Mosgiel, New Zealand, in 1895
In 1895, the New Zealand south island township of Mosgiel, which is just outside of the former Scottish enclave of Dunedin, was a community of no more than one thousand settlers when the 24 year-old F.W. Boreham arrived from London to become the first pastor of the local Baptist church. Little could they have known that they would host and help produce the F.W. Boreham who would become known around the world as a profound writer and preacher.
A major part of Boreham’s development happened after he had been pastoring in Mosgiel for 8 years. Each Sunday Boreham would preach twice – once in the morning service and then another message in their evening service. By this stage FWB had already begun to feel that his messages might be appreciated by a wider audience — which led him to editorialise them for the local newspaper, The Taieri Advocate. But he also began to wonder whether his own congregation would notice if began to ‘recycle’ the messages he had preached to them 8 years earlier? The success of this experiment led Boreham to develop a strategy that he would improve upon and continue over the rest of his life – repackaging.
FROM RECYCLING TO REPACKAGING
FWB’s booklets on display in the Mosgiel Public Library[
When FWB began to revisit his 8 year old sermons, it afforded him the opportunity to improve them. (Every preacher knows that there are always three sermons in every sermon they preach — the one they prepared; the one they preached; and, the one they wished they’d preached!) He was able to adjust his turns of phrase, modify his illustrations, and reinforce his conclusions. He notes in his autobiography that none in his congregation seemed to notice what he was doing. Perhaps this was due to his improvements and refinements. This becomes evident when we examine FWB’s essays as they appeared in newspapers compared with their later publication in his books.
An example of an FWB essay-sermon re-published as a separate booklet
Howard Crago tells us that for those who had the privilege of hearing Dr. Boreham preach were often surprised that he would preach his essays in a word-for-word fashion without ‘notes’! What his hearers may not have realised though, was that this was almost certainly not the first time he had preached this message. In fact, one of FWB’s most popular messages, The House That Jack Built, was preached by Boreham at least 140 times! This was an example of how he recycled his messages, but he would soon go one step further and begin to repackage his messages.
Repackaging usually commenced with F.W. Boreham preparing and preaching a sermon. It was then repackaged as a newspaper article, then a periodical article, then as an essay in one of his books, then as a booklet — then as ABC radio talks. Each of these repackaging efforts enabled FWB to extend his reach and broaden his potential to bring people to a knowledge of the saviour.
FWB’s last sermon ‘notes’ are an example of FWB’s rather unique method to recount his sermon points, compare these notes with the actual audio of the message Dr. Boreham preached below-
From originally repackaging his sermons for the local Taieri Advocate, Boreham tells how one night after visiting the nearby town of Dunedin for an engagement, he missed his return train to Mosgiel. Looking out from the Dunedin Train Station he noticed that the lights of the offices of the Otago Daily Times were on. Mustering up the boldness to ask for the editor and introduce himself as someone “who scribbled”, his introduction was put to the test when the editor informed him that they still needed an editorial leader and invited FWB to sit down and write one while he waited for the next train to Mosgiel. Boreham had just been reading Gibbon’s history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and had been reflecting on the parallels with where their own British Empire was poised. The uncertainty over whether the editor, Mr. Fenwick, would accept Boreham’s impromptu editorial leader was settled the next morning.
The next day over the breakfast table Boreham and his wife gazed upon the leading article of that day’s Otago Times – a gaze, FWB writes in his autobiography, “with a pride such as Lucifer can never have known.”
Navigating Strange Seas, documentary (see also ‘My Pilgrimage, p. 149)
An example of one of Dr. Boreham’s sermon-essays re-packaged for a popular Christian periodical
This became the first article of thousands that FWB would contribute to the Otago Daily Times over the next few decades and it enabled him to repackage his sermonic essays for an even larger audience than the Taieri Advocate afforded him.
HOW MIGHT FWB HAVE REPACKAGED TODAY?
The Australian Christian World Newspaper, which FWB regularly wrote for.
It’s worth noting that FWB regarded his books as the culmination of his sermon-essay repackaging. His ambition wasn’t to write books — his ambition was to share Christ with those through a medium his pulpit hadn’t reached. Before he published his first book with Epworth Press he had already built a following and an audience with his newspaper, periodical, and journal articles. He exemplified the writer’s maxim about – “There’s no such thing as good writing—only ever good rewriting!” All too often today the temptation for bloggers and social media contributors (and even mainstream media journalists) is to write rather than: draft»rewrite»edit»rewrite»publish.
The publishing opportunities available today for writers and preachers are far more diverse than they were in FWB’s day. Yet, I suspect that the principles employed by Boreham would still be his today. This would include, developing his craft, finding his voice, building his audience, looking for and taking advantage of repackaging opportunities on existing platforms, and then embracing new technology platforms to repackage his messages.
I suspect that there are lessons for those of us today who continue to steward the same gospel that Dr. Boreham bore and I hope that what I’ve written might inspire other potentially world-class Christian preachers and writers to draw on these lessons from Mr. Boreham. Some already have, which is why several FWB admirers – Dr. Geoff Pound (Melbourne), Michael Dalton (Eureka), and Jeff Cranston (Bluffton) formed John Broadbanks Publishing in order to repackage many of F.W. Boreham’s essays into new collections (listed here and below) for a new audience and the next generation of Christian preachers and writers to be inspired to reach their generation with an engaging, winsome, story-telling style of gospel presentation.
-Andrew Corbett
Choosing the best essays of F. W. Boreham is as excruciating as selecting some children to get the honors and telling the others that they did not make the grade. VIEW
The book contains more than 250 of the best stories found in F. W. Boreham’s writings. Dr. Geoff Pound compiled the stories and wrote a foreword. VIEW
This book consists of five previously published essays that have been brought together for the first time: Second-Hand Things, The Second Crop, Second Fiddles, Our Second Wind and Second Thoughts. VIEW
This book chronicles F. W. Boreham’s pilgrimage to the birthplaces and homes of many great English and Scottish writers and his communion with them as the young writer recalls quotations and thoughts from their books. VIEW
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