Before churches became centers for religious amusement, people used to go to church to hear preaching. The Reformation, the Great Awakening, and the massive spiritual movements of the 19^th Century were built upon the power of the pulpit. Within living memory the strongest forms of American Christianity were those that were dominated by preaching. Fundamentalist leader T.T. Shields used to write out every sermon by hand, though he never preached from the manuscript. J.C. Massee hired an elocutionist to attend his services on Sundays and then critique his sermons on Mondays. Stalwarts like W.B. Riley, Robert T. Ketcham, Bob Jones, sr., R.V. Clearwaters, and Ernest Pickering knew that the success of their ministries depended upon what happened in the pulpit. They gave themselves to the task of preaching, and they excelled at it.
 

Now we live in the day of the sound bite. Current wisdom tells us that preaching is obsolete. Average people are not supposed to be able to follow an extended discourse. They need visual stimulation, we are told, or their minds will simply wander off. They are so used to sensory overload that they will attend church only to view a spectacle. Therefore, while we would not dream of changing our message, we must change our methods. Instead of preaching we must bring in bands, athletes, entertainers, and theater troupes.
 

Against this modern wisdom stands the New Testament insistence that preaching is God's plan. 'Preach the Word!' Thundered the apostle Paul in his last counsel to Timothy. Scripture, it would appear, not only reveals a message - it also requires a method.
 

This method is what Paul elsewhere calls the 'foolishness of preaching.' Disparagers of preaching have argued that what Paul meant was the foolishness of 'the thing preached,' or the content of the gospel. But the term cannot be dismissed that easily. True, the KERYGMA of 1 Corinthians 1:21 includes the idea of the content, the message, the 'thing preached.' Some of the best of recent scholarship, however, indicated that the term KERYGMA also emphasizes the means through which this message is delivered. In other words, the 'foolishness of preaching' includes both the MESSAGE and the METHOD. The method is preaching, the public proclamation of the Word of God.
 

What would Lead us to believe that we could abandon this method without altering the message? Students of art, music, and literature have always recognized that form is inseparable from meaning. Even secular critics of media and culture such as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman remind us that the medium we employ will largely determine what we can say. If these authorities are correct, then we run the risk of altering our message whenever we change our method.
 

Preaching may appear to be unseasonable, but Paul told us to preach the word, to be ready 'in season and out of season' This appears to entail a tacit admission that there will be times when preaching is 'out of season'
 

Nevertheless, we are not to wander from our task. Neither our message nor our method is to vary. Proclamation of the Scriptures is how God intended the Christian message to propagate.