The Social Gospel Nag

My wife and I have been searching for a new church in our new city for just over a year. We’ve settled on one, for now. But the search has been disconcerting. 

There are a hundred-and-one reasons. One is my own, slowly, dissolving faith. I keep hoping for a church that will run with my doubts, rather than try to assuage them, or deflect them, or (God forbid) covert me to some sort of orthodoxy.

Shub Niggurath is a fictional H.P. Lovecraft god.
One that can, apparently, inspire preachers to nag.

The search has also been disconcerting, if I’m totally honest, because many—by far the most—of the churches I’ve visited have been mostly made up of elderly people. They’ve been faithful for long lifetimes. They deserve an opportunity to rest from their labors, to enjoy the next generation take on leadership and choir seats. I remember when—in a different denomination—I preached to churches full of young people, young adults, and young marrieds. It made for better singing, better after-sermon coffee klatches, better bazaars and picnics and volunteers. It’s all gone now—if not in the denomination I used to serve as a minister in—at least it’s very rare in the churches I’ve checked out in my new city.

But among all the reasons (I could go on for a while) why mainline churches (and increasingly, Evangelical churches) are failing, the one that irks me the most is this—they are consumed by a form of works righteousness.
 
Works righteousness is the idea you have to do something to get in good with God. In Evangelical churches, it manifests itself in the preaching of moral codes, which if you keep (more or less, and as defined by your denomination or minister) you get heaven as a reward. The Trumpization of the Evangelical Church in the USA has put the lie to that. 
 
But in the UCC, we have our own unique kind of social gospel works righteousness. It’s the notion that unless we’re busy doing everything in our power to set the powers that be—government, institutions, systems—to right, we’re falling short. 
 
United Church works righteousness is a never-ending list of “to-do’s.” House the homeless. Challenge Israeli apartheid. Fight racism. Pursue peace. Be LGBTQ-friendly. Change the system. Save the planet. Change your habits. Call your MP. Donate. Plant a forest. Acknowledge our wrongs vis a vis First Nations. And on and on.
 
Ironically, there is not a single one of these “to-do’s” that I disagree with. I embrace every one, without qualification. I preached or have written about each one. I have been guilty of what I’m going to rail against in this post.
 
The problem is one of balance. You see, the only church that can effectively make a dent on these issues is a healthy church. Such churches are multi-generational. They play and are fun. They meet in and out of the sanctuary. They are full of laughter and full of informed care for those in the fellowship who need it. They are full of people who are focused on each other as the closest neighbours at hand, a practical training ground for all our other neighbours. 
 
But preachers who wave their finger, endlessly, at people, telling them what to do, how to do it, why to do it all—they are weighing church goers down and making staying church, or coming for the second or third time, very hard. 

The preacher nag inspires the same sort of negative reactions that mask mandates did. It isn't that the mask mandate was a dumb idea. It is that people don't want to be told, over and over. It infuriates most of us--or exhausts us before we begin.
 
The preacher nag, perhaps unintentionally, serves as a constant accusation that we have not measured up. It is imitative, in an odd way, of how newspapers—on TV or the web or even real paper—work. You put the murders first, the car crashes next, and finish with scandal. Op Ed pages are full of negative reads on each and every political decision and economic trend. Good news is either absent or buried. 
 
Our churches are similarly focused on all that’s wrong. We put the latest injustice first, then the worst looming ecological disaster next, and finish with what we better do or else last. Good news?
 
Look. Once again, I’m personally engaged in righting injustices, responding to disasters, and being politically involved. But as much as the church as a public institution and its members as citizens need to address many urgent matters, we should do so because the church has inspired us to gratitude and thanksgiving first. Too much nagging muddies our motivation and saps our energy.
 
Let’s preach dreams rooted in hope. I want to hear sermons that celebrate the good—and even the privilege—that so many of us experience; that celebrate starry nights, great music and art, real caring, an ancient tradition, forgiveness, sex, shared meals, and friendship. 
 
Let’s preach out of our gratitude rather than our civic and cultural problems and fears and injustices. Where is the light yoke promised by Jesus? Where is the community in love with each other—not just for Sunday coffee time—but communities that prioritize the knowing and sharing and mutual support that the New Testament so often speaks of? That’s the foundation of our love for all neighbours and strangers.
 
I long for the consolations of the gospel. I long for a spirituality that isn’t so much marching orders as it a magical spiritual mystery tour. I long to be inspired instead of commanded.
 
Look, the seventy- and eighty-year-olds who fill many United Church pews are true believers in the social gospel. Most of them don’t need to be convinced anymore. They’ve hung around when the UCC was among the first churches in Canada to truly welcome women to leadership. We lost a third or more of our membership making sure that LGBTQ people were not only welcomed, but celebrated, but they stuck with us. Our older members also hung around when we called for an end to apartheid and as we made steps to work out reconciliation with First Nations. The people who still come to our churches have fed the hungry, housed the homeless, donated to the United Church and its favorite causes, and on and on. They don’t need to be nagged to do more.
 
And younger people are looking for hope, for inspiration, for meaning amid so many crises—they don’t want to be nagged to do more and more and more either. They’re busy with families and two careers. They’re struggling to make mortgage or rent payments and to hang on to their temporary jobs in a gig economy. Even if we, here in Canada, are living through the materially best of times, most peaceful of times, many young people don’t experience it that way. What do we have to say to them besides “volunteer. Do more. Support. Vote. Go. Go. Go.”?
 

I’d love to see the United Church commit to some sort of reverse-sabbath pattern when it comes to pulpit nagging. That would be a commitment to limit our nagging to one Sunday in seven. A commitment in the rest of our preaching and lives together to focus on the old, old story (and some new ones!) because the way to change anyone’s heart is through the doorway of the imagination.  

 
I’m not lazy. I do my part. But I’m filled with spiritual yearning. I want meaning. Maybe I'm strange that way. I wake up wondering what it is all about. I feel vulnerable in a world more dangerous than we realize and I want to know whether there is hope. I want my church to have a psychic playground out back, where we can laugh and play together, feed each other and party. Where I can be rejuvenated. 
 
I get that other people might want wildly different things from church than what I want. But if we did a reverse Sabbath, we could use those other six Sundays to explore what other people are curious about when it comes to God and humanity and this planet. Bring it on.
 
But, oh. I’m so tired of being told what to do.
 
 

Six Hundred Sermons on the Wall, Six Hundred Sermons . . .

            This week, I’m going to preach a sermon about heaven. I’m not that keen on heaven as a sermon topic anymore. It isn’t that I don’t hope for some sort of wonderful surprise when I close my eyes the last time. It is just that I’m not counting on it. And I’m certainly not living for it or in fear of some other place. It strikes me that I need to live for this life and my current neighbours. If there is more, after, it’s all gravy. I think that's about what I'm going to preach, too.

            Still, I thought I should go back into my collection of old sermons and review my journey with respect to heaven and hell. I did a key-word search, and came up with a dozen good hits. I read what I had preached before, in another life. And I didn’t find anything that grabbed me or convinced me, though I did find a lot that made me shake my head and think, “I said that?”

            But this exercise got me to thinking about all my old sermons—about six hundred of them. I used to have two filing cabinets full of them. They were four-drawer behemoths. I carefully catalogued my sermons by text. Each sermon folder contained all of my false starts, all of the material that I had edited out of the final revision, and all my exegetical notes. Each file contained both the final manuscript, and a copy of the notes I took to the pulpit. On each folder cover I kept track of where I had preached the sermon, the computer file-name of each revision, and thoughts about how the sermon had gone over, as well as how it might be revised in the future.

           

            Early in my career as a preacher, the effort I put into cataloging, preserving, and reflecting on my sermons made a lot of sense. In my first congregation, in Sarnia, Ontario, I had to preach six times a month. I came to that congregation with twenty-five or so sermons “in the barrel” that I had written during seminary. I decided to use one of those sermons each month, so that I only had to write five new sermons each month. This meant there was only one week each month I had to write two.

            With vacations and study leaves, this plan got me through almost three years of ministry. In my fourth year I went back to the new sermons I had preached my first year, tried to improve them, switched out a few memorable stories, and preached them a second time. But I noticed that rewriting those four-year-old sermons was actually a lot of work. Those old sermons didn’t really please me anymore. They were all too long, and too sure, and too full of finger-waving, “thou shalts,” and “thou shalt nots.”

            With all the changes I had to make in those old sermons, it was a lot of work to stay ahead of my writing load that fourth year. It exhausted me. Happily for me and my family, my next congregation, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was a dual-pastor situation, and thus the pressure was off. I made sure to write at least three new sermons each month, and used only the occasional old sermon. By then I had a dozen or so that I was happy to preach again. But it was only a dozen out of 250 or so sermons. I couldn’t help but notice that there were many, many sermons that I wasn’t happy with at all. I found many of them to be too exact, too pointed, and too sure.

            After four years in Ann Arbor I move to Grand Rapids to edit the denominational magazine. My new routine was to preach as a guest pastor twice a month. However, I still only had a dozen sermons that I was really proud of—and not the same dozen I went to Ann Arbor with. Later, when the magazine switched from a weekly to biweekly and later monthly schedule, I had more time to write new sermons. I was probably averaging one a month for the last five years I was editor.

            I stayed out of parish ministry for a further six years, teaching at a seminary in the Philippines and working at a graduate school of philosophy back in Canada. When I returned to parish ministry, I found that hardly any of my old sermons spoke to me any more. My thinking had changed a lot. I experienced a lot of inner conflict about what I could, in good conscience, say. My new sermons reflected that ambivalence. I certainly never preached on heaven or hell, because I knew that there was nothing I could say that would be theologically acceptable and true to my own convictions.

            So now I’m in what I hope will be my last parish, in Toronto. It belongs to a different, much more liberal denomination, the United Church of Canada. I don’t think I’ve used an old sermon here, as is, ever. In fact, I’ve dumped the hard copies of all my old sermons, along with their exegetical notes and my reflections on them. These days, my old sermons survive only, ghost-like, in the cloud. They’re pretty much dead letters.

            So why am I thinking about all this? For a few reasons, I guess. One is that as I reflect on all those old sermons, I’m struck by the fact that I’ve changed my mind. And it has been good—an adventure, really.  I’ve changed my mind for a lot of reasons. I’ve read the Bible with more care, and a more open mind (I think). The world has changed. I’ve studied hard, because I enjoy doing so. I’ve read far more widely in theology and philosophy than the rather narrow canon I was introduced to in seminary. I’ve especially read a lot of secular hermeneutics, and it makes a lot of sense—though I know I’m only one and many others might disagree. I’ve also changed my mind because of my experiences in places like Rwanda and Hiroshima. These experiences have given me something akin to post-traumatic-theological stress. The old certainties I used to have don’t measure up to the new questions that sometimes still keep me awake. I guess I’m also a restless soul by nature.

            When I reflect on how I’ve changed my mind, I’m surprised that more ministers don’t change denominations. Does it mean they never change their minds about important matters? Have they stopped reading “tough” foundational stuff and stuck with nothing but pragmatic “how to grow your church” stuff? But I also know that when I published my last book, Not Sure, I was overwhelmed by the number of ministers—including many in my old denomination—who wrote me to say things like, “I’ve changed my mind too . . . but I just don’t know how to get out of the situation I’m in.” Many ministers are afraid to preach what they really think—or doubt.

            When I reflect on how I’ve changed my mind I’m not suggesting that every minister will become more liberal, like I did. Some might become more conservative, I suppose. But the fact that there is so little theological movement in most minister’s lives, over thirty or forty years, surprises me. I wonder, sometimes, if all of the dire statistics about ministerial burnout, depression, and unhappiness are related to the inability of most pastors to imagine changing course by moving to different denominations. Certainly, parishioners do it all the time. Why not us?

            I’ve changed my mind. But looking at all those old sermons also gets me to thinking about the many people who sat through sermons that I could now never preach again. Where does my change of mind leave them? I sometimes wish I could go back in time and offer a “ya, but!” in place of the sermons I actually preached.

            If nothing else, this suggests to me that parishioners should do more than sit in the pews and nod their heads. They need to wrestle with what they hear, listen with a very critical ear, and work to inform themselves of differing perspectives.

            I am not suggesting that they then go after the pastor who has preached something they disagree with. But if we could come to the preaching moment as if the sanctuary was a never-ending conversation between friends, rather than a “Thus says the Lord” [via the minister] moment, we’d be further ahead. Or, as I’ve said before, if we could think of the sanctuary as a playground rather than a lecture hall, we’d all be working for the day when we grow up a bit, mature to something else and move on, theologically at least. Perhaps then, as ministers, we wouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. In the end, after all, people come to know God more through our love for each other than through a particular (out of many to choose from) orthodoxy.

            I do have twenty hand-written sermons left in my last filing cabinet. They are catechism sermons written by my father over thirty years ago, just before he died. I read them over this week. My dad was always a bit insecure about his English, since it wasn't his native language. On the whole, though, he did pretty well on that score. He had a lot of practice, and worked hard at it.

            What struck me was that I didn’t find anything in his sermons that interested me. It was a different time, a different audience, and he was a different person. I suppose I read them as much for the bits of his self-disclosure as I did for his perspective. But on the whole, they didn’t speak to me.

            Just as my old sermons don’t speak to me, and won’t be heard by anyone, anymore. I’m thinking of erasing my disks, jettisoning all of them. I know my kids won’t read them either—no one will. It’s just hubris to keep them. What matters now is this coming week, this audience, this time. That’s what I have to focus on—as well as the text, whether it's a Biblical one or not—as I write my new sermons. Sure, each new sermon is ultimately going to be a brick in the wall that merely proves the truth of, “vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” On the other hand, for me at least, there is no life like writing a new sermon this week, and trying to get it right, for now.

Six More Thoughts on Preaching to Today's (less than deeply literate) Audiences

           Someone recently reminded me that I had once given a talk on preaching for secondary-oral audiences. What is a secondary-oral audience? Well, these are people who are merely literate rather than deeply literate. They read well-enough to manage the Toronto Sun sports pages or a Fifty Shades novel, but they don’t read literature, or deeply, or much at all.

            A great deal of communication scholarship, from pioneers like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, to modern brain-science scholars such as Stanislas Dehaene or Maryanne Wolf has argued, in fact, that the very act of watching television—and perhaps other modern forms of electronic media—even in small amounts, makes it much more difficult for people to read with understanding, read for multiple levels of meaning, and read for interiority—the emotions, thinking, feeling, and psche of characters. Instead, people need simplified vocabulary, lots of action, agons (near-supernatural heroes like vampires or wizards or Supermen) to move them along through a novel. The days of the unabridged Les Misreables are long gone; the musical version is in. And so on.

            The bottom line, with respect to preaching, is that preaching that mimics the linear, printed word and theology's abstract categories doesn’t connect with many in our audiences  nearly so well as it used to. People have no practice with such reading—and so hearing sermons written on the pattern of dense writing about abstract principles is doubly difficult to understand.

            Anyway, along the way, in that manuscript, I suggested ten strategies for reaching secondary oral. What follows here are six of those strategies beyond the ones that I suggested in my last blogpost, or that expand on them a little bit.

1. In the modernist, highly literate culture, we tended to understand good preaching as rational, ordered, three or four points, doctrinal or moral, with good illustrations. People listening to such sermons listen as readers, using their reading skills to decode the sermon as a written document. But since people no longer read as well, they are much less adept at doing so. So we must entice audiences to listen for stories.

In oral cultures, where no one read, preaching was designed not so much to engage the audience's critical faculties as it was to engage them in the story. Oral era preachers did so through wordplay and fun. Taking a cue from orality, sermons made use of complex rhetorical devices (mnemonic devices, commonplaces, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, repetition, and type scenes—which might be drawn from modern media) to ensure that they can be simply heard. We can learn much about the storyteller’s art from the Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, the Iliad, and the Atrahasis Epic, to name just a few ancient stories. In the premodern era, Augustine put it most simply by saying preachers must leave difficult ideas to books. I would add, "stick to one idea per sermon, and infuse it in the story.”

2. Use multiple channels to teach and preach the gospel. Oral cultures even employed a rich array of literary genres to teach the truth: morality plays, parables and proverbs for wisdom; story and statuary for telling the old, old story of scripture. All this color and variety was largely replaced, in print culture, by written doctrines & confessions explained in print and spoken discourse that imitated complex print. Churches threw out drama, statues, images, and organs. Sermon forms are linear, expository, narrative, doctrinal, and often very abstract.

Today our preaching audiences are full of people used to seeing icons and trademarks, who love watching visual images on television, and listen endlessly to music. We need to support our preaching by using other avenues than just the spoken word to get across key messages. We need to turn back to oral preaching for hints about how to reach today's post-literate audiences.

Consider bringing people and arts into the sermon. I'm thinking of film clips, staged settings for sermons that make use of cultural artifacts, banners, liturgical elements that use candles, visuals, and processions. The possibilities are nearly endless. I've preached sermons on how hard it is to get close to God from the top of a ladder, and sermons on forgiveness where I unpacked my baggage from a real suitcase. I used to regularly do part of the sermon as a five minute drama that was written by lay people in consultation with me. They had to understand what I was getting at to write the drama, and I had to work with them to make sure the quality was high and it fit seamlessly with the rest of the spoken message.

3. One problem that we have in today's church going audiences is that we have multiple kinds of audiences in the same sanctuary. I'm generalizing, but younger people who read less, with less pleasure, and who have not internalized the linear, rational model of literate Christianity inside are sitting next to people who love nothing more that that a sermon should--as it has for the past 400 years--mimic written documents. In order to address this reality, one possible approach is to offer multiple choices in their worship services to reach multiple kinds of oral/literate people, as well as blends. Truth is, we are a niched society not only in terms of marketing niches, but modernist/postmodernist, literate/oral audiences. So, think of offering two services, or three. One a Taize or jazz service, another a modernist rational presentation, and the third a sermon based on oral-era strategies

4. Exegete popular culture without ceasing, for yourself, and share what you learn with your audience. Your twenty-minute sermon is up against twenty or more hours of popular culture. People choose to spend their precious life on these entertainments, and they imbibe deeply in the values and hopes and dreams of such entertainments. You won’t win a battle for the hearts and souls by ignoring it or condemning it wholesale. Bring the TV shows, the stars, the bumper stickers, the toys, the games, the clothing, the games and the finances of popular culture into the pulpit. There is a rich, rich vein of critical literature about television, major league sports, the fashion industry and on and on. Find out where God is in it and celebrate that. Identify the potholes and put up warning signs. Make media literacy a high priority of your adult and teen education programs. Read John Van Sloten’s book, The Day Metallica Came to Church.

5. Churches must consider time constraints of members when it comes to Sunday morning liturgy and sermons. You need to come to grips with the short attention span that is an inevitable corollary of secondary orality. If you don’t, you may be right, but you’ll also be a bore. In our context, Jesus' parables and beatitudes are a better fit than Paul's letters.

6. Music. People learn their theology through music. I know this is tough for us pastors to accept. But if this was true even in a literate society, it is doubly and triply true in a post-literate society. We need musical words of our own to go along with the deadly misinformation conveyed by a steady diet of nothing but praise. We need room for lament too, and complaint—as in the Psalms. We need room for music that teaches morality. We must make peace with music that is a pale imitation of secular rock and roll because many relate to that genre; but we need lots of other genres too, songwriters who will mine the depths of the gospel instead of the shallows of human fashion.

What Does It Take to Write a Sermon?

     What does it take to write a sermon? Well, many books have been written on that topic, and all I have to offer here are a few suggestions. They’re borne in experience, have been tested by my homiletics students—and sometimes rejected. I admit that they’re a bit crotchety at points—I’ve been a preacher who has spent years sitting in the pew, and have heard far too many sermons that were clunkers not to be a bit crotchety, I guess. But take these suggestions for what they’re worth to you.

·       Preach good news. So much preaching is so full of the law, of the “do’s and don’ts” of the Pauline Epistles, of warnings against sin, of doctrines that confuse (“leave difficult things for books,” said Augustine), of platitudes, of distinctives that pit us against other Christians, and so on. The gospel is good news. It is joy. It is what parched lips long for. Offer living water, not dishwater; offer a light that shows the way to safe harbor; not a spotlight for keeping the crime rate low.

·       No recipe turns out great sermons unless one of the ingredients is a mysterious, creative, imaginative moment that contains the sermon’s nugget. Such moments are half gift from God, half talent, and half stubborn persistence. I had an old teacher (Marrion Snapper) who told me “the imagination is the door by which the Spirit enters our hearts.” If you read the Psalms or Jesus’ parables or the Song of Songs, you will understand.

·       Beauty is redemptive. The universe has an aesthetic dimension. It strikes me that one of the divine uses of beauty is its ability to turn us from the things that weigh us down to the heavens—or the poetry or temples—that declare the glory of God. Whether it is a song sung with holy passion, or a painting that sheds new light on something we would otherwise not have seen, or a sermon that seizes the heart as well as the brain—beauty has the power to turn us towards the divine. Cultivate beauty, especially in sermons.

·       Don’t mistake the sermon for advice (such as you’re reading here!). This is the pragmatic turn in preaching, absolutely at home with this age’s concern for self-help, easy maps to success, and ten bulleted points but no narrative. Preaching is about the story mostly, and only rarely, advice. The theological synonym for advice is “repent,” and its genre is prophecy. Real prophets are extremely reluctant.

·       On a more mundane level, write a manuscript. If you don’t, you’ll soon be preaching the same three sermons (or paragraphs or themes within a sermon), over and over. Manuscripts also force you to plainly state the tough issues (or beautiful truths) in a text that you might otherwise gloss over by speaking of them off the top of your head.

·       Writing a manuscript in not nearly enough. Editing is indispensable. Editing is the work of getting sloppy sermons into shape: making sure you’ve made your points to your satisfaction, finding the right turn of phrase, building fences between you and needless repetition or poorly thought out tangents, and giving yourself a script for practicing delivery or memorizing. I spend as much time editing as writing. It is also the only way I can build literary repetition, assonance, rhyme, and most especially, greater simplicity and economy into my sermon text. If you think you can do without a manuscript, listen to some politician or public official speak unscripted on the radio. It is usually very painful and not something I would volunteer to do from the pulpit.

·       What you do with the manuscript on Sunday is up to you. You can memorize your sermon. You can put it on note cards. You can take the manuscript in some form or other to the pulpit with you. On the pulpit, you can add or subtract—so long as you are aware of the temptation to add and subtract for lesser reasons. Beware, however—no pulpit strategy is so prone to failure as improvisation.

·       Don’t be too earnest. Yes, what you say seems important. But no one likes a nag. So relax. Spend more time on illustration, on humor, on retelling the story, and on reprising the good news. Spend less time trying to get it all in, or speaking as if this is their last, best chance to get it right. This is just one of up to 2500 or more times your parishioners might be in church to hear a sermon.

·       Be brief. Some people may be used to long sermons, but so what? A few stellar preachers may even have built a career out of hour-long sermons. And a few self-selected all-pro pew sitters may love long sermons. But are these the people you really need to reach? No. The youth, those who have not made up their minds, those who are visiting a church for the one time in their life and have learned to listen in front of a TV . . . I’m telling you, this country is ripe for preachers who can do good news in 20 minutes (1600 words) or less. Of course, that also means more editing.

·       Find ways to cultivate your imagination. Take a few small risks. Try an object lesson for a sermon. Write it as a children’s story. Copy the style/rhyme/brevity of a children’s story. Do it as a one-woman play. Poke fun at yourself. Project some art on the overhead and make it the outline for your sermon. Use a text other than scripture. The possibilities are endless even if the good news is one key thing.

·       Use self-disclosure. Build a relationship with your congregation that is rooted in the real you. Be honest and direct. I’m not talking about being a tattler or being self-absorbed or going on and on about the minutiae of your life or family. But strategic use of self-disclosure makes you, and therefore what you say, more real and believable.

·       Don’t spend too much time trying to say too much that’s too hard to understand. Simplicity isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It works with sermons too. But simplicity is very hard to achieve. Jesus did it well, Paul not nearly as well. However, in our media-saturated, non-linear, secondary-oral culture, people can’t follow complex or dense arguments nearly as well as they used to. They also don’t have the mental theological infrastructure to help them file what they hear. So simplicity is the tried and true way forward.

·       By all means, when some time has passed, pick up an old sermon and redo it for the second time the way it should have been done the first time.

·       Find a friend, usually a fellow pastor, who will ruthlessly dissect your sermons (with a little love left over). And then do the same for him or her. If you really do this, you will learn a lot. I met my first sermon critic each month over lunch. He taught me, for example, that preaching isn't nagging--much to the relief of my first congregation.

·       Accept failure with a smile. Learn from it. But don’t get too upset about it. No runner wins every race, though a real runner will enjoy every one.

     So what do you think? What would you add to this list? Or subtract? Or, if you listen to sermons, which piece of advice would you underline or add? Click the "comments" link below and add your two cents' worth.