A Fine Time for Failure

By Daniel Schantz

It’s good to be humbled early in life, I think, because the only direction you can go from humiliation is “up.”

I was just nineteen when I first realized this. I was a sophomore at Great Lakes Bible College in Lansing, Michigan, and I had been supply preaching since I was fifteen. Already I had a fistful of sermonic masterpieces which I had inflicted on unsuspecting churches in southern Michigan,  such as South Haven, St. Joe, Niles, and Charlotte.

My transport was a 1949 royal blue Studebaker, a homely, rusty sedan, given to me by a deacon in the Niles church. Like most Studebakers it burned oil, and it put out more smoke than a crop duster. To me, however, it was a royal blue limousine, because it was mine.

I took preaching seriously, and I took advantage of every opportunity to learn to speak. So, when the president of the college asked me to give a devotional at a student appreciation banquet to be held at a pancake restaurant in two weeks, I said, “Yes!”

A devotional is like a mini-sermon, but it can be harder to construct than a full length sermon, because every word must count. Right away I began looking for a sure-fire topic that would so captivate these gluttonous academic animals that they would forget even to eat.  I settled on one of the parables, and for two weeks I immersed myself in commentaries and word studies. Then I went out back behind the college and strolled along the Grand River, rehearsing my talk. All this for a fifteen minute talk.

The night before the breakfast I struggled to sleep, distracted by glorious visions of the restaurant where I would speak. I figured that the breakfast would be held in a nice, quiet, private room, such as “The Buttermilk Room,” or “The Sausage Parlor.”  My fellow students would be there to cheer me on, but there would also be prestigious professors and significant staff people in the audience. The president would give me a flattering introduction, then  a hush would come over the student body as I began to speak. My talk would be short, but so was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Churchill’s “beaches” speech.

The next day I discovered that the pancake place was much smaller than I imagined, and it reeked of sausage, syrup, and cigarette smoke. Above all, it was busy and noisy.

There were no private rooms, just one large room, divided into two rooms by an archway. In the right room, regular customers were dining,  and in the left room, college students were gathering.  I sat by the archway, facing the student side, but I just nibbled on my breakfast, anxious to get on with my talk.

At last it was time for the president to introduce me, but instead, he just pointed to me and said, “You’re on, Danny.”

I leaped to my feet and began to speak with great energy, but the room was so noisy that my voice sounded  like a whisper. Then I noticed that hardly any students were even looking my direction, because they were distracted by a television on a shelf to my right, which was broadcasting a ballgame. Some students were still eating, stuffing their faces with crepe suzettes and gulping down orange juice. Behind me I could hear the cooks in the kitchen, banging pots and pans and yelling at each other.

As I spoke, pretty waitresses traipsed back and forth in front of me, toting tall platters of buttermilk pancakes, topped with Michigan blueberries as big as golf balls, and ready to be  drowned in Mrs. Butterworth’s sweetness.

“How can I compete with this?” I was wondering. “Is anyone in this room paying any attention to me?”

It was my first taste of the loneliness of preaching, and I began to skip sections of my notes, hoping to euthanize this sham situation.

At last I was done, and I fled to my seat between my girlfriend, Sharon, and my best friend, John.

Sharon patted me on the arm and said. “That was just fine,” but “fine” is like a swear word to someone who was hoping for something like “fantastic” or “fabulous.”

I turned and whispered to my friend, John. “Could you hear me okay?” I was fishing for a compliment, but he just hung his head and said, “I’m sorry, Danny, but we hardly heard a word you said.”

I was devastated, and I felt like crying. I had wasted many hours of preparation and chewed a lot of fingernails for nothing,

It was my first experience with public failure, but it taught me two lessons that every preacher needs to learn, early on.

One, is that no matter how gifted you are and no matter how hard you prepare, the world does not revolve around you. Not that I am totally unimportant, but neither am I all-important.  I am  to think “soberly” about myself,  according to the apostle Paul in Romans 12:3, and not to be intoxicated with my own significance.

The second lesson is that success is not always under your control. Unless you own the restaurant, you cannot control all the noise. There is a lot of noise in every church: people with different ideas from yours, leaders who don’t share your enthusiasm, and mean-spirited members who actually work against you. These are things beyond your control, so you should not beat up on yourself when your ideas don’t “fly,” on first launch. Maybe someday they will.

Now, 63 years later, I have preached several thousand sermons. Some of them were successful, but some of them seemed like fizzles. The trouble is, I don’t always know which are which. That performance sermon I preached, with all the funny stories, seemed to be a great success, but was it? And that conventional sermon with lots of Scripture and tedious explanations may have been the one that saved a marriage, or a soul, or inspired someone into Christian service.

The truth is, preaching is an act of faith. I work hard on my sermons, and I deliver them with all the energy I have. But when I am done, I turn them over to God, who alone knows how to pierce the hearts of men and women with His Word.

Daniel Schantz is a professor emeritus of Central Christian College of the Bible, Moberly, MO.

Author: Christian Standard

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