Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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Church required him to leave the denomination. He went on
to what, under his leadership, became the Riverside Church,
In whose pulpit he gained international fame. While
pastoring there, he simultaneously held the chair of
Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary.
This discussion of Fosdick's theology of preaching
begins where Fosdick began: the needs of people.
People come to church on Sunday with every kind
of personality difficulty and problem flesh is
heir to. A sermon was meant to meet such
needs; it should be personal counseling on a
group scale. If one had clairvoyance, one
would know the sins and shames, the anxieties
and doubts, the griefs and disillusionments,
that filled the pews, and could by God's grace
bring the saving truths of the gospel to bear
on them as creatively as though he were
speaking to a single person. That was the
place to start--with the real problems of the
people. That was a sermon's specialty, which
made it a sermon, not an essay or a lecture.
Every sermon should have for its main business
the head-on constructive meeting of some
problem which was puzzling minds, burdening
consciences, distracting lives, and no sermon
which so met a real human difficulty, with
light to throw on it and help to win a victory
over it, could possibly be futile.
Fosdick's evaluation of other contemporary preaching
styles highlights his appreciation of the "personal
counseling" method.
He criticized expository preachers who started with
a Biblical text, gave the body of the sermon to
explaining its context and content, and finished with a
few notes of application.
Every other agency dealing with the public
recognizes that contact with the actual life of
the auditor is the one place to begin. Only
the preacher proceeds still upon the idea that
folk come to church desperately anxious to