Writing as a Ministry

Chapter 4

Preface
Again, we return to our motto, since there is probably no area of greater variation in how the Lord works in writers' lives than in this matter of interlinking between writing and speaking. So, again: Go where grace entices thee; perfection lies in this. Or being translated: Let the Holy Spirit guide your life as to your particular opportunity and responsibility. Let's examine some principles; the first item links with what I've just said in a prefatory way.

Point 31: Some writers do not and should not have a speaking ministry.
We are differing people. For some of us, speaking is part of the ministry. This actually is true whether one is a secular writer or Christian. Writers function in very differing ways. If you remember your high school English text or college courses, can you imagine Emily Dickinson appearing for public readings? No, Emily Dickinson was so private a writer that very few of her poems even saw publication in her own lifetime.

If you know the very popular writer of some years ago, J.D. Salinger who wrote Catcher in the Rye ... if you know about his utter privacy and his refusal to grant interviews, can you imagine him coming from seclusion to give an interview on The Today Show? No, that isn't the way his mind works nor his personality, but Christian poet Chad Walsh has been on The Today Show. There are differences of opportunity and of personality.

Point 32: For some writers, the speaking ministry is the transient part of their service.
At this point, I think I would think of my friend Eugenia Price, as I think I've mentioned before. After her conversion, Eugenia Price found ministry through her autobiography, through earlier writing, and through vast speaking. She sped across this country, catching trains in the middle of the night, speaking here, speaking there. But after a time, it seemed to her that the Lord was just tapping her on the shoulder and that her real responsibility would to be in writing books, and that she must accomplish this through more seclusion, more privacy. So that now, she doesn't even welcome callers to her home except for very special things and arrangements as she lives quietly off the coast of Georgia on Saint Simons Island.

Point 33: For some people, a speaking ministry is actually a prelude to a writing ministry.
Think of the people you know. Doesn't it rather often work that way? If you go in any Christian bookstore, notice how many volumes you encounter that have actually come from the typewriter or word processors or secretarial help of eminent preachers. Billy Graham has had a vast speaking ministry around the world. Billy Graham now also has a writing ministry that has flowed out through that. Chuck Swindoll. The pastor of Moody Church, Irvin Luther, speaks all the time and from his speaking, some of the sermons have been reworked into effective books. It may happen and not just at that level of a very eminent preacher.

[Editor's note: I wonder how Dr. Mac would have reacted to this adaptation of her speaking series. I think she would have smiled. :-)]

A few weeks ago at our commencement time, a woman was back for an alumni reunion - she must have graduated about 25 years ago - and she told me with quiet joy that she was moving toward a writing ministry, she was quite sure. The step toward that was that a church near where she and her husband lived had been left without a pastor. She had been invited to serve as pastor of the church, and as she prepared sermons for that small local church, she felt ideas welling within herself, and she was quite sure that she was moving toward a writing ministry. I suspect she's right. I suspect for her that the speaking ministry was a prelude to the writing ministry.

Actually, as I've been thinking about this in recent weeks, it occurred to me that in a sense it's archetypal that the speaking should precede the writing. After all, in the literature of the world from ancient Greece to ancient England with Beowulf and the rest of it, the speaking has often preceded the writing. People told stories around campfires in all primitive cultures before the written ministry or written literature took shape.

Point 34: For many of us, writing and speaking obviously intertwine.
Writing and speaking intertwine habitually and inseparably. If we follow what seems to be right for us, we're both the speaker writing and the writer speaking. Obviously this morning, our focus is on the latter, the writer who is speaking. I've mentioned C.S. Lewis already quite a few times, but let's mention him again. Think of C.S. Lewis as a superlative example in this area. As you read the biography of C.S. Lewis, it's obvious that you see him constantly move from one role to the other. Lecturing with his vast knowledge of literature as a professor, then writing his massive study of Paradise Lost from the material he was lecturing about to his students at Oxford or Cambridge ... giving his talks on the British broadcasting network and then writing those talks in a polished way for release and publication. Maybe he had them fully polished before he gave them on the radio. I suspect that he did.

At any rate, these were talks which were also published materials ,,, writing in the Narnia fantasies and in his great works in Christian apologetics ... talking interminably. If you read much about the life of Lewis, Lewis was talker par excellence. Talking with his friends in the common rooms at the universities, talking with his brother, talking with his wife who he obviously enjoyed as a co-conversation person in a great way. Then, writing his many, many letters. You have probably seen some of the books now collected from the letters that Lewis wrote in which he was the writer writing, but the conversations were flowing to that. So that indeed, writing and speaking may intertwine. What about you? Well I can't say, "What about you?" That's for you to work out with the Lord.

Point 35: To speak the ideas too freely may lessen the compulsion to write those ideas.
Sometimes to speak the ideas too freely may lessen the compulsion to write those ideas. Since my teaching field is English, I from time to time have to tell about the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You may know that Samuel Taylor Coleridge actually wrote relatively little poetry in his lifetime. He talked all the time and was a compulsive speaker apparently in every circle he encountered, and his friends felt that some of his best books were the ones he poured out in speech but didn't get on to paper at all. The handling of the ideas was a part of his talkative nature, but the very act of pouring out the ideas in conversation or lecture seemed to diminish some of the compulsion to write.

You may know also the life of Samuel Johnson who made a very great contribution to writing, compiling that great dictionary and other things, but if we didn't have Boswell who recorded the life of Johnson, we'd know much less of Johnson's thought than we do. Again, he was a compulsive talker. He poured out ideas all the while. It happened that Boswell was around taking down shorthand notes and recording things. I'm not sure many of us would have a "Boswell" around, writing down everything that we utter that should be kept for posterity, and sometimes the very speaking lessens the impulse.

As I was jotting this down, I thought about some colleagues I've had over the years, some very brilliant people in classroom lecturing. People, who in a conversation group over coffee in a faculty lounge, can talk and talk and talk brilliantly. But some of those same people who seem to pour out ideas so wonderfully in classroom lectures and conversation, find it just impossible to stay at a typewriter long enough to get things in typed script and get them off for editors to inspect. And, in fact, some indeed have the ABD (All But Dissertation) so far as graduate level achievement. There's a great joy in the ideas in working with them, but there's a difference in the discipline of getting the ideas in writing. So, there's that to keep in mind.

Point 36: Things may change during different seasons of our lives.
I heard a very wise Christian sociologist in California one time, speaking to a faculty women's retreat, actually. He said, "Remember, life is lived in chapters. Make the most of the present chapter of your life. It won't last always. There will be another chapter. Make the most of the present chapter in your lives." This would hook on to my comment the other day that we need to get on with the rest of our lives along with our being writers in circumstance. Dwight Small in that comment was speaking particularly to young mothers in the listening group, and he said, "Right now you feel frustrated by the mountains of diapers, but your toddlers won't be around very long. Make the most of this chapter of your life." And I think it applies in many other circumstances.

Let me mention a small episode from my own life. When I came back from my sabbatical in Britain, ideas were just turmoiling around inside me. I arrived just before school started the following year, and all year I had just felt this great compulsion to get some writing done. The following summer, I did something I've never done before and may never do again, but I just dedicated that summer to writing. And, I actually sent out a memo to my colleagues and said, "This summer, I'm writing. If there's a topic on which is important enough that you would call me if I were still in England, feel free to call me. Otherwise, I'm writing."

One of my good colleagues almost thought I was going off the deep end when he telephoned one day to say, "What time are you going to the banquet? I'll go along with you." (A group was on campus visiting) I said, "I'm not going to that banquet. This is my summer for writing." Well, he just thought I was carrying this a bit far, but it actually was an immensely productive summer.

I ruled off my day with one part of the day for new reading; one of the day for new writing, new poems, revising of poems, and one part of the day for practicalities of shipping things to editors. And even though I'm exceedingly amateur at the piano, I even ruled off a bit of time to sit at the piano tuning up my soul for the writing experiences. For that summer, it was right; and again, things may change during different seasons of our life.

Point 37: If you speak it, file it.
If you speak it, file it. I'm not thinking now the conversations in the coffee shop, but if you prepare something fully enough to give a thought - a book review to a club in town, talk to a youth group - whatever it is. If you think it through enough to prepare it for public presentation in speaking, then you may want to use it again in writing. Let me tell you one small classic case of my own experience. This is a bit involved, but bear with me.

Several years ago, our good chapel director of the year, Jim Reinhard, arranged for several faculty couples to come to chapel and give presentations on "How God Has Worked in Our Lives." It was very significant. Students responded very warmly to the candor and real sincerity with which those couples gave their presentation. I was chatting with my good friend Jim a few days after the last presentation, and I said, "That's been a great series." But I said, "You know…you made it sound as though God works only in couples." His secretary giggled and asked if I was applying for a chapel talk. I laughed and went on back to my office.

Then, after I got back to my home, I felt the inner nudge, and I picked up the phone and said, "Jim, if you need a chapel speaker, you know I'm always available." "All right. I'll take you up on that." I think I never have worked harder on any chapel talk I've given so far as getting it into a polished form. In talking about how God had worked in my life as a single, I wanted things not to come out backward in phrasing. So, I did write it in full manuscript as I seldom do. I prefer to speak to the eyes in front of me rather than from full manuscript, but I did work it out with some care.

After I had given the chapel talk - parenthesis, I took a title from my friend Eugenia Price. "God doesn't promise matrimony. He promises himself." And essentially I told the students that day, that so far as I perceive, one of the ways God has worked in my life was to pull out of it some of the men who would have made a very tangled state of affairs had they stayed within it. God works in different ways in different lives, and I added other things about books and music and other examples of God's working in my life, but I made that fairly emphatic. After the chapel talk, Jim Reinhard and someone else of authority around our place said to me, "You ought to send that to some magazine. Try Eternity magazine." And after those nudgings, I did indeed ship it off, and it appeared. I don't know that I've ever had nicer artwork. It appeared verbatim just as I had prepared it for the chapel talk. It went into print in Eternity magazine.

Then there's a further nudge to that. As you know already, one Les Keylock was after me to write a book on singles a little later on in my life, and after he had suggested the idea, I wrote back saying, "If you want a sociological kind of comment, statistics, and so on, I'm certainly not the one." And, I said I have done a lot of thinking this direction obviously. I did give a wedding shower for a friend on my sixteenth birthday and I've been around the pairing of people ever since. I sent off to him that magazine article. He wrote back with "Keylockian" exuberance and said, "That's the kind of thing we want. Do think further about this idea of writing." So it was indeed a kind of preface for what I referred to when I was talking about my book, Free to Be Single. It was an interweaving, then, of writing and speaking in that particular episode in my life.

In contrast, I did quite a lot of speaking during the time I taught at Seattle Pacific. There was something about someone just out of graduate school with various ideas that seemed to attract churches around the area. When I packed up my stuff to leave from Seattle to move to Greenville, I don't think I kept one single note from those talks that I gave in the Seattle area. So, if you speak it, file it. Right now, I'm rather constantly urging our president to keep his notes from the Sunday school class he teaches, which I attend, and I think there may be a book coming out one of those times…if he files those notes.

Point 38: There can be a special joy and awareness of mission when you speak to the eyes in front of you, if it's right for that time and circumstance, and if speaking is indeed your designation.
There can be a particular joy in the speaking experience. Let me mention two or three examples just to elaborate on this thought. One of my really early awarenesses of the possibility that speaking can be joy and outreach came when I was a teenager and our youth group went off to the adjoining town to give a program in another church. I vividly remember an older woman who came to the youth program. I didn't get acquainted with her at all, but she sat on an aisle very clearly in my line of vision. Her radiant face and her little nod all the way through the brief time I was speaking was just a real uplift, and I knew a resonance and a sense of joy in having a chance to contribute at that time.

While I was on sabbatical in California at Westmont College, I was invited to speak at a women's retreat. I think I have never approached a group that seemed to have had so much prayer preparation. The women who came to that retreat had obviously had it in their calendars and in their awareness and had been praying toward it. And jokingly, and yet to a certain extent seriously, I said afterward, "They were so ready for blessing that if I had stood up there and recited the alphabet, they would have thanked me and praised the Lord." There was just a sense of deep interaction and appreciation. There can be a joy in the speaking experience.

Not always at that level … In the immediate past semester, I had in freshman English a young man who comes from a very troubled background - broken home, and I think his mother is hospitalized from medical problems - but he established a sense of identity. I became a kind of "auntly" figure to him. He would sit in his back corner of the room with his head sort of cocked and a slight nod every now and again that said, "I'm hearing you." When I was giving information about comma splices and the rest of it, there was a sense of the contact of the Spirit. I knew again that there can be a special joy if and when speaking is a right responsibility.

One of my more startling opportunities, I'll linger over for a moment…The first time I was abroad, I was a guest in the home of one Ethel Huston of Edinburgh. Some of you might know James Huston who is active in Christian circles in the British Columbia area and has been active in Regent College. Ethel is the sister of James Huston. The contact came through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. She had not met me nor I her, but we'd had a bit of correspondence. She had invited me up to stay in the Huston home and use that as my base of operation in seeing Scotland a bit.

I was a little taken aback when she met me at the train and before we had even arrived at her home, she announced to me that I was going to be her speaker at a women's prison on the following Sunday or Thursday or whatever it was. She was a young lawyer, or solicitor in British terms. She had a standing arrangement to play games with women at a prison during a given hour of their time, and in the following hour to have a devotional service with them. Well, I could hardly turn her down when she was, after all, offering me hospitality for ten days of seeing Scotland, but I was a bit taken back. I had with me one Bible and one notebook. I had no library facilities at all. I did have one of the poems I had worked on not too long before, insufficiently memorized; but I was able to write it down, I will bid into my comments. I endeavored to bring from scripture phrasing that the Lord had put on my heart for that time, and I wish I had now a videotape of the women in that prison as I endeavored to share with them the concept of newness in Christ. The trembling, intense response on those faces made me know that if a speaking responsibility comes to us, it may be indeed a reason for joy.

Point 39: The speaker/listener opportunity will not come again.
The speaker/listener opportunity will not come again. Among the Latin mottoes you met in high school, you may have encountered the phrase "carpe diem," which translated means "seize the day." Snatch the opportunity. Catch the chance while it's here. If we put things into written form - an article, a poem, a book - then the material is around and a person may come back to it and meditate on it and think about it and use it. And, that's great. That's one kind of ministry.

If it's a matter of the spoken voice, and the moment for that time, then it is one segment of eternity that will not be duplicated. The chance is there. It has then a special kind of intensity. It just won't come again. As I was thinking about this, I called my great colleague Frank Thompson and asked him, "Which philosopher was it in ancient Greece who said, 'You can't step in the same river twice.'" He saved me going to a reference book. "Zeno," he said quickly.” That's one of his paradoxes. You put your foot in a river, Zeno thought, and you pull your foot out. You put it in again, and it's a different river. The water has passed by. It is not the same circumstance.” So, in the speaking situation, if you're talking to a young people's group at a youth camp or to a book review session or whatever it is, it's the opportunity of the moment.

Point 40: When the speaking ministry comes, speaking needs an immediacy of prayer preparation.
When the speaking opportunity comes, speaking needs an immediacy of prayer preparation. We want the daily heart contact with God, as Les was urging us a while ago. We want anything we write to be touched by our contact with God, but it seems to me that there is a bit of difference in the light of the sense of the transiency of the speaking opportunity. Perhaps we could say in one sense - if you have a chance to speak, when you have a responsibility to speak - there might be more immediately a direct line through you between God and audience. And, we need to walk carefully before the Lord at this point and to think especially of heart preparation for speaking opportunities.

Point 41: There's a saying that happiness is always a byproduct.
Could we transfer that? Like happiness, the writer's speaking ministry is often a byproduct. I'm not so sure you can say, "I'm going to have ten speaking appointments this year." They come as they come, and one thing may lead to another. It is often a matter of moving forward with other circumstances and responsibilities and then the speaking opportunities work out from there. It's a matter of sensing the daily guidance, working on from one thing to another.

When I was working on the little book, When a Father is Hard to Honor, I certainly didn't sit at the typewriter and say to myself, "This will open up some interesting opportunities in speaking for me.” I don't think any thought of that ever crossed my mind. But in the chain of circumstance, because the book touched on an important topic in America today, I did have some very interesting opportunities open line through Moody Bible Institute in which I talked to people across the nation one time. Another open line contact, a couple of TV interviews, one in St. Louis and one on Channel 8 here in Chicago. Those speaking opportunities were byproducts from the responsibility I had felt in the writing.

Point 42: We will often need to make a conscious effort to leave the results with God.
We do what we feel a responsibility to do. We follow the opportunities that come, if they seem right to us at that time. Then, we need sometimes to make a conscious effort to leave the consequences with God. Practically speaking, I think you should recognize that if you're sensitive enough to be a writer, you're sensitive enough also to feel self-accusing and disappointed sometimes. You're asked to speak, things don't always seem to go the way you wanted, and you beat yourself about it. Have you had that happen?

I remember coming from Urbana back to Greenville one time some years ago in the same auto with Bishop Leslie R. Marston when he had spoken at the funeral of Dr. Arthur Secord. Dr. Secord was an eminent professor at the University of Illinois, and I was just astounded at the way this eminent of a person as Bishop Marston was chiding himself. He felt that he had not really reached the university people who were there paying honor to Dr. Secord. He didn't like the way his sermon had gone. Here was this eminent bishop who had spoken to audiences everywhere … I took heart a bit. If a man like Bishop Marston could leave that discouraged after a presentation, what about me? But realistically, if you're sensitive enough to be a writer - sensitivity is one of the prerequisites - then you are sensitive enough to feel discouraged. So you need to keep in mind that we need to leave the consequences with God. God - If I understand rightly - asks us to be faithful. He doesn't require us to succeed by our own standards.

Point 43: Sometimes, a total success may be composed of many little failures.
This is a little McAllaster proverb I've been putting at people for quite a while now: Sometimes, it does seem to me, a total success may be composed of many little failures. You teach a Sunday school class, and you're discouraged about how Johnny behaved in the back row. You're giving a talk at a women's group, and you don't quite feel comfortable with the response you got - there are feelings of failure about this and this and this. But those various efforts combine in a way that cause good things in the kingdom we can rejoice about.

And - let's linger a moment - we need also to have a realism. If things do not go well in a speaking situation, remember the fault may be in the audience and not you. Again, let me reminisce for a moment …The first summer I was at Seattle Pacific, I was enlisted to be the chaperone with the traveling male quartet. They really didn't want to send the quartet on the road for several thousand miles and several weeks without a chaperone, so I was enlisted to go along in that primary responsibility.

I also was acting as the college speaker - I gave a brief talk each evening, business manager, and sometimes Ann Landers. I won't linger there, but it was a very interesting summer. After we'd been on the road for ten days, had left Seattle, and held services in Oregon and northern California, we were chatting about how things were going. It seemed to us the shows kept alternating - a good service, a mediocre service, a good service, a mediocre service. The fellows were singing just about the same repertoire, with few variations each evening. Betty Jo was the same pianist, doing about the same things at the keyboard each evening. I gave different talks each evening, but I was the same person, doing essentially the same thing. We were just puzzled at this up and down effect we were getting. Then we hit upon this thought as we were talking about it: the good services were the ones in which people arrived early, had a sense of anticipation, had a sense of being ready in their own prayer preparation that were with us. The down services were the ones in which we knew by their faces, when the faces finally got there, the audience was distracted and unprepared for the evening’s worship.

Point 44: You may learn long after that you have ministered to someone.
Again, we don't need to know; we leave it with the Lord. But, sometimes, joyously, we discover that a seed we planted has indeed taken root and has grown, and when that kind of news comes, certainly there is special doxology and awareness.

I think probably my most startling example thus far of that would be a phone call I had occasion to make a year ago. A man who graduated from Greenville College twenty-five years ago, when I was a new, young teacher there … and in the course of our conversation about other topics, Jim Kirk, now preaching in Canada, said to me, "I don't know that you know that I really came to Greenville College because of you." And I blinked, and I assured him that I hadn't known that fact. He explained that he was a very new Christian when I spoke at a youth camp in Oregon.

Shortly before I moved from Seattle back to Greenville, he purchased what was then my first book, a little book of poems that I told you about, and he said joyously over the phone, "That was the first Christian book in my library when I was a new Christian." When he started thinking about college, he learned that this person he had heard at youth camp was moving to Greenville College, and he felt a sense of leading. "The one I heard at youth camp is the one I should be near." That was an utter amazement to me.

As it chanced, I had become class sponsor of the class he entered in at Greenville, so I had a number of contacts informally over the time, and that seed planted at a youth camp way back when had indeed happened and brought fruit.

Point 45: The speaking ministry may become really large scale.
That will be for you to work out with the Lord. But we do know of those persons whose writing has led to speaking and speaking has led to writing. Let me just mention again a name I think I mentioned the other day, Harold Ivan Smith, who wrote at first under the penname of Jason Towner. After he came into awareness as a writer for singles, he was speaking constantly. His energy amazes me, but if you pick up a magazine and read about a cruise to the Bahamas in singles ministry probably Harold Ivan is one of the speakers. He speaks at conferences everywhere all the time, and he also is writing all the time. So, he is in large-scale speaking.

Point 46: A word for all of us, whatever the varying degrees of our ministry, from Colossians 4:6 - I'm using the New International phrasing - "Let your conversation be always full of grace seasoned with salt so you may know how to answer everyone."
Writers are people who are gifted in using words, not only in the public speaking situation, but daily, all around us. Are we gifted in using words in private conversation to encourage, to reassure, to offer sympathies? Another of my McAllaster proverbs that I quote from time to time: Just about everybody needs encouragement, just about all the time. We think other people have it all together, but they don't. They need the words of encouragement, too. And your words may be - some of your most important words in this life - may be words spoken to an audience of one.

I won't go into full detail, but as I was thinking about this last night while I was hiking over by Lake Michigan, I was thinking about a funeral home several years ago and a young fellow about 8th grade whose brother was the Danny Kaid I mentioned previously. I had my eye on him. I was asked to help in the service, but the things I said publicly in reading from his brother's poetry were not the important ones. I could see that David Brown was crumpled, shattered, angry, despairing. When the general audience had been ushered out, I said to relatives nearby, "Let me speak with David." So, I moved over, slipped an arm around his shoulder, talked to him a bit. Actually, I talked and he sobbed. And those few words made a link that made a difference then when David came on to Greenville College and in his life up to this point. I think those few words of conversation, proudly, were among the more important words I've had a chance thus far in life to speak. Let's resolve with God's help, that whatever our speaking is, it will be, as Paul urged, with grace, seasoned with salt.

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Last updated: March 27, 2002