Beat Preacher

by Anonymous

Why do they keep telling us how to preach and where to preach and what forms of preaching work and don’t work? Tell me a form Mr. Professor man, and I will break away from it. Yes, I will study it for a time but then I will go free-verse.

They keep telling us what a sermon is and I am tired. I am tired and the message is tired. I just want to go to the hilltops like the prophets of old and just rip and rip. The hills are where poetry and prose mix and no one knows which is which. Let the people who study you worry about what form you use. Make them have to come up with an entire new form, named after you. You. You just worry about preaching.

Maybe that is what we need, not another generation of form-heavy preachers, but a generation of beat preachers who see through it all and just want the pure form, free-verse preaching. Preaching what’s on your heart, that thing beating in your chest to the very beat of God’s heart which beats in all our chests.

I want to preach the kind of sermon that I would only preach if no one was watching me, the kind that makes me pace around the apartment all night, the kind that I would only talk about at coffee shops, the kind I can only preach into a microphone with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of bitter coffee in the other, the kind that stirs my own soul, that I know will stir other souls and then they will mix.

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