Typically, it’s hearers who are blamed for “misunderstanding” them. I choose to accept what they say at face value. When Evangelical preachers show themselves to be bigots, racists, misogynists, or homophobes, I believe them. They said what they meant to say regardless of how much pushback they received after fact.
These so-called men of God spend hours every week crafting their sermons. Most pastors don’t speak extemporaneously. They know beforehand what they intend to say. I was an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five years. All told, I preached 4,000 sermons. That’s roughly 15 million words. (Since 2014, I have written 5,044,326 words for this site.) Outside of innocent mistakes, every word of my sermons I meant to say. I can only remember two times when I stood before the church and said I made a mistake in one of my sermons. I meant everything I said, even if my words offended or irritated people. The same goes for my writing on this site. I carefully think about everything write. When I hit publish, I am confident that wrote exactly what I wanted to say. That doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes or have instances where I could have used different words. That happens, but not often. Having an editor helps me avoid bad word choices. Carolyn, when warranted, will say to me, “are you sure you want to say this?” or “are you sure you want to use this word?” Thus, when I say “Evangelicals are an existential threat to the United States,” I mean every word. Let the Evangelicals rage! 🙂
I have done a number of live media interviews over the past two years. I always try to speak thoughtfully and carefully. Sometimes, when I listen to the interviews, I find myself saying “I should have said this” or “I wish I hadn’t said that. People will misunderstand.” That’s the nature of live programming. I try my best to be honest and factual. I do, on rare occasions, make innocent mistakes. The offending preachers we are talking about in this post aren’t making “innocent” mistakes. They have every intention of being provocative, controversial, and inflammatory. That’s why they must be held accountable for what they say. And when they try to say that they were “misunderstood,” don’t believe them. When these preachers stand before their congregations and repudiate their words and admit that they were hateful, bigoted, racist, misogynistic, or homophobic and post their admissions to the Internet, then and only then will I believe and accept their mea culpas.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Bruce Turner was my youth pastor in the early 1970s. Bruce played a very influential part in my life, from my profession of faith in Christ to my call to the ministry. I originally published this letter in 2014. As with the previous letters I have posted, I want this letter to be a part of the historical narrative of my life.
Dear Bruce,
I see you found my blog. I am sure the current state of my “soul” troubles you. My “spiritual” condition troubles many as they try to wrap their theological minds around my twenty-five years in the ministry and my present atheistic views.
I plan to address the comment you left at the end of the letter, but before I do so I want to talk about the relationship you and I had and the influence you had on my life.
You came to Trinity Baptist Church in Findlay, Ohio, fresh out of Baptist Bible College. Trinity was looking to hire a full-time youth pastor and you were the one they hired. You joined the staff of a busy, growing Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church.
You were there when I put my faith and trust in Jesus. You were there when I was called to preach. You helped me prepare my first sermon (2 Corinthians 5:20). You and I worked a bus route together and went out on visitation.
My parents had recently divorced and you became a surrogate father to me. When my Dad remarried and moved us to Arizona I was devastated. In a few months, I returned to Ohio, and in the late summer of 1973, I moved from Bryan to Findlay.
You helped me find a place to live, first with Bob and Bonnie Bolander, and then with Gladys Canterbury. For almost a year I went to school, worked a job at Bill Knapp’s, and immersed myself in the ministry of Trinity Baptist Church. You were there to guide me every step of the way.
When I first moved to Findlay, a divorcee and her young daughter wanted to take me in. You wisely made sure that didn’t happen, knowing such a home would not be healthy for me.
When I became enamored with Bob Harrington (I loved his “It’s Fun Being Saved” record) you warned me about worshiping big-name preachers. You told me to pay attention not only to what they preached but what they didn’t.
You even catered to my personal desires. In the summer of 1973, I had a whirlwind romance with Charlotte Brandenburg. Charlotte was the daughter of the couple who came to hold a Super Summer Bible Rally (VBS) at Trinity. For one solid week, we spent every day with each other. I was smitten with Charlotte.
Later that same year you planned a youth outing to the Troy Baptist Temple, the church Charlotte attended. We went to see the movie, A Thief in the Night, but my real reason for going was to see Charlotte.
Bruce Gerencser, 1971, Ninth Grade
When it came time to leave, I lingered as long as possible — I didn’t want to leave Charlotte. Finally, I heard a voice that said, Gerencser, get on the bus (for some reason you liked to call me by my last name). As I came hand-in-hand with Charlotte to the bus you turned away for a moment and told me to get it over with. I quickly kissed Charlotte goodbye and that was the last time I saw her. We wrote back and forth for a few months but, like all such relationships, ours died due to a lack of proximity.
You were my basketball coach. Trinity sponsored a team in the ultra-competitive high school Church Basketball League. One game I had a terrible night shooting the ball. I was frustrated and I told you I wanted out of the game. You refused and made me play the whole game. My shooting didn’t get any better but I learned a life lesson that I passed on to all my children years later.
I remember when this or that person in the youth group got in trouble. You and Reva were there to help them pick up the pieces of their lives. You were a kind, compassionate man.
I remember you helping us get a singing group started. I still remember singing the song Yesterday during a church service (YouTube video of Cathedral Quartet singing this song). I also remember you singing Fill My Cup Lord. Polly and I sang this same song for many years in most every church I pastored.
Who can ever forget your Youth Group survey? You anonymously surveyed our attitudes about alcohol, drugs, music, and sex and then you dared to use your findings in a sermon. I remember what a stir your sermon caused. You peeled back the façade and revealed that many of the church’s youth were not unlike their non-Christian peers.
I saw your bad side too. I remember the youth canoe outing where Reva lost her teeth. Boy were you angry. I felt bad for Reva, but in a strange way, I loved you even more. I saw that you were h-u-m-a-n. I already knew Gene Milioni and Ron Johnson, the other pastors, were human, having seen their angry outbursts, and now you were mortal too. (Remember I am writing this from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old boy.)
In May of 1974, I abruptly left Findlay, one week away from the end of school (a move that resulted in Findlay High School denying me credit for my entire 11th-grade year). Subsequently, I dropped out of high school. My Mom was in a world of hurt mentally and she needed me (and I needed her). In the fall of 1974, she would be admitted to the state mental hospital and my Dad would come to Ohio and move my siblings and me back to Arizona.
In 1976 I enrolled at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. I met my wife at Midwestern, and after leaving there in the Spring of 1979, we embarked on a twenty-five-year journey in the pastorate, a journey that took us to seven churches.
Bill Beard and Bruce Turner, 1986
In 1983, I started the Somerset Baptist Church in Somerset, Ohio. I put to use the things I learned from you, Dr. Tom Malone, and my professors at Midwestern. I put soul-winning first. I committed myself to being a faithful preacher of the truths found in the King James Bible. And “God” blessed the work I did. Somerset Baptist Church grew from a handful of people to over two hundred. We were the largest non-Catholic church in Perry County.
You and I reconnected and I had you come and preach for us. I believe it was a special service and the church was packed with people. The people loved you and I was thrilled to show off my mentor to them. I suppose, deep down, I needed your approbation.
You invited me to come and preach at your church, Braintree Baptist Temple in Braintree, Massachusetts. I now know that the real reason you had me come and preach was that you saw some things that concerned you. My workaholic, Type-A personality was good for growing a church but not so good for me or my family. Sadly, it took me many more years before I realized this.
We stayed in your home in Massachusetts and spent a few days traveling around the area. This was the first “vacation” our family had ever taken and it would be the last one for many years. I was too busy and thought I was too important to take any time off. Even when I later took vacations, I never took them just to be taking one. I always had a church or conference to preach at while we were on “vacation.”
Bruce Turner with our three oldest children, 1986
You and your dear wife treated us well. You gave us some “run-around” money and we went out to the Cape. My oldest children still remember dipping their feet in the cold waters of the Atlantic.
We parted, promising to keep in touch, but as with Charlotte and me years ago, our relationship died due to a lack of proximity. I suspect my later adoption of Calvinism ended any chance of a continued relationship.
I did write you several times in the 1990s. I read somewhere that you had Fibromyalgia, and when I was diagnosed with the same, I wrote you. You never responded. I was disappointed that you never wrote back, but I chalked it up to you being busy.
Bruce, I wrote all of this to say that you had a profound effect on my life. I will always appreciate what you did for me.
Sorry to see your blog and obvious bitterness toward Baptists. Not all of us preached an easy believing Gospel and certainly not all of us lived a perverted life. These King makers you blog about have never had my respect.
Reva and I have been happily married for 44 years. I am sorry your health is so bad and though you apparently have rejected what you once professed, I am praying for you to the God (not preachers) that I trust.
I sincerely hope your health improves and remember some good times in the old days. Stay healthy friend.
Bruce Turner
I am often accused of being bitter, angry, or some other negative emotion. On one hand, I have every reason to be bitter and angry, but my rejection of Christianity is not ultimately defined by anger or bitterness.
I rejected Christianity because I no longer believe the claims made about the Bible and its teachings. I came to see that the Bible was not inerrant or infallible. I came to see that belief in the God of the Bible could not be rationally sustained (this is why faith is necessary), and even if it could be, I wanted nothing to do with such a capricious, vengeful, homicidal God. I later came to see that the supernatural claims for Jesus could not be sustained either. While I certainly think a man named Jesus roamed the Judean hillside during the time period recorded in the Bible, the miracle-working Jesus of the Bible is a myth. At best he was a revolutionary, a prophet who was executed for his political and religious beliefs (and I still, to this day, have a real appreciation for the sermon on the Mount and a few other sayings attributed to Jesus).
My journey away from Christianity and the ministry took many anguish-filled years. I didn’t arrive where I am today overnight. I looked at progressive Christianity, the Emergent church, liberal Christianity, and even universalism. None of these met my intellectual needs. None of them rang true to me. I made many stops along the slippery slope until I came to the place where I had to admit that I was an atheist (and I still think saying I am a Christian means something).
I am not a hater of Christianity. I have no desire to stop people from worshiping the Christian God. I am well aware of the need many people have for certainty. They want to know their life matters and they want to know that there is life beyond the grave. Christianity meets their need. Who am I to stand in the way of what helps people get through life? It matters not if it is true. They think it is true and that is fine by me.
The Christianity I oppose is the Evangelical form of Christianity that demands everyone worship their God, believe what they believe, and damns to Hell all those who disagree with them. I oppose their attempts to turn America into a theocracy. I oppose their hijacking of the Republican Party. I oppose their incessant whining about persecution and their demands for special status. I oppose their attempts to deny some Americans of the civil and legal rights others have. (What happened to Baptists believing in a strict separation of church and state?) I oppose their attempt to infiltrate our public schools and teach Creationism or its kissing cousin, Intelligent Design, as science (this is what Christian schools are for). I oppose their attempt to make the Ten Commandments the law of the Land.
The kind of Christianity I mentioned above hurts people and hurts our country politically and socially. The Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement has harmed countless people, sometimes scarring their lives so severely that recovery is almost impossible (and telling people to get over it is not the answer). I weep often as I read emails from people whose lives have been destroyed by the extremes found in the IFB church movement. My blog exists because I want to help people like this. I want them to have a safe place to work through the wreckage of their lives, lives ruined by their involvement in Evangelical and IFB churches.
In many ways, I am still a pastor. I want to help other people. The difference now, of course, is that I don’t have an agenda. I don’t have a list “truths” that must be believed. If I can help people walk the journey they are on with openness, honesty, and integrity, I am happy. I am concerned with their journey, not their destination (since I think we are all headed for the same final destination, death).
I too, Bruce, have prayed thousands of times to the Christian God, and yet, like the universe itself, he yawns and remains silent. Instead of hoping for a God to fix what ails me, I have chosen to embrace my life as it is. I have chosen to try to change what I can and accept what I can’t. Above all, I have learned that it is what it is.
Through this blog, I try to flesh out my understanding of the past and examine the path I am now on. I try to be open and honest. I don’t have all the answers and, for that matter, I don’t even know all the questions. All I know to do is continue to walk forward, however halting my gait may be.
I shall always remember our days in Findlay and I will always appreciate what you did for me. When I write my autobiography someday, there will be a chapter titled Bruce Turner.
After leaving Community Baptist Church in the fall of 1994, we moved to the small central Ohio village of Frazeysburg, 16 miles east of Newark, where Polly’s mom and dad lived. Polly’s parents gave us enough money for a down payment on a fairly new 14′ x 70′ mobile home. We lived in Williamsburg Square — a well-kept manufactured home community that catered to older families without children and younger families with two children or fewer. The only reason we were allowed to live in Williamsburg Square was because we had previously bought a mobile home from Williamsburg, and after observing how well behaved our children were, the owners decided it would be safe to allow the Gerencser children to prowl the neighborhood. Our older neighbors were delighted to have our children around, especially when it came time to rake leaves and shovel snow. Believing that it was important for our children to serve others, we asked them to help our neighbors without pay. This they gladly did, even though several neighbors were insistent that our children be paid.
After getting settled in Frazeysburg, I went about looking for suitable employment to provide for my family. In less than a week I had secured a job working as general manager for a Charley’s Steakery in Zanesville, Ohio. As it was with every time I needed to secure secular employment, I made substantially more money working in the “world” than I did working as a pastor. Having managed restaurants in the past, I was well-suited for my new job. The owner was a Taiwanese man who operated a restaurant in Columbus. He was a hands-off owner who expected me to manage every aspect of his franchise. I would talk to him on the phone every few days, and every month or so he would stop by for a short visit to see how things were going. Outside of these contacts, I was on my own (which I liked).
The restaurant had been run into the ground by the previous manager. Its owner would later tell me, after contacting me to testify in a wage-hour dispute, that I was the best manager he had ever hired. He told me that he knew that I would just take care of things and that he wouldn’t have to worry about whether I was doing my job. Working for Charley’s Steakery was by far the best job I ever had. I had the freedom to hire the necessary people to ensure that the restaurant ran smoothly. Unfortunately, this meant reassigning or firing many of the existing employees, most of whom treated their job like a weekend at a spa. They learned quickly that I was a no-nonsense, the-customer-comes-first, if-you-have-time-to-lean-you-have-time-to-clean, trust-but-verify manager.
During this foray into the secular world, we attended Fallsburg Baptist Church, an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) congregation in Fallsburg. Ohio. The church was pastored by my then-best friend Keith Troyer. (Keith currently pastors Grace Baptist Church in Greenville, Pennsylvania.) Attending Keith’s church allowed us an opportunity to recover from the wounds inflicted upon us through our horrific experiences at Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf, Texas. (Please see the series I am a Publican and a Heathen.) In retrospect, we should have spent more time recuperating, but as I shall share in a moment, the not-preaching bug bit me and after a few months on the sideline I was ready to return to the pastorate. Keith tried to satiate my need by allowing me to preach from time to time. Though our friendship did not survive my loss of faith, I have always appreciated what Keith did for our family.
Going to work at Charley’s Steakery six days a week allowed me to stay busy. It was not uncommon for me to work 60-70 hours a week – workaholic that I am. Part of the reason I had to work long hours is that I had a hard time attracting and keeping employees. I’m sure some of the problem was that new employees quickly realized that they would actually have to work once they took the job, and didn’t stay long. Over the years, I hired scores of entry-level employees and managers. Some of these new hires turned out to be wonderful employees. However, far too many of them were indolent, lazy people looking to make as much money as possible for the least amount of work. Such people, of course, frustrated the hell out of me. Workaholics have a hard time understanding why everyone is not just like them. I spent much of my life as a pastor planting new churches. This type of work lends itself to driven workaholics. I was always perturbed by pastors who viewed the pastorate as a vacation gig, one where they preached on Sundays and played golf and hung out with their preacher friends the rest of the week. Again, I projected my own work ethic and way of looking at life on others. While I still think many pastors are as lazy as a coon dog in front of a fireplace on a cold winter’s night, I do realize that my judgments of others were often unfair or misguided.
The restaurant I managed was in the food court at the Colony Square Mall on the north side of Zanesville. I had to compete with restaurants such as Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Mr. Hot Dog, and a Chinese restaurant. We not only competed for food dollars, we also battled one another over employees. Charley’s Steakery shared a back hallway with Taco Bell. Employees would enter their respective restaurants via this hallway. Taco Bell was the first restaurant after employees entered the hallway. The manager of Taco Bell, noticing the quality of several of my employees, began poaching them, offering them better wages than I could offer. After a few weeks of losing employees, I decided to contact the Taco Bell manager. I asked her to please stop soliciting my employees. There, I thought to myself. I have put an end to that problem.
Several days later, the director of franchise operations called me about a disturbing call he had just received from the Taco Bell manager. According to her, I had asked her to please stop offering sex to my employees as an enticement for coming to work for her. That’s right, because I used the word “soliciting,” the Taco Bell manager thought I was talking about her prostituting herself. Of course, I did no such thing. I assumed that she had at least a cursory understanding of the English language and knew that the words solicit/soliciting/solicitation actually have several meanings, but she did not. After explaining to the franchise operations director what my intent was, he suggested (demanded?) that I contact her and apologize. My first thought was, apologize? What did I do that was wrong? It’s not my fault this dumb hillbilly doesn’t know what the word soliciting means. After pondering what to do for several days, my what-would-Jesus-do guilt kicked in, and I sat down and wrote a letter to the Taco Bell manager apologizing for our misunderstanding. But, before I uttered the words “I’m sorry,” I made sure she understood the dictionary definition of the word “soliciting.”
The Taco Bell manager quit soliciting my employees and I went back to trying to find meaning and purpose in secular work. But five months after I took the job, I could no longer push down the urge, need, and desire — the Holy Spirit — to pastor another church. In February 1995, some (now former) friends of ours, Marv and Louise Hartman, stopped by the restaurant to visit with me. They lived in the northwest Ohio city of Bryan — the city of my birth. (We currently live five miles south of Bryan.) I had known the Hartmans since I was a teenager. Their oldest son Lyle was, at the time, a good friend of mine. As a teenager, I attended First Baptist Church in Bryan, as did the Hartmans. Marv and I played church league softball together and Louise help me save money for college by managing my savings account. (Years later, after sending out my infamous letter, Dear Family, Friends, and Former Parishioners, Louise sent me a blistering letter that said I had been taken over by Satan. She later wrote and apologized for the first letter. Our friendship did not survive.)
The Hartmans told me about a church that was looking for a pastor near where they lived — Olive Branch Christian Union Church, near Fayette, Ohio. A few short weeks later, we packed up our belongings and moved our mobile home to a trailer pad next to the church for what would be a short seven-month pastorate. In retrospect, as I shared above, we should have taken more time to heal before taking another church to pastor. Despite advice from several friends who suggested that I slow down and do pulpit supply, revivals, and itinerant work, I felt the need to be about my Father’s business, and that feeling was so great that neither money, common sense, nor my wife’s objections would keep me from quitting a job that paid twice what Olive Branch Christian Union Church was offering me. All that mattered was that God had called me to preach and I needed to be busy preaching. This is why it amuses me when people suggest that I was in the ministry for the money. I ALWAYS made more money in the secular world than I did as pastor. If I had it to do all over again, I would have worked bi-vocationally, providing for my family and scratching my God-inspired itch to preach. We wouldn’t be facing some of the financial problems we now face if I had put my family first.
As Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Many Christian sects, and certainly every Evangelical sect, believe that pastors are called by God to preach the gospel. Pastors are ordained by the particular church or denomination of which they are a part. Through their ordination, the church or denomination is saying we recognize God’s calling in your life.
According to Evangelicals, the Bible is a supernatural book given to them by a supernatural God. God calls pastors to read and study God’s inspired, inerrant, infallible Word so they will then be able to stand before their congregations and proclaim “thus saith the Lord.” These men of God are often viewed as people who have a direct line to God. When a church member is confused about what the Bible says, he or she most often seeks out the pastor for clarity. Like mythical oracles, pastors are expected to have ready answers for any question they might be asked.
Most Evangelicals believe in the priesthood of the believer. This means they believe that every Christian has direct access to God. However, as with many things in the church, the stated beliefs are often contradicted by what actually goes on in the church. Instead of directly accessing God, many Christians expect their pastor to be an intermediary between them and God. After all, the pastor is a mature Christian, a font of wisdom and Biblical knowledge, right? Or so many congregants think.
The pastor’s supposed intimate connection with God plays a big part in how parishioners view his sermons. In their eyes, the sermon is a direct message from God. The pastor is just God’s mouthpiece. God could have used an ass to speak as he did in Numbers 22, but he used the pastor instead (that is, until the pastor upsets them, at which time he becomes an ass). When the pastor stands before the congregation the people have an expectation that they are going to hear from God. The pastor expects God to use his sermon to speak to the heart of every person. He desires God to use his sermon to reclaim backsliders and save the lost.
Preaching is not just an intellectual exercise. There is a huge emotional component in preaching, not only for the pastors, but also for those who are listening to sermons. Emotion is often ascribed to God moving, God working, or God calling. I have preached in numerous services where it seemed evident God was in our midst. Emotional levels were high. People were weeping. People were coming down the aisle to the altar to pray. It was evident to everyone that God was using my sermon to bring repentance, renewal, and revival.
Any cursory reading about the First and Second Great Awakenings will reveal that emotions played a huge part in the success of these campaigns. The Evangelical movement can trace its lineage, to some degree, back to revivalist machinations of the 18th and 19th centuries. Emotions have always played a monumental part in any significant move of God (as revivals, awakenings, and movements are called). This should not be surprising since we are, by nature, emotional beings.
What we have here is a perfect storm. A supernatural God, a supernatural book, a God-called, church-ordained pastor, and a congregation of emotional human beings. If the pastor is good at his craft, he knows how to use all of these things to his advantage. The pastor is not necessarily manipulating the emotions of the congregation on purpose. Most pastors grew up in the church. By the time they start preaching they have sat in countless church services and heard hundreds of sermons. Their understanding of how to preach is shaped by the church environment and religious culture they grew up in.
The longer a pastor is in the ministry the more he is keenly aware of what “works.” He becomes more discerning about what his congregation “needs.” What “works” is coupled with what the congregation “needs” and the result is often described by parishioners as God speaking to their hearts. The fundamental problem here is that it is impossible to know whether the “feeling” a person has is God. The deeply affected person believes it is God, but must accept such a claim by faith.
A commenter on a different post wrote:
I don’t believe in Jesus because of arguments for the trustworthiness of the Bible. I believe in Him because I have a relationship with Him-I have heard His voice and I feel His presence. And I am aware that sounds vague and illogical, but I also know that no one can invalidate my experience.
This comment goes to the heart of the difficulty in trying to present an alternative viewpoint to Christians. They know what they have experienced. They were there when Jesus saved them, and they know that their experiences are “real.” It is almost impossible to move people away from their subjective experiences. Rarely do objectivity and facts win a battle against religious subjectivity and faith.
As I look back on the 25 years I spent in the ministry, I have come to see that I used my sermons to manipulate people (and I am not necessarily using the word manipulate in a negative sense). Spend enough time with a group of people and you will learn their strengths and weaknesses. Eat meals with them, pray with them, visit in their homes, and educate their children, and you will certainly know a lot about the people you pastor. With this knowledge at hand, sermons can be crafted to help the congregation (sermons are never preached in a vacuüm). It should come as no surprise, then, that people think that the pastor is preaching right at/to them. This is not God speaking to the particular parishioner as much as it is a human being who has good discernment skills, skills finely tuned by interacting with thousands of people over the course of many years.
Do I think God used me to speak to people? At the time I did. However, I now know that what people were responding to was a well-crafted sermon preached by a sincere man who knew the needs of his congregation. I knew the power of emotions and used them to God’s my advantage. I heard preacher after preacher do the same thing. I was not an anomaly. I was a young man raised in an environment that put a premium on powerful, emotional preaching. I was encouraged to study the great preachers of the faith, men like Charles Spurgeon, DL Moody, Billy Sunday, John Wesley and Charles Finney. When I became a Calvinist, I studied the great Calvinist preachers, men like Jonathan Edwards, Martyn Lloyd Jones, George Whitefield, and Rolfe Barnard. The way I preached was a result of the environment I grew up in and the men I considered my role models.
Because of the power ascribed to sermons, there is a real danger of abuse. The sincere pastor can quickly turn into a huckster who desires to advance his own agenda. Even well-meaning pastors can do this. Have problems in the church? Have people upset with a decision you made? Preach on pastoral authority. Offerings down? Preach on tithing. Want a raise? Preach on the laborer being worthy of his hire or an elder being worthy of double the salary. Better yet, get an evangelist to come in and preach on these things. That way you can blame the evangelist if people are upset about the sermon subject matter.
Liberal or mainline pastors find discussions like this quite amusing. For the most part, they see the ministry as a profession, one used by God, but not in the way Evangelicals think it is. Most liberal/mainline pastors have far more education than their Evangelical counterparts. And their sermons often reflect it: dry, boring, meaningless exercises in intellectual nothingness. What happened to their passion, their emotions? Preaching without emotion and passion is not worth listening to. A preacher ought to give 100% of himself to the sermon. I can admire a pastor’s passion without necessarily agreeing with his message. I don’t believe God exists, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a well-crafted, passionately-delivered sermon.
From 2002 through 2008, my wife and I visited over a hundred churches. Most of the sermons we heard were forgettable, and sadly a lot of them were downright awful. We did hear a few pastors who took their calling seriously. It was evident that they worked very hard to deliver a good sermon. Regardless of what I believe about Christianity, I admire any person who works hard at his craft. I may despise the message, but I can still appreciate the way the messenger goes about his work.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
For many Evangelical church attendees, the manner in which the pastor gets his sermons has an aura of wonder about it. How does he, week after week, come up with sermons that speak directly to them? Where do these sermons come from? How are they prepared? In this two-part series, I will focus on pastors and their preaching.
I have little respect for lazy-ass preachers who rarely, if ever, spend any time crafting their own sermons. Week after week they rip off the work of others and pass it off as their own. They scour the Internet looking for sermons to preach. They subscribe to sermon clubs that provide them with new sermon material. They buy sermon outline books or lectionaries and use them to prepare sermons that they then pass off as their own; anything that allows them more time for schmoozing with their fellow clergymen at the local golf course or diner. In any other profession, they would be considered thieves.
Let me give a few examples of what I’m talking about.
In 2005, my family and I visited for a number of weeks at a local nondenominational church. On our second visit, I began to sense something wasn’t right about the pastor’s sermons. He quoted a lot of Scripture, but his quotations were from various Bible translations. Lots of them. I thought “hmm . . . there’s something about this that seems familiar.” I went home and consulted the mind of God (aka the Google) and my suspicions were quickly confirmed. The pastor was ripping off the sermons of Rick Warren and preaching them as his own, word for word. We visited this church half a dozen times and the pastor never preached an original sermon of his own. Ironically, one Sunday the pastor asked for testimonies from congregants and several people stood up and praised Jesus for how wonderful the pastor’s sermons were. I thought “If they only knew.”
For several years, on an off-and-on basis, we visited the local Episcopal church. When the parish priest was there the sermons, as a rule, were excellent. However, there were many Sundays when the priest was absent, and at those times the sermons ranged from mediocre to absolutely dreadful. The worst ones were the sermons that were taken from books, magazines, or lectionaries and read to the congregation (These sermons reminded me of some of the worthless college classes I took where the professor read the textbook to us). The justification for reading the sermon was “Hey, it is better than nothing.” No, it wasn’t.
In 1984 I invited a pastor I knew come to the church I was pastoring to hold a week of special meetings. He asked me what I wanted him to preach. He then proceeded to list off numerous sermons of other preachers which he had memorized — famous sermons by noted preachers. I was shocked by his willingness to rip off the sermons of others and pass them off as his own. I told him I would rather he preach his own material. Little did I know, at the time, that using sermons preached by others was a common practice.
Many pastors recycle their sermons. The average Baptist pastor changes churches every 2-3 years. No need to craft new sermons, just reuse the sermons you preached before. If they worked well in Ohio, surely they will work well in Texas, right? I remember one well-known evangelist named Phil Shuler who kept long silver cases filled with recordings of his previous sermons. After collecting his sermons for many years, he would just pick a recording to re-familiarize himself with the sermon and then preach it that night. Rarely did he preach new material.
One more example: in the mid-1980s, I managed a Christian bookstore in Newark, Ohio for Bill and Peggie Beard. Over the course of my employment, I came into contact with dozens of pastors from a variety of denominations. I was astounded by how many pastors bought sermon outline books or lectionaries. I was beginning to wonder if any preacher crafted his own sermons!
Now, I don’t necessarily blame a pastor for using bought sermon outlines or reading verbatim from a lectionary. Truth is, there are a lot of pastors who lack good communication skills and, in many cases, they received little training in proper sermon construction and delivery. I think some pastors know they suck at preaching, so they do what they can to limit their suckiness.
From 1976-1979, I attended Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan, an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution started by Tom Malone in 1954. Every preacher-in-training was required to take speech and homiletics. The speech class was pretty much a waste of time, and very little of the instruction transferred over to the art of preaching a sermon. In fact, my homiletics teacher, Levi Corey — a world-class preacher — told the class on day one that we needed to forget everything we were taught in speech class. According to him, preaching a sermon was all about the text and the pastor’s ability to deliver it passionately. Outlines and illustrations were essential to successfully delivering a sermon.
Years ago, I was acquainted with a pastor who had horrible preaching skills. He was a Bible college graduate, yet he didn’t even know how to make a sermon outline. I tried to show him how to make a basic outline, but he had a hard time understanding the process. His approach was quite simple: read the text, chase rabbits, bring it back to Jesus, pray, and give an altar call. I never heard this man preach a coherent sermon. While he had great people skills, his preaching, at every point, was lacking.
There are a lot of preachers like the man mentioned above. Poorly trained or lacking the requisite skills necessary to effectively communicate with others through a well-preached sermon, they go from church to church killing everything they touch. They may have great people skills, but if they can’t preach passionately and effectively, they often do more harm than good.
Far too many men become preachers because someone told them that their gift of gab made them great candidates for the ministry. The truth is, running on at the mouth is not a gift at all, especially in the pastorate. All of us have heard those sermons that drone on and on and on. Don’t blame the preacher. Blame the person who told him he would make a great pulpiteer.
By the way, what I have said here also applies to other teaching-related jobs in the church such as Sunday school teacher, youth leader, or bible-study leader. I’ve had to sit through more aimless, heresy-ridden, ill-prepared Sunday School lessons than I care to remember. One man, my high school Sunday school teacher, told me that he studied his lesson on Saturday night while he was sitting in the bathtub. As this man’s class on Sundays proved, a lack of preparation yields a barren crop.
Here’s my point: the ability to preach and teach is a gift (not in a supernatural sense) just like the ability to do virtually anything else people do. Each of us has things we do that come easily to us. We enjoy it. And if we are smart, we will further develop the things we enjoy. Far too many people spend their lifetime trying to become things they will never be good at. It’s less than honest to tell everyone they can be anything they want to be. The sky is not the limit, and, no, not everyone can become President. A lot of men enter the ministry lacking the requisite skills necessary to be a good preacher. They simply are in the wrong profession, but since they believe GOD called them to the ministry, they refuse to admit that maybe they might be better off doing something else.
Many pastors would have you believe that their sermons come directly from God. I know I believed this for many years. I was certain that God was leading and directing me to preach on a particular Biblical text. I believed that God was guiding me through the delivery of the sermon all the way to the altar call. I was simply God’s mouthpiece.
As I look back over the thousands of God-inspired sermons I preached, I can now see who it was that was guiding me. It wasn’t God. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit. It was me. Through my own thought processes, I decided what the church needed to hear. Sometimes I had an agenda that I wanted to advance and what better way to do so than to couch my agenda in “Thus saith the Lord” terms.
Preaching came easy for me. I loved the intellectual aspect of preparing the sermon. I loved to read and study, preparing my mind for delivering the sermon. I devoted hours of study to virtually every sermon I preached (though I also was quite comfortable preaching extemporaneously). While most preachers won’t admit it, lest they give the impression that they are taking praise and glory away from God, they love the attention that preaching brings their way. As a person who has struggled with self-esteem issues his entire life, I found the love, respect, and adoration showered on me by parishioners quite affirming.
Remembering my preaching is one of the things that makes my defection from the Christian faith so troubling for many former parishioners. As Baptists, we believed once saved, always saved (eternal security, perseverance of the saints). This means that once people put their faith and trust in Jesus they can never, ever lose their salvation. People are left, then, with either believing I am still a Christian or that I never was. Neither choice sits well with them, especially for those who heard me preach and viewed me as someone who played an important part in their spiritual formation.
I’ve been criticized for a lot of things I did as a pastor, and rightly so. I was arrogant, narrow-minded, and rarely put up with dissent. I ran off a lot of good people. That said, few people have ever criticized my preaching. For the most part, the people I pastored found my sermons well crafted, worth listening to, and, at times, quite humorous and entertaining.
Hundreds and hundreds of people made public professions of faith as a result of my sermons. Lives were changed and people were delivered from sins. If I was never saved, what does that say about all the fruit I gathered over the course of 25 years in the ministry? If by their fruits ye shall know them, surely I proved that I was a great fruit grower?
I have no doubt that I could, even as an atheist, go to a church and preach a sermon that everyone would find inspirational and entertaining. I’m sure those listening to me would think God was speaking through me or using me to touch their hearts. What if I then told them I was an atheist? How would they explain their response to my oratorical gem?
Effective preaching requires passion and charisma. Two of our recent presidents are good examples of what I mean here. Forget the party affiliation or platform for a moment. Who would you rather listen to giving a stump speech? Barack Obama or George W Bush?
Good preaching moves people to go beyond themselves. Good preaching inspires and motivates. A good example of this is Martin Luther King, Jr’s I Have a Dream speech. And this is why preachers who excel at their craft are so dangerous. The potential for abuse and manipulation is great. Far too often, parishioners check their minds at the church door. When the winsome, charismatic pastor preaches they soak up his words like a sponge. If they are not careful and cognizant of the potential for manipulation they can easily be led astray. (Please see Should a Christian Preacher Turned Atheist Stop Using His Public Speaking Skills?)
I still like hearing a well-crafted sermon. I respect people who attempt to excel at what they do. Sadly, I have heard more sorry, pathetic, poorly-crafted, rabbit-trail sermons than any one person should ever have to listen to. I feel sad for church members who have to sit under this kind of preaching week after week. In fact, they sit under it long enough that they begin to think that their preacher’s pathetic sermons are the norm.
Why I am being so hard of preachers? Why should I, a card-carrying atheist, give a rat’s ass over the quality of sermons in the Christian church?
First, preaching is what I did for many years and I still like to talk about it.
Second, I think people should do what they do well. I hate half-assed wherever I find it, whether it be in the pulpit or the local fast-food restaurant.
Third, I realize that the world is always going to be predominantly religious. If that is so, I think people of faith should have leaders that thoughtfully and honestly teach them the beliefs of their particular religions. They deserve to have leaders who are passionate about what they do. Sadly, in many denominations, the higher a man rises in the denominational hierarchy the more worthless he becomes. Does anyone consider any of the popes a great orator?
I know this post is pretty pointed. I am of the general opinion that the United States is awash in mediocrity. It seems everything has been turned into an audition for American Idol or America’s Got Talent. People are told that they can be whatever they want to be, so they become what they want to be and not what they ought to be. Result? School teachers who can’t teach. Retail workers without basic people skills. And yes, preachers who can’t preach.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
