If you’ve ever heard a sermon entitled “A Plethora of Pentateuch Principles for Preventing Pre-Teen Promiscuity and Potent Punishments for the Perverted Participants” chances are it was in a fundamentalist church.
(I’m out of town traveling on business this week so updates are likely to be a little sparse.)
Somewhere in a fundamentalist church a guest speaker is wrapping up his thunderous sermon. He swigs a last sip of water from the cup on the pulpit and invites the pastor back to the so he can “draw the net” with the invitation.
The pastor thanks the speaker grandly for his wonderful message and then says the fateful words “I just want to talk for a minute and add a few things to what our brother said.” An audible groan goes through the congregation because they know full well that at this point begins the phenomenon of the second sermon which could last any length of time regardless of how long the first sermon was. Fundamentalists preachers are not slaves to any man’s clock.
A variation on the second sermon may also come in the form of the closing prayer. Some pastors who have missed the chance to preach themselves in a service have been known to insert a full three points into the closing prayer complete with alliteration. Hopefully nobody was hoping to see the kickoff of a football game or beat the rush to the local buffet for lunch.
(many thanks to stan for the suggestion)
Because of their emphasis on separation, the body of approved source material for fundamentalists is a very small and often changing list. Quite often when a fundamentalist goes to look for a book or sermon on a given topic there just isn’t one by one of the three fundamentalist leaders he’s still on good terms with. This problem has created an extensive taxonomy of disclaimers as fundamentalists attempt to quote experts while maintaining a proper separated distance.
The Anonymous Quote The easiest way to avoid being pinned down to supporting a particular person is just not to name them at all. Pastors use this one all the time. “Someone once wrote…”
The Parenthetical You can slip the warning right into the middle: “I’d like to read this quote by John MacArthur — now we know that John MacArthur is a Calvinist and that you just can’t trust anything he says about salvation, the gospel, or witnessing but I’d like to read this anyway…”
The Vague Warning This is the catch-all warning for when a speaker just doesn’t want to get into it: “Unlike the books written by fundamentalists, you need to read this book with a lot of discernment but there is this one good sentence which reads…”
The Book Label “The contents of this book are not necessarily endorsed by [insert institution name here]. In fact this book may be complete heresy but we keep it in our library anyway in case there is something that really fits well into a sermon illustration someday.”
When you’re separated from everyone it sure does make using a good quote tricky. Imagine a fundamentalist pastor repeating something he read on this blog for example…
Many modern preachers have discontinued the use of a pulpit, preferring instead to roam the stage freely sporting headset mics and using slide presentations. Fundamentalists, however, remain big fans of the old-fashioned pulpit and continue to put flowers in front of it and bestow upon it the title of the “sacred desk.”
The pulpit itself is no mere common piece of furniture for it has countless uses to the fundamentalist preacher. Among these are…
So synonymous is this wooden box with the pastor himself that the search for a new pastor is carried out by a “pulpit committee.” Beware to those who would handle it carelessly lest they be struck down.
There are a couple of recurring characters in fundamentalist illustrations:Â the errant teenager, the king who makes employment decisions based on fantastical tests involving driving a coach near the edge of a cliff, and the ever-present God-hating atheist.
The atheist is a great character for a story because he’s a polarizing figure. Like the man in the black hat in a an old western, it’s obvious who’s side he’s on. It’s no accident that there are very few sermon illustrations involving Unitarians, the Amish, or others who just generally get along with everybody. Also, in a country where over ninety percent of people claim to believe in some kind of God, it’s easy enough to claim whatever you’d like about atheists; chances are there won’t be one in attendance to contradict you.
Whether the atheist is standing in a park challenging God to strike him dead, verbally fencing with a surprisingly astute freshman at a university, or being converted on his deathbed by an evangelist, the story is sure to be equal parts gripping and appalling. It’s even better if you name a famous atheist in your story — whether or not you can actually document that it’s true. Fundamentalists never let a lack of source material get in the way of a good story. Voltaire would hardly recognize himself.
The fool hath said in his heart there is no God. But at least while he’s at it he provides a lot of good illustration material. fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.