The Pivot in Preaching: Moving from Text to Life, The Saga of Life and The Preaching Event & Writings of John Claypool
By Walter B. Shurden
John Claypool, Stages: The Art of Living the Expected (Waco, TX: Word Books Publisher, 1977, 90pp.)
John R. Claypool, The Saga of Life (New Orleans, LA: Insight Press, Inc., 2003, 95pp.)
John R. Claypool, The Preaching Event (Waco, TX: Word Incorporated, 1980, 139pp.)
One of the best white Baptist preachers and teachers of preachers in the South of our generation is Clyde E. Fant. In 1969 with weak knees I followed him as pastor at the First Baptist Church in Ruston, LA. I was 29-years-old and scared to death of the job. But I was maybe more intimidated by following Dr. Fant who had left Ruston to TEACH preaching at a Baptist seminary!
One Sunday night during worship (we still had worship back then on Sunday evenings), almost three whole years after I had been pastor, I called on good ole’ Fred Leachman to lead us in prayer. (Back then, we still called on people in the congregation to pray without warning.)
“Dear Lord,” Fred intoned, “We thank you that we are free to worship here tonight. And we ask you to bless Dr. Fant as he preaches to us.” After that, I have no idea what else Fred might have asked of the Almightyt!
Fant’s preaching was unforgettable and I know why. Years after I left Ruston, he visited us in our home in Louisville, KY. Sitting in the den after lunch, I asked him to tell me in a sentence the secret of good preaching. “Go for the text,” he said, “then go for the life.”
He rattled it off so quickly that I assumed he had been asked that question a 100 times. He had it down pat. His counsel for good preaching begged brevity: “Go for the text. Go for the life.”
John Claypool did that. He went for the biblical text, always with remarkable, amazing insight into its life. And he did it beautifully, Sunday after Sunday. In his second book, Stages, later retitled The Saga of Life, he went for the text of King David’s life. He then demonstrated how David’s life related to four developmental stages of our lives. In his third book, The Preaching Event, Claypool unpacked his theology and the practice of moving from text to life in the pulpit.
Stages/The Saga of Life is a book of four sermons Claypool preached in the mid 1970s at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, TX. The book had three lives. Word Books first published it in hardback in 1977 as Stages with the subtitle of The Art of Living the Expected. In 1980, Word reissued it as “A Key-Word Book” in paperback. Finally, Insight Press published it in 2003 under the title of The Saga of Life: Living Gracefully Through all of the Stages. Because it is more readily available today, the Insight publication of 2003 is the edition I cite here.
In their printed form, the four sermons of Stages/The Saga of Life read more like essays than sermons. One suspects Claypool elaborated in the print edition. He addressed four developmental stages of life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and senior adulthood.
Utilizing the life of King David as his biblical background, Claypool’s aim was “to blend the light of biblical wisdom with the best from the behavioral sciences” (20). And for what purposes? He wanted to help individuals understand the distinct challenges of each of the four stages of life.
This particular book mirrors John Claypool’s awareness of and interaction with his contemporary culture. He used Paul Tillich’s correlation method. Culture defined the issues and revelation provided the answers. Gail Sheehey, a journalist of the culture, published her blockbuster book, Passages, in 1976; it stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for three years. Claypool published his sermons the next year. Eric Erickson, the great developmental psychologist, preceded Sheehey and developed eight stages of human development. Claypool cites him in the book. While Claypool preached from the Bible, he did so in the full light of prevailing culture. Themes of his book even foreshadow James Fowler’s much more expansive and comprehensive 1981 Stages of Faith.
Claypool claimed modest hopes for the book: “First, to provide an individual with perspective on his or her own past, insight into his or her own present, and preparation for his or her own future; and second, to provide individuals some ‘handles of understanding’ in what is going on in the lives of family and friends who are at these various stages along life’s way” (22).
Regarding the stage of childhood, Claypool identified two needs: affirmation and expectation. The child needs to be affirmed and made to feel worthy. As one reads Claypool’s complete oeuvre, one becomes aware of how surprisingly personal this specific need was for him. He spoke often of feeling unworthy. Those of us who knew John Claypool ask in mystification, “How could John Claypool have ever doubted his self-worth?” But that he did reminds the rest of us of how universal is the need for self-affirmation.
But as the child needed to be affirmed, she also needed to be reminded of the accountability of her life. Being has an ethic to it. “No matter how secure a child may feel in the delight of his or her family, no matter how much self-worth may have been internalized, if he or she has not also developed a sense of responsibility to take what has been given and pass it on to others, then it is not likely that God’s dream for that child can ever come true” (37).
Adolescence, the second stage, said Claypool, finds one in “the valley of transition.” The young person moves from dependence to interdependence, learning that independence is a myth. During a child’s adolescence, the parent must step back without stepping out on the relationship, while the young person must walk forward without walking away from one’s sources.
Adulthood, Claypool’s third stage, is not a time of “arrival” when all things are settled. Rather it is a time of continuing areas of growth. He identifies three: vocation or generativity, intimacy or relationship with others, and inward growth or self-fulfillment. Claypool hammers away at one of the Achilles heels of many adult males, especially ministers: the need for balance between these areas. And one recalls Claypool’s own confession in another place that he was better at work than he was at home.
While Claypool excels at relating each of the stages of life to the life of David, he may be at his best when he writes of “senior adulthood.” Returning to one of the major themes of his preaching, that of self-worth, Claypool identifies the major shift in the senior years from doing and having to being.
Reading these four sermons reminds us that Claypool was a pastor, not simply a preacher. His sermons, though almost always universally applicable, were rooted in the needs of local congregations. He was more than preacher; he was church visionary, church theologian and church educator. His sermons were designed to help the real people who sat before him each Sunday to make it through another week.
John A. Broadus, Edward McNeill Poteat and John R. Claypool are the only three Southern Baptist ministers to give the celebrated Lyman Beecher lectures on preaching at Yale University. Though invited, Carlyle Marney died before he could deliver his lectures in 1980.
Claypool contended that when preaching is done “authentically, something of enormous significance takes place. An event occurs, where power of the deepest sort moves out of one human being to affect other human beings” (31). Therefore, he called his four Beecher Lectures The Preaching Event in which he sought to answer the what, the why, the how, and the when of the preaching event.
What is it that the preacher does when standing to preach? What is the objective? It is “to establish a relation of trust between the human creature and the ultimate Creator. Reconciliation of the profoundest sort is the true business of the preacher . . .” (36). A relationship has been broken! We are not simply frail and flawed creatures. We are insurgents, rebels! The preacher’s role, says Claypool, is that of reconciler.
Why does the preacher do what she does? What is the motivation? “Am I trying to get something from the audience for myself, or am I intent on giving something of myself to the audience” (57)? Drawing on C. S. Lewis, as he often did, Claypool contrasts “need-love” with “gift-love.” He said out loud what every preacher knows deep in her bones. There is a “high” to preaching. One becomes easily addicted to the plaudits. What the preacher needs often trumps what the preacher gives. Claypool understood the preacher as a gift-giver.
How does the preacher do what he does? What methodology did Claypool recommend? “We will make our greatest impact in preaching when we dare to make available to the woundedness of others what we have learned through an honest grappling with our own woundedness” (86-87). Here Claypool called for what he is best known: confessional preaching. Truth, he insisted, has the best chance of happening through us if we admit how it happened to us. So how does a preacher preach? As a witness!
In the final chapter, Claypool addressed the timeliness or the when of preaching. “There are teachable moments and appropriate occasions when things are possible that could never have been before and never could be again” (115). Here the preacher is nurturer, one who “who works with growing things” and understands timing, what to do when.
Mary Oliver believed poetry was life-transforming. She said, “For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” John R. Claypool believed exactly that about The Preaching Event.
While I cannot vouch for it nor do I know if it is simply a common practice at the Beecher Lectures, I heard that when John Claypool finished his lectures at Yale the audience stood immediately with a boisterous ovation. I would have stood with them, quickly, gladly, had I been there.
— Walter Shurden is a Baptist scholar, preacher, writer, and mentor to many. He is an emeritus professor at Mercer University and lives in Macon, GA with his wife, Kay. This essay is the second in a 6-part series which he has written for Christian Ethics Today.
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