How important is authenticity?
John Wesley famously followed Peter Bohler’s advice to preach faith until he had it. He later – according to Richard Heitzenrater’s Wesley and the People Called Methodist – had months of wrestling with himself over the timing and nature of justification, sanctification, and assurance. But even as he struggled, he continued to preach again and again what comes to us as sermon 1 in his collected sermons, “Salvation by Faith,” which states things in terms he would later qualify or move away from.
By what I understand to be contemporary standards of authenticity, Wesley would come up short. He did not preach his doubts and qualify in his sermons with the questions that he clearly wrestled with in his own mind.
So, do we fault him for his bad practice? Or do we look at the fruit of these practices and question whether our attachment to preacher authenticity is perhaps itself a doubtful thing?
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
I’m puzzled by this post. It seems to me the task of preaching is to proclaim the gospel. The focus of good, authentic preaching is God and God’s truth for the world, not the faults and doubts of the preacher. The preacher’s job is to get out of the way so that the gospel is faithfully proclaimed.
To label Wesley as somehow “inauthentic” is unfair.
Steve,
I agree with you, but the post is intentionally provocative. (Maybe I should put a ? at the end of the title of the post.) Many people who preach today say that a preacher who does not share his own doubts and struggles with faith is inauthentic.
By that standard, Wesley was as well. I think that fact calls into question the calls for authenticity in the pulpit when “authenticity” means having the preacher make his own spiritual hot and cold spells a featured part of the sermon.
I think the question might be asked about ethical authenticity…I had a crisis of faith myself during which I questioned the ethical merit of remaining a Christian even though there were days I felt like an atheist (if, in those dark hours, I did still believe.)
But I did have the will to believe, and so I think that counts for something.