He is old – in his 90s, perhaps – and he’s old school. Ancient school. Preaching the way they did 60, 75, 80 years ago: blunt, earnest, without clear outline or smooth transitions … without the honeyed voice or up-to-date illustrations. No vast auditorium of intent listeners to offset his close-ups, no imaginative camera angles, no eye-catching architecture to underscore his success or trumpet his broad appeal.
His television show is no more current than his sermon style. A few flowers before the pulpit. To the side of him, someone has stood a small tree whose branches threaten to consume him before the preaching is finished. He still wears a coat and tie; nary a trace of the slim-fit jeans and open collared Oxford, or golf shirt, or wrinkled t-shirt that are the new prerequisites. He doesn’t pace or pause for dramatic effect; he is locked behind that pulpit like a formula racer behind the wheel – and just as fixed on the finish line.
He stands there like God’s bulldog: short, stout, squinting through his bifocals, reading the cherished verses without much thoughtful inflection … with barely a breath. He knows nothing more than the Bible and its Gospel message, and his trust in both is so simple and complete that it never occurs to him to massage or fine-tune the presentation.
It’s an easy persona to mock, and rather a difficult one for those of a more media-saturated generation to endure without squirming and changing the channel. He is of his era, and that era has almost completely passed away.
But the Word he has given his long life to has not. And where that Word is preached – however it is preached – someone, somewhere is listening. There is fire yet in the preacher’s belly, and some of the sparks fall on souls dry and hungry for the flames.
He has been so long faithful to the call he first heard those many, many, many years ago. I wonder if any today – hearing their own godly summons above the din of this impatient, myopic age – will heed, and follow, and be enduring six, seven, eight decades from now?
Great must be his reward in heaven.
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