teaching/sermons/col-1-15-20/commentaries/willard_preacher_character.md

Willard on preacher / teacher character — what Divine Conspiracy gives the formation work

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy lecture series (12 sessions). Source: ../expansion/dallas_willard/. Companion file: willard_christ_in_action.md (cosmic-Christ / Col 1:17 thread). This file maps the formation thread — what kind of person the teacher must become and the practices Willard prescribes to get there.

Quotes lightly punctuated for readability (auto-transcript source); no words substituted, [...] marks trims, [bracketed] indicates obvious transcription fixes.

Willard's single sentence claim (verbatim): "The most important thing that God gets out of my life is the person I become." (DC 08).

§1. Willard on what the teacher must become

The clearest statement, embedded in a self-correction story — Willard is describing his own preaching past and what changed.

"My intention in that case or my vision — my vision was a soul-winner preaching to bring people to trust Christ [...] the vision changed as it went along because I began to realize that perhaps it was very important what kind of person I was and not just a whiz-bang preacher. I used to preach like a machine gun until a man once said to me, 'Why do you preach so fast? Why don't you give people time to think about what you're saying?' I realized I didn't want them to think. I wanted to keep them back on their heels. I wanted them to respond. I didn't want to give them time to think. I wanted to manage them and manipulate them and get them to do what I wanted to get them to do. So I had to go through a whole process of rethinking that. So the vision shifts [...] and so I became intent more on who I was than what I was doing. I'm still concerned about what I was doing — I'm concerned about results — but I now believe the most important thing that God gets out of my life is the person I become. Actually I think the most important thing I get out of my life is the person I become. The things I might accomplish in the way of ministry — they're very small compared to the importance of my becoming Christlike." — Willard, DC 08: Transformation

The corollary, in the same lecture, applied to congregational life:

"The church problem is never that we need more money, more influence, more people. The problem is always with the quality of the people who are there, and that begins with me. If there's a problem, that begins with me. What is the quality of my life now?" — DC 08

And the inverted version of the same claim — when teaching the Beatitudes, Willard says of the would-be "light":

"You are the light of the world. Now you say, 'Well, Jesus is the light of the world.' No, you can't get off easy. You're the light of the world where you are. If you are not the light, there isn't going to be any light. That's your calling. [...] Being the light of the world — all you have to do is be the light of the world. You don't need to make an effort to be seen. [...] We can put God in charge of our public relations. If we have the real stuff, it can't be hid." — DC 10: Kingdom Living

§2. Willard on practices and disciplines

Willard's working definition — and the most usable single line on this topic in the whole series:

"A discipline is something in your power that you do in order to enable you to do what you cannot do by direct effort. [...] So the principle is indirection — you find the things that will help you grow and change and you do those, and then as a result what comes out of you is different because what is inside you is different." — DC 08

He sorts the disciplines into two columns — abstinence and engagement — and is sharp about which side most preachers start on, and why it burns them out:

"I started over here — you see — study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession, and those are good things, but the thing is, I didn't know those were disciplines. I didn't know what a discipline was. So I was just trying to do those. Now, if that's all you got, that's a short recipe for burnout. That's what that is. So you grind away at those, and especially in a social context where people have all sorts of things for you to do — that's going to burn you out, because it will not put you in touch with the things that will nourish you and grow you. It will not allow you to have a joyous, strong walk with Jesus. In order to get that, you have to shift over and you have to practice some of these other things. [...] Solitude and silence and fasting are the big ones on the list. The others are more like hygienic exercises. They're important — very important — but they don't have the importance of those first three." — DC 08

The way in — small, experimental, no white-knuckling:

"You begin to move into them, you begin to practice them, and as you do, they begin to sustain you. Usually with something like solitude it begins very quickly, and I would encourage anyone to begin to try to have substantial periods of time every week when they are simply alone doing nothing. Solitude primarily means doing nothing. Solitude is connected to Sabbath, and Sabbath is still one of the big deals — one of the big commandments [...] Solitude is, for most people, the only way they can start practicing Sabbath, is to go into solitude, because as long as they're around others, the others will keep them working." — DC 08

Crucial qualifier — these are wisdom, not law:

"Be gentle, be experimental. If you don't succeed with this for some reason, don't worry about it. Find out what went wrong, try to fix it, and try it again. I say these are not righteousnesses, they are wisdom. They're not laws, they're wisdom." — DC 08

How Willard himself found solitude — back-doored, against his Southern Baptist instincts, under the pressure of needing to preach better:

"That's what led me, as I said earlier, when I was concerned about being able to preach effectively and realized that prayer was connected to that and realized I couldn't pray in the condition I was in — then I moved more or less by accident into solitude and discovered what solitude and silence could do to build those connections. [...] I thought solitude and silence sounded awfully Catholic, and I wasn't into that bag at the time. In fact, I was young and full of spizz, and I thought they were all wrong, and I had no experience of it. I had to work my way back." — DC 08

On secrecy — a discipline named precisely because it pulls the preacher off the platform of being-noticed:

"On the list of disciplines that I put up, you may have seen a discipline I call secrecy. And secrecy is actually the practice of doing things in ways that they are not noticed. [...] It's the practice of doing things in ways that people do not notice. And the purpose of it is to free you up from being dependent upon the approval and disapproval of other people. So you practice not being observed, and that helps break the habit of needing to be observed." — DC 12: Prayer

On fasting — not leverage on God:

"The primary function of fasting is to align ourselves with the kingdom of God. It isn't to convince God he ought to do what we want. It isn't to put him into a corner or drive him by the glowing merit that we achieve by fasting and denying ourselves. The purpose of fasting is to align ourselves with what God is doing. [...] When you are fasting, you are receiving from God. You're not just doing without food, you're receiving from God." — DC 12

And — striking — the desert-father hospitality rule: discipline is wisdom, not law:

"The old desert fathers and mothers — they had it all worked out that if you were in a fast and a person came to visit you, you would break your fast. And you'd prepare food [...] you would eat with them, even though you're fasting. Now see, that's because they understood very well that disciplines are not righteousness. They're not law. They're wisdom." — DC 12

On celebration as the antidote to anxiety (counting blessings, in memory):

"This is where we need what I call the discipline of celebration — is enjoying things in memory of the good that God has done for us. [...] Celebration is basically, in old-fashioned language, it's counting your blessings. And counting your blessings enables you to know that God has actually provided. And that knowledge then helps you look at the future without anxiety. Jeremy Taylor somewhere in his book Holy Living has this line to the effect that the person who really trusts God is no more worried about the future than he is about the past." — DC 12

§3. Willard's self-divulgence pattern — character modeled by demonstration

Willard does the thing he teaches. The "worst foot forward" anecdotes are scattered through every session. Three verbatim.

(a) "I preached like a machine gun" — the manipulation confession (see §1 above; DC 08). This is the centerpiece because the content of the confession is the move he is recommending: stop trying to manage and manipulate.

(b) The exercise machine — vision/intention/means, lived in his own failure:

"I have a very nice exercise machine at home. It is relatively unused. And I can tell you why it's relatively unused. I bought it once when I thought it would be a good idea, but I had no vision and no intention to go with it. So it sits there, and it's a means. It would work if I had the vision and the intention. I'm told that there are other people who have that same sort of thing. I understand. Truthfully, it just doesn't mean that much to me, and I don't think it's that important. [...] I do try to watch my health, I try to be careful about eating and getting some exercise and so on, and I can ride that thing once in a while, but I don't do it consistently because I don't have the vision and I haven't formed the intention. I just have the means." — DC 08

(c) "Maybe I'm one of them" — Willard wondering if the Matthew 23 woes are about him:

"This is one of the passages that really got after me [...] when I was a young minister trying to do something, and I kept coming across this passage and — is this talking about me? And I began to suspect, maybe all the Pharisees weren't dead. You know, maybe there are a few. Maybe I'm one of them." — DC 07: The Beatitudes

(d) The Pastor Ed sledgehammer story — Willard quoting another preacher's stake-driving move, not his own, but using it as model of character that can let the institutional self die:

"Someone was telling me the story about the church here [...] how the pastor, Pastor Ed, who came in here, took a sledgehammer to the choir loft. Is that true? And invited others to come. Now see, actually that's profoundly wise, but it's very hard to see someone do that. [...] He has an experience of Christ that enables him to say, 'This has to be done, and we're going to do it.' [...] You have to get out of the mode of saving the vessel. That building was a vessel. It was not the treasure." — DC 09: Church Communities

The cumulative effect: Willard models that the preacher who teaches transformation must be visibly under the same teaching. The vulnerability is not performance — it's the proof that the discipline works.

§4. Mapping to the preacher this week — Pass 2

The 05-08 memo names two things at once: (1) five months of preaching repentance with no visible harvest; (2) the question of what "reverence for reality" actually means outside the room. Willard speaks directly to both — and to a third the memo doesn't name but is implied: the felt pressure of the preacher's own performance.

On the five-months-of-repentance fear. Willard's most directly applicable line is not "keep going" — it's a reframe on what's actually being built:

"The engine that pulls the train of Christian spiritual formation is obedience to Christ." — DC 10

And — the long view that drains panic out of the harvest-question:

"Most of us have had very little experience with [trust]. [...] The experience of actually not having the resources and then coming to the time when you really have to have them, and there they are. And sometimes you don't know how they come about." — DC 12

The repentance-preaching is part of the trellis. The memo's Second-Great-Awakening reference is itself a Willardian move: most of what God does in formation work is hidden until it isn't.

On "we are talking about reality." This is the line the preacher already named in the memo. What Willard does with it — and what the preacher can borrow — is not abstract metaphysics. Willard uses "reality" to keep pulling the listener back from religious-performance space into ordinary life:

"You are the light of the world where you are. If you are not the light, there isn't going to be any light. That's your calling. [...] We can have people now who work next to one another for years, and they both attend church and are professing Christians, but at work they never find out they're Christians." — DC 10

That's the bridge between the memo's two threads: reverence-in-the-building is not real if it disappears at the desk, the hike, the diaper. The Willardian word for the bridge is not "consistency" or "integration" — it's kingdom: the same Christ, the same reality, in the same room and the same parking lot.

On the preacher's own state, the 6-day window. Willard's wisdom-not-law frame matters here. The applicable practices Willard explicitly names that the preacher could lean toward this week — Willard's words, the preacher's call on what to take:

None of these are presented as obligations. They are wisdom. The preacher decides.

On the performance trap, specifically — Willard names it without hedging:

"You have three main areas where there's apt to be performance. [...] Often it's done for what is regarded as good ends. We want to keep people coming back, so we want to have a good service. And a good service normally means one that they will enjoy. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying a good service. [...] But the object of the service is not to have people enjoy it. The object of the service is to bring them closer to Christ and more fulfilled in the kind of life that is in Christ. That's the object of the service. [...] It shocks people sometimes to hear it said, but when you watch how people get into consuming services and judging them as to whether they're good or bad, you suddenly realize that very often the mode of being that church services have is theater. That what is actually happening is a performance is being put on. That becomes very grinding to the people who have to do it when they realize that, and they realize they're just having to put on a performance." — DC 12

That last sentence is for the preacher.

§5. Where Willard extends or challenges the AOT 3 C's frame

AOT Session 1 says: craft / content / character — and that "character is at the root of all teaching. You are your ministry — not your sermons." That much Willard fully affirms.

Where Willard adds (or sharpens):

(a) Character is not a moral résumé — it's outsourced to the body and the habitual self.

"Character is to a large degree what you do without thinking. [...] Why, when Peter said to Jesus 'I will not deny you,' he meant it. He meant it. When Jesus said 'You will deny me three times,' he wasn't questioning Peter's intentions, but he knew what was in the rest of Peter. And Peter did not know that. So Peter didn't know his character. Jesus knew his character. [...] Peter didn't know that his body was poised to do what is wrong without thinking about it. That's what he didn't know about himself." — DC 07

AOT's "watch your life and doctrine" can be heard as a checklist. Willard makes it physiological: what you do under pressure, without thinking, is character — and you only change that by indirection, never by trying harder in the moment.

(b) The 3 C's don't name the burnout trap. Willard does.

AOT's content and craft sit upstream of character; Willard would say: if your character formation is only the engagement disciplines (study, prayer, worship, service), you will burn out. The abstinence disciplines (solitude, silence, fasting, secrecy, frugality) are what make the engagement disciplines sustainable. AOT doesn't name this distinction. Willard puts it in capitals.

(c) AOT treats vulnerability as a homiletic technique. Willard treats it as evidence.

AOT Session 6 quotes Ortberg: "An appropriate self-divulgence is one of the most important and powerful tools that a teacher has." Willard is not opposed — but his self-divulgence is not a tool. It's the proof that the teaching has touched him. The "I preached like a machine gun" story is not deployed for warmth; it's deployed because the content of the confession is the move he's asking the listener to make. The vulnerability is load-bearing on the teaching, not decorative.

(d) AOT's "spiritual formation" preaching (Session 9) — Willard sharpens the goal.

AOT: "to preach in such a way that Christ is formed in people." Willard says the same thing but with two added moves:

  1. The goal isn't more Christians; it's bigger ones. ("One version of church growth is not more Christians but bigger Christians" — DC 09.)
  2. "The primary field of evangelism in our day is the American church." (DC 09.) The room you preach to is the mission field. AOT presumes that frame; Willard names it.

(e) AOT presumes the structures are fine. Willard challenges them.

AOT Sessions 2–8 are mostly about doing the existing form better — architecture, chunks, seams, manuscripts. Willard's whole DC 09 is a challenge to whether the form itself is set up for what it claims to do:

"It is surprisingly silent about many matters that we associate with church structure and life. There is no mention of architecture, pulpits, [length] of typical sermons. In fact, there's no mention of sermons. [...] Why does the New Testament say nothing about all those matters to which the usual congregation today devotes almost all of its attention? [...] It might be because nearly everything we devote our attention to today doesn't matter. That might be it." — Willard quoting Leith Anderson, then commenting; DC 09

This is not a directive to throw structure out — it's a Willard challenge to check what the structure is for. AOT supplies the craft; Willard checks the telos.

§6. Honest framing — where Willard overreaches or makes moves to hold lightly

Willard is a careful philosopher, but the DC lectures are extempore and occasionally he loads more on a homiletic move than it can carry. Flagging:

None of these undo the formation argument. They're the spots where, transcribing the lecture for the preacher's use, the editor's pencil belongs.

Source map

Companion: willard_christ_in_action.md (cosmic-Christ / Col 1:17 thread — do not duplicate).