Purgatory 2024: Vacating the pulpit for an expert opinion
North East Quine
Purgatory Host
In July 1914, the British Medical Association held its annual congress in Aberdeen. On the Sunday of the Congress, most of the churches in Aberdeen, of several different denominations, handed over their pulpits to a variety of doctors, all of whom preached on the subject of "Temperance." Each took a different approach; churchgoers could choose between Alcohol and the Brain, the Social Cost of Alcohol the health benefits of Temperance, other countries approach to alcohol etc etc and there were afternoon meetings for churchwomen's guilds to hear about "Tonic wine, the start of a slippery slope."
Is there any topic today that churches could agree to hand over their pulpits to experts on a specified Sunday?
Also, does anyone know, was this standard practice wherever the BMA held its annual congress?
Is there any topic today that churches could agree to hand over their pulpits to experts on a specified Sunday?
Also, does anyone know, was this standard practice wherever the BMA held its annual congress?
Comments
I had understood that Buckie was what you found at the end of the slippery slope.
Well, sure. Lots of topics. The perils of junk food, for example.
Whether they would want to do that is another question. There might be a danger that, at least in the case of temperance, the sermons would be viewed as allied with political movements to ban or regulate alcohol, which could pose a number of different problems. But I don't know enough about the British political situation to comment much further on that.
Indeed. From what the newspaper reported it seems there were women who were giving the tonic wine laldy on the basis that it was "strictly for medicinal purposes."
According to wiki, Buckie is a place near Banff in Scotland. Is it near a ski slope or something?
Each of the various doctors was preaching from one of the Biblical texts on drunkenness.
Buckfast Tonic Wine is known colloquially as Buckie. It is a scourge in Scotland; also known as "wreck the hoose juice" with the slogan "Buckfast gets you f**ked* fast." It's sold in areas of deprivation; shops in nice middle class areas won't stock it because it's the drink of the underclass.
*f**ked in the sense of "wrecked" not "laid".
According to the internet, "laldy" means to "bash", which I assume here means "criticize". But how is saying that tonic wine is for medicinal purposes criticism? Wouldn't that, in the context, be a DEFENSE of tonic wine?
"Giving it laldy" means to do something with enthusiasm.
So, you're positing that equivalent sermons today would be based on specific biblical texts?
(Not quite seeing how "Other countries' approach to alcohol" could be based on biblical texts, since contemporary nations' laws, and, indeed, many of the nations themselves, didn't exist when the bible was written, but I'll assume the doctors somehow managed the segue.)
Thanks.
1. It's always intrigued me that the word "temperance" was understood as "total abstinence". Surely the whole meaning of the word is "controlled, temperately, in moderation".
2. There is of course virtue in having experts in the pulpit - provided that they don't merely used a biblical text as the starting-point for a discourse which has little to do with it, or just give a dull academic paper with little spiritual input. (I'm not saying that te good doctors back in 1914 did either of those things, of course).
By-the-by, it might have been good for churches to ask Christian ecologists to preach simultaneously with COP28 - although they might have been in high demand and short supply!
Not necessarily, but these were "sermons" which started with a text, then went into specifics that attracted congregations because they were delivered by a doctor rather than a clergyman.
The "other countries" sermon claimed that that there was poverty elsewhere in the world, but only here (not sure whether "here" was Scotland or the UK) did alcohol combine poverty with degradation.
IME it depends where you go and who is preaching. We're in an interregnum and a visiting stand in/blow in priest this summer preached one of the very best sermons I've ever heard, hands down, bar none. I feel like I've also been treated to some of the worst though... I'd actually rather some preachers went back to the practice of reading out someone else's sermons from a bound volume. Though I wouldn't say it to them of course.
I've been known (in urban areas) to seek out the 8am in order to be spared the sermon, and there is a - short - list of preachers who I will travel for
I can easily imagine lots of churches having an after-church lunch, Sunday school presentation, or some other separate gathering where an expert talks about something like the dangers of junk food. But I can’t imagine many letting that be the sermon.
In 1914, at least in Church of Scotland and Free Church of Scotland, it would have been normal for the doctor, the headmaster and the bank manager to be ordained elders. In that sense, the churches probably weren't bringing in "outsiders."
There are several Biblical texts to choose from re drunkeness.
It all seemed to fit together rather neatly.
(The great Dr Matthew Hay stated that he himself was not a total abstainer, it's not clear how many of the doctors were.)
One statistic at the time was that 85% of children in Barnardos Children's Homes were there because of drunken parents who couldn't look after them, and only 15% were orphans with no family to bring them up.
The prisons, too, were clogged up with people jailed for drunken assaults, or disorderly conduct. If you gave me a date, any date, I could probably find an account in that days newspaper of an alcohol related assault, or death.
Venereal diseases were blamed on alcohol, too. Once a prostitute had VD her best chance of custom was from a drunk man, and he then passed it onto his wife. Life was grim for syphilitic families - you can sometimes spot them in the census returns. A couple of healthy children, then a gap as the woman would miscarry all her pregnancies whilst she had primary syphilis, then when it progressed to secondary syphilis her pregnancies would result in live, but unhealthy babies, often blind.
I don't know about 1914, but in 1896, in Aberdeen, the life expectancy of a woman who became a prostitute was four years. VD was a scourge.
Temperance seemed to be the magic cure for a whole host of social problems - illness, violence, poor housing, neglected children, poverty.
Sorry, Jane R, but what does "safeguarding" mean in this context?
Protection of children and vulnerable adults from abuse.
Thanks.
That, of course, can be short-circuited if one has an environmental theologian to hand, but then again, how frequent are they?
To cross-thread for a moment, we have two, or possibly three, narratives going on here, and my intention here is to hear one narrative in its native form, as it were, before the others are overlaid, and dialogue, and/or interference, happen(s).
I agree, of course--but you might notice I carefully said "a similar fad" and did not call the temperance movement itself a fad, because I'm well aware of the real problems they were trying to deal with. But then, AFAIK the word "fad" can in fact be used solely as a reference to the fleeting intense interest a topic arouses without necessarily denigrating that topic. But whatever. What would be a better choice of words? I wouldn't want to refer to it as a moral panic, which seems to me even more denigrating. I'm after the "relatively short-lived intense interest in the community" kind of thing.
Secondary definitions do have the pejorative concept of a "fad".
Of course, for many subjects there may already be an expert in the church who is also a regular preacher, and then the sermon and expert teaching sections could be rolled into one. Though, sharing those people around through many congregations would risk overworking the poor expert.
Ah, but stretching the service by half an hour runs the risk of impinging on LUNCH! (Or if our early service overran, it would impinge on the time between the services when we run Sunday School, which would be a problem given that half the teachers would still be in church...)
Over the last 20 years the Sunday morning Divine Liturgy at our church has lengthened from 80 minutes to 90 minutes simply because more people attend with a corresponding increase in the number of communicants.
A 20 minute experts talk immediately followed by a 20 minute sermon (or, just a 40 minute sermon including what the experts are saying) is going to be much harder going than a 20 minute experts talk followed by a hymn, some prayers, another hymn, some readings and then the 20 minute sermon.
Of course, for many churches today you don't even need the expert present. There's a lot of great stuff by experts in many fields that have been recorded and can be shown on a screen, though you do lose the option of asking questions which can often be more informative than the talk itself. If there was a national project aiming to get as many churches as possible discussing a particular issue then recordings by experts could be made for the occassion (or, permission obtained to use existing material), and include hymn suggestions, prayers, readings and sermon ideas. We do simialr to this regularly anyway, for example with services for Christian Aid Week in the UK.
One of the developments I hate most about the last decade or so is the tendency to make every presentation of information in to a video. I want to read. That way, I can go at my own pace, if there's something I didn't quite get, or want to think about, I can go back to it, and if the author is rather prolix, it's easy to skip.
An in-person presentation with a live speaker allows the speaker to adjust the pace and detail of their presentation based on cues they get from the audience.
Video is the worst of both worlds.
I generally still fall in the camp of thinking that however beneficial a talk such as is being discussed here might be, a worship service is not the proper place for it.
But I’ll readily admit I’m taking this position from the context of being in a church culture where scheduling a talk like this for the Sunday school hour or an after-church lunch, or maybe even Sunday evening or mid-week (some places), is pretty common, gets a very good turnout, and doesn’t in any way send the message that it’s not for everyone.
We have two services on a Sunday Morning, with a slot between them where we run Sunday School, Adult Christian Education (sometimes), and so on. This kind of "talk" fits quite appropriately in that slot.
So I’d agree that different contexts might call for different “solutions” (if that’s the right word) to the question posed in this thread.
My concern about replacing the sermon is that there are so many good causes in the world, and plenty of places to hear about them; but you're very unlikely to get anywhere else what a good sermon (note I said "good"!) provides.