Quotes and Quips from the Pulpit

Southwood Baptist Church, in southwest Fort Worth, kept a page of sayings gathered from its own pulpit. The congregation has since disbanded and the collection is reproduced here as a historical record. The lines below are quoted as the church published them.

Almost every congregation accumulates a stock of these. Very few write them down, and fewer still put them on a website, which is why a page of this kind is unusual enough to be worth keeping. It is also, in its offhand way, a better guide to what a congregation was preoccupied with than any statement of doctrine, because nobody drafts an aphorism to be defensible. They get remembered because they landed.

The collection

"Wouldn't it be nice if we guarded our Bibles as carefully as we do our cellphones?"

"Being merciful is giving someone else what they need, not what they deserve."

"Man is crucified between two crosses: the regret of yesterday and the fear of tomorrow."

"Sometimes God changes your circumstances in the furnace; sometimes He meets you in the furnace." — cited with Daniel 3:25

"Hardening your heart is like the calluses a guitar player gets on his fingers; after a while, you don't feel anything."

"God's Word is like a measuring tape: you can measure different things with it, but that standard still always remains the same."

"LIFE means Live Intentionally For Eternity."

The saying as a form

The memorable line has a long history in American Protestant preaching, and a fairly specific function within it. Preaching in the plain style — which is what this tradition inherited, by way of the frontier revival and the Sunday evening service — assumed an audience that would hear a sermon once, without a text in front of them, and would need to carry something away by memory alone. The aphorism is the device that survives the walk to the car park. It compresses the argument of twenty minutes into a shape short enough to repeat at a dinner table.

Its machinery is nearly always the same. Most of the lines above work by analogy, and by a deliberately domestic one: a mobile phone, a guitarist's fingertips, a measuring tape. The comparison is drawn from something the hearer handles during the week, so the abstraction it carries arrives already attached to an object. One line works instead by symmetry — the regret of yesterday set against the fear of tomorrow, with the hearer suspended between them — and one is an acrostic, a mnemonic device with a very long history in devotional and educational writing on both sides of the Atlantic. Collections of preachers' illustrations were published commercially throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries precisely because this material was understood as a craft with techniques that could be taught, and much of that literature is preserved in general collections such as those of the Library of Congress and in denominational repositories including the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

What this particular collection is about

Read as a set, the seven surviving lines cluster around a small number of concerns, and it is a revealing cluster.

• The neglect of scripture — two of the seven are about the Bible, and neither is about its contents. Both are about how it is treated: whether it is looked after, and whether it is allowed to remain a fixed standard rather than a flexible one.
• Mercy and forgiveness — the definition of mercy as giving what is needed rather than what is deserved is the most quotable line in the collection, and it sits alongside the same theme as it appears on the church's doctrinal page, where the question of whether anyone could have lived too badly to be forgiven is answered through the parable of the Prodigal Son.
• Endurance rather than rescue — the furnace line is the most theologically interesting of the seven, because it declines the easier promise. It allows that circumstances may not change at all, and offers presence instead of relief. It cites the third chapter of Daniel, where a fourth figure is seen walking in the fire with the three who were thrown into it.
• The slow drift — the calluses image is about gradual insensibility rather than dramatic failure, which is a characteristically pastoral worry: the concern is not the person who leaves but the person who stays and stops noticing.
• Time and attention — the acrostic and the two-crosses line both take the ordinary texture of a week as their subject, and both assume a hearer whose real difficulty is distraction rather than disbelief.

What is absent is as telling as what is present. There is nothing here about controversy, nothing aimed at other churches, and nothing about politics. These are lines addressed to people already in the pews on a Wednesday evening, which is where much of the congregation's teaching actually happened — the midweek pattern is described elsewhere in this archive.

Provenance, and its limits

The page gave no dates and no attributions, and this archive adds none. Sayings of this kind circulate: some will have originated in Southwood's own pulpit, and others will have been picked up from a conference, a radio programme or a book of illustrations and repeated until they became the congregation's own. That is how the form works and it is not a fault in the record. What can be said with confidence is narrower and more useful — that these are the lines this congregation chose to write down and keep, out of everything it heard.