It was the middle of May in 1946 when a 33 year old Richard Nixon approached the podium. In the audience couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred of the Pomona Kiwanis Club. Nixon clears his throat and gives a riveting speech.
It was certainly a much more modest audience than Nixon would be speaking to in the coming years. In the Nixon Library one can scroll through the speech files and will note that 1:7 is this particular address. The attendance at this event (and the significance of this event) will pale in comparison to the hundreds of other speeches on this list.
And yet Nixon delivered to these few souls “a rather learned review of the brutalities of seven centuries of Russian history”. It was, as his biographer Conrad Black would note, “an amazingly substantial address for such a modest audience” (Black 76).
Few times have preachers and Christian bloggers been admonished to follow in the foot steps of Richard Nixon. But here we must.
Preaching and Blogging to a Modest Crowd
What preacher hasn’t been discouraged by his modest Sunday evening crowd and just decided to phone it in? It’s not that he’ll preach untruth. He’ll still preach the gospel and still try to be faithful to the text. But it’s the periphery things. The things that he could have done that are missing—like the riveting illustrations that he diligently sought to help his Sunday morning sermon.
Those periphery things are missing when he preaches to the more modest crowd. He’ll save his hard work for the big crowds—and the little crowd will get his leftovers.
The same thing is true of bloggers when they first start. The crowd is modest and so she’ll write for a modest crowd. She won’t bother editing much. She won’t sit on a post and work it over until it’s just perfect. After all, she reasons, only my grandma will be reading this anyways.
Be Faithful With Little
But there is a reason why Nixon became president, why some bloggers continue to grow, and why the influence of some preachers will widen; namely, they were faithful when they had a little crowd.
What Jesus said in Luke 16:10 applies to preaching and blogging. “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.”
Whether you are preaching for 5 or 500 give it 110%. Whether your blog audience is 10 or 10,000 keep writing to the best of your ability. If you aren’t faithful with the little that you’ve been given then you will certainly shipwreck any wider audience that you might be given.
One other thing that is interesting in the life of Nixon is that you can see early on in his political career corners that he cut. These were little things when in his scope was much smaller. But eventually these little things caught up to him and he wound up disgraced. I can’t help but think that there is a warning for us as well—the corners you cut now will catch up to you later.
Be faithful no matter the size of your audience—knowing that you always have an audience of One.
