ABSTRACT
Karl Barth warns against making preaching 'a service performed for clients'. Grady Davis in his widely-used homiletics textbook cautions: Any successful appeal to selfish motives, however 'religious' the form it takes, leads the author's victim away from the lordship of Christ. A certain pastor boasts of graduating from college with a double major magna cum laude. Another who has been to the Holy Land does not let the people forget it. Still another who knows some important people just happens to find ways to drop a big name now and then. A superiority complex does not improve communication. One theorist defines persuasion as the art of reducing the distance between Sender and Receiver. The Christian in fact cannot in any way think of himself as possessing either a power or even an advantage which has been denied to the unbeliever.
