33. Charles E. Jefferson (1860–1937)
33
Charles E. Jefferson
1860–1937
A shepherd cannot shine,” wrote Charles E. Jefferson in his book The Minister as Shepherd. “He cannot cut a figure. His work must be done in obscurity. . . . His work calls for continuous self-effacement. It is a form of service which eats up a man’s life. It makes a man old before his time. Every good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”1 All of us know that pastor is the Latin word for “shepherd.” The pastor of the local church is supposed to be a shepherd; but, alas, too often he is not. He may be a good preacher—and preaching is definitely important to pastoral work—and he may be a good organizer, but if he is not maintaining a personal interest in the flock, he is not fulfilling his divine calling. “It is the weaklings and not the giants, who neglect their people,” Jefferson wrote. “It is the Pagan and not the Christian who shines in public and leaves undone the private duties which belong to him as an ordained steward of the Son of God.”2
The Minister as Shepherd has been reprinted by the Christian Literature Crusade in the Living Books for All series, and I heartily recommend it to you. It is one of four valuable books by Jefferson directed especially to the pastor, the other three being The Minister as Prophet, Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers, and his Yale lectures, The Building of the Church. These titles will have to be found in the used-book stores. His Yale lectures were published in a Baker Books edition in 1969. I urge the addition of these four volumes to every library, and I suggest they be read and reread; Jefferson’s philosophy of the ministry is desperately needed today.
Charles E. Jefferson was born in 1860 and died in 1937. He started out not as a pastor, but as a superintendent of schools in Worthington, Ohio. He also taught at Ohio Wesleyan and Ohio State. In 1884 he entered the Boston University Law School, and it was while he was in Boston that the challenge of the gospel ministry took hold of his heart. As he visited various churches, he became thoroughly disgusted with the preaching that he heard. Then he heard Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church, and everything changed. He enrolled in the theological course at Boston University and graduated in 1887. After brief pastorates in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, he accepted a call to the 34th Street Tabernacle in Manhattan, where he was to labor for almost forty years. The tabernacle had a noble history; William M. Taylor was pastor there for twenty years (1871–92). If you do not have Taylor’s sermons on Christ’s miracles and parables, by all means get them! And while you are looking, secure his great biographical series on Moses, Joseph, Ruth, Esther, David, Paul, and other Bible greats. What preaching!
When Jefferson accepted the call, he knew God was placing him into a difficult situation. After seven years the church relocated and built a new edifice at the corner of Broadway and 56th Street, changing its name to the Broadway Tabernacle Congregational Church. At that time, Broadway was known as “the great white way,” and it was to this kind of a constituency that Jefferson ministered for almost forty years. Though the church was in one of the most difficult parts of the city, he managed to fill the building week after week and to minister, with great power and blessing, to a “needy parade.” He witnessed the exodus of more than one church from the downtown area, yet he remained. What an example for us to follow!
He had a pastor’s heart, and the combination of preacher-pastor was what made him an effective minister in that difficult downtown location. He believed in the local church, in building the church to the glory of God, and not simply using it as a tool to build his own career. “It is sad to see a man turning away from the ministry because he does not understand the church,” Jefferson wrote in his Yale lectures, “but it is tragic to see one entering the ministry with a wrong attitude to the church. Young ministers sometimes look upon the church as a necessary evil, an inherited encumbrance, a sort of device by which preachers are handicapped in their movements and held back from largest usefulness. . . . They want to do things on a broad scale. To deal with so small and insignificant a body as a church seems parochial and belitthng.”3 This is why he titled his lectures The Building of the Church, taking the “architectural idea” in the New Testament and applying it to the preaching of the Word and the pastoring of the people. “The crowning and crucial work of a minister is not conversion, but church building.”4
His first lecture deals with “the church building concept in the New Testament.” What does this have to do with preaching? “The sermon,” said Jefferson, “comes not out of the preacher alone, but out of the church. . . . He is nourished by his environment—the family of Christ.”5 What a tremendous concept for the growing pastor to grasp! “The church is a growing organism and the preacher must know the stages of its development before he can feed it.”6 “A physician always looks at his patient before he goes to the medicine chest. A wise preacher begins, not with his books, but with his church.”7
Recently a seminary president complained to me that some of his school’s finest graduates “were not making it” in their churches. “Do you know what one of our boys did?” he asked. “He hadn’t been in his first church three months before he started to revise the constitution! He didn’t stay long.” It is too bad that graduate had not read The Building of the Church, especially this passage:
Here again the preacher must begin by establishing right relations between himself and his church. . . . If a man has a contemptuous view of his church he is well-nigh certain to be afraid of it. But love casts out fear. If a man loves his church and proves his love by his life, he can say to it anything which is proper for a Christian teacher to say to his pupils, anything which is fitting for a Christian man to say to his friends. The preachers who get into trouble by talking plainly to their people are as a rule preachers who do not love their churches.8
Of course the ministry of building demands time, and Jefferson pleaded for the longer pastorate. “He [the pastor] is a master-builder, and his task is not simply collecting material, but shaping it into a structure which shall become a shrine of the Eternal. . . . The highest place belongs to the man who, year after year, in the same parish, instructs men in the high and difficult art of living together, and trains them by long and patient processes in the work of bringing spiritual forces to bear upon the moral problems of the community.”9 “No matter how long he stays, there will be more work to do than there was in sight at the beginning. Men who engage in the building of the church know that the work is never done.”10 And yet some pastors are looking for new churches after two years of ministry!
In the remaining seven lectures, Jefferson applied the building concept to various aspects of the ministry in the local church: building the brotherhood (“To create an ampler and a warmer fellowship inside the church of Jesus is the first work for which preachers are ordained”); building the individual (“Many a man is preaching to a dwindling congregation because his sermons have lost the personal note. He chills by his vague generalities, or enrages by his wholesale denunciations”);11 building moods and tempers (“A congregation possesses a disposition as pronounced and characteristic as that of any of its members”);12 building thrones (“The preacher who would make his church a power must begin by trusting common people”);13 building the worldwide church (“Every preacher should do his work in the radiance of the vision of the church universal”);14 building the plan (“It is not a waste of time to give hours and days to the work of pondering and maturing schedules for future operations”);15 and finally, building the builder (“The secret of an extended pastorate is a growing man”).16The Building of the Church is easily one of the finest books to come out of the Yale lecture series, and its message is greatly needed today.
Jefferson’s other three books are not quite so massive and detailed. The Minister as Shepherd contains five lectures that Jefferson gave in 1912, but they are amazingly contemporary. He began with “The Shepherd Idea in Scripture and History,” proving that the shepherd has a key place in the plan of God. “When church leaders began to lose the vision of the Good Shepherd, they at the same time began to drift away from the New Testament ideal of ministerial service.”17 He then covered the shepherd’s work, opportunity, temptations, and rewards, and he did so in a manner that convinces you that he himself possessed a shepherd’s heart. He pointed out that the Eastern shepherd was a watchman, a guard, a guide, a savior, a provider, and a man who personally loved his sheep. I appreciate the way he explained the relationship between preaching and shepherding, and it is here that the influence of Phillips Brooks is most clearly seen. “The pastoral instinct is nowhere more sorely needed than in the work of preaching,” he wrote. “No part of a minister’s work is more strictly, genuinely pastoral than the work of preaching.”18
In The Minister as Prophet Jefferson dealt particularly with preaching and the importance of proclaiming the truth of God. I am tempted to quote several passages, but I will settle for this one: “A little man with narrow view can cause a world of trouble.” I like his emphasis on patience in preaching and the importance he places on building the preacher as much as building the sermon. “I prepare my sermons by preparing myself,” he told Edgar De Witt Jones. “Self-preparation is the most difficult work a preacher has to do. . . . A preacher who is spiritually anemic, or intellectually impoverished, or morally depleted, will wish often for a juniper tree.”19
The fourth book, Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers, is somewhat of a pastoral fireside chat, twenty-six chapters on important ministerial matters that somehow have been omitted from the textbooks.
Many a man in the ministry fails, not because he is bad, but because he has a genius for blundering.20
If a man expects to move men by his preaching he must first do a deal of living, and the sooner he begins to live the better.21
No man can long be interesting in the pulpit who does not think. No man can think wisely who does not study.22
Probably no other single sin works such havoc in the Christian church as the impatience of her ministers.23
Popularity is the most fearful of all tests.24
This is the kind of book the pastor can keep on his desk and read a chapter of a day—all chapters are brief—and remind himself of the things that too easily are forgotten.
Jefferson wrote not only for pastors but also for the church at large, including a number of books of sermons. His own preaching was doctrinal in emphasis but not theological in content. He used short, crisp sentences and sought to express the truth in the simplest manner. His Cardinal Ideas of Isaiah (1925) and Cardinal Ideas of Jeremiah (1928) are helpful to the pastor preaching on those books and prophets.
When I read Jefferson’s ideas about preaching, I discovered that he used several comparisons to make his point. In one place he compared the sermon to something cooking! “One never knows what is going to happen when he puts a truth to soak in the juices of the mind.”25 In another place he compared sermons to bullets. “How far they go does not depend upon the text or upon the structure of the sermon, but upon the texture of the manhood of the preacher.”26 But his favorite comparison was that of a sermon to a flower. “My sermons grow. They unfold. I never ‘get up’ a sermon. . . . A sermon of the right sort gets itself up. If I supply the soil and the seed and the sun and the rain, the sermon will come up of itself. My soul is a flower-garden. My business is raising sermons.”27
I suppose the most helpful thing Charles E. Jefferson does for me is to remind me of the importance of the local church and the work the pastor must do if the church is to grow and glorify God. The pastor is a shepherd, a prophet, a builder. Jefferson himself was all three. Any man who can make a success of a city church in a difficult place is worth reading, and Jefferson is such a man. Get to know him soon!