College Turns Speakers Into Preachers

EL CAJON, Calif. —  Justin McElderry locks himself in his dorm room, paws through a stack of handwritten notes and begins talking to the wall.

About God. About humility. About how, he says, the two are connected.

“Humility is born out of a recognition of God,” says McElderry, facing a wall lined with books and posters.

Call it homework of the heavenly kind.

While most college students spend their study time hitting the books, McElderry and his classmates at San Diego County’s smallest four-year college hit The Book.

Bible at his side, the 23-year-old senior is among about a dozen Christian Heritage College students enrolled in a fall course that teaches the art of preaching.

Once a week, they meet in a campus chapel, taking turns delivering 30-minute sermons and then gently critiquing each other’s pulpit performances.

“We try to be as honest as we can with each other,” said Steve Whitten, who teaches the homiletics class.

It’s tricky work, this preaching business, combining the challenges of being an effective public speaker and an impassioned messenger of the Word.

“You want to reach people’s hearts,” said a student. “It’s not just an intellectual exercise.”

For many students, passion is the easy part. “I’m very excited about [my religion],” said McElderry, who is from Seattle. “And I feel like letting it out.”

But, he confided, “I’m very inhibited.”

The aspiring missionary recently locked his dorm room door, to prevent any interruptions, and practiced a sermon he was crafting on humility.

Near a cluster of family snapshots and posters of basketball stars, he stood in his jeans and bemoaned how the virtue of humility often seems mocked today.

“And if it’s not mocked, it’s certainly not esteemed,” he said.

In class a few days earlier, two of McElderry’s classmates rose to the pulpit to deliver sermons. Both were videotaped.

Derrick Patterson, 23, started out a bit nervous, then spoke at length about how the Bible talks of giving people a fresh start when they are distracted or make mistakes.

It was a good sermon, his teacher said later, especially the way Patterson worked the pulpit, using his hands and arms to emphasize his points.

“Your physical presentation I think was excellent,” Whitten told his student.

But Whitten was concerned about the way the sermon was organized and suggested Patterson tie more of his main points to everyday examples to bring the message home.

The sharpest criticism came from Patterson himself as he watched the videotape.

“My eyes are very shifty,” he told his classmates, prompting some laughter. “I have a geeky smile.”

Still, he said, it was a kick. “It’s fun to get up and talk about something you really want to share,” said Patterson, a youth pastor at a San Diego church.

Whitten said most of the homiletics students on the 500-student campus want to become ministers. Homiletics courses are a staple of seminaries and religion-based colleges.

Whitten, a pastor at Grace Fellowship in Mira Mesa, said some students find it difficult to be coherent while preaching about life’s great questions.

But, he added, practice is often a polish. “It’s like anything else,” he said. “As you do it, you get better.”

His students agreed.

“If you’re going to be a preacher,” said one senior, “you can’t get better experience than just doing it.”