CHURCH OR AUDIENCE
Quoting Charles E. Jefferson in his Yale lectures of 1910: “A sharp distinction ought to be made between a church and an audience. It is to be regretted that we have come to rank churches by the size of their membership, and to judge preachers by the number of persons who listen to their sermons. A superficial man is consequently tempted to work, not for a church, but for an audience. An audience, however, is not worth working for. An audience is a group of unrelated people drawn together by a short-lived attraction, a conglomeration of individuals finding themselves together for a brief time. It is a fortuitous concourse of human atoms scattering as soon as a certain performance has ended. It is a pile of leaves to be blown away by the wind, a handful of sand lacking consistency and cohesion; a number of human filings drawn into position by a pulpit magnet, and which will drop away as…
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