Listen to how Frederick Buechner once described what could be a typical congregation as they gather in preparation for this thing that God has ordained… this thing called “preaching”:

“In the front row the old ladies turn up their hearing aids, and a young lady slips her six year old a Lifesaver and a Magic Marker.  A college sophomore home on vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward with his chin in his hand.  The vice-president of a bank who twice that week has seriously contemplated suicide places his hymnal in the rack.  A pregnant girl feels the life stir within her.  A high school math teacher, who for twenty years has managed to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even from himself, creases his order of service down the center with his thumbnail and tucks it under his knee.”

Buechner then goes on to describe the one who preaches:

“The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler.  The stakes have never been higher.  Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand.  The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it.  Everybody is listening, even himself.  Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and has not told them, but who knows what this time he will tell them, out of the silence he will tell them?  Let him tell them The Truth.”

“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
—Christ