Preaching
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Posted on June 23, 2011, 8:53 am | 3 comments
Topics: Leadership, Preaching
Dear Fellow Workers in Christ: Greetings! As an "aging" Pastor of 93, but still in good health and sound mind, I feel relatively qualified to pass along to you a few suggestions for offsetting those feelings of boredom and non-productivity which we all share once we have lost the allure of "going out to pasture."
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Posted on April 21, 2011, 11:09 am
Topics: Preaching
Many say Lent’s 42 days mesh with Jesus’ 40 days of desert temptation by the devil. He was sustained by praying. Lent is still a time for praying. When do you pray? Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize winning novelist, was once asked when he prayed. Singer famously answered, “"I only pray when I'm in trouble. But I'm in trouble all the time, so I always pray."
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Posted on April 5, 2011, 10:08 pm | 3 comments
Topics: Preaching
With a delightful sense of irony and reality, Stan Mast calls his 110 page book Someday You’ll Be a Good Preacher. The way he stakes out the career-long tension between his own nagging thoughts and the few spoken (and probably many unspoken) comments make this book a compelling read.
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Posted on November 12, 2010, 9:45 pm | 12 comments
Topics: Preaching
If you're a preacher who has ever gotten tired, doubtful or in trouble, these novel preaching books by Kenton Anderson might push you back to the Story and Life behind everything. Or, do you want to be a confidant and friend to your pastor? Read these books, lend or give them to him or her and keep talking about life and preaching. Maybe that will help prevent endless sermons. After all, the Word of the Lord lasts forever, but preaching should be shorter, engaged and interesting.
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Posted on November 3, 2010, 12:47 pm | 9 comments
Topics: Preaching
Last week a colleague of mine sent me a link to this hilarious, yet serious, rap on the Heidelberg Catechism. This "cat rap" as I shall call it, is the curious result of a challenge by C.J. Mahaney to rapper Curtis Allen. I hadn't heard of either of these dudes (the term seems fitting), though I've read some good things by Kevin De Young, whose recent book on the catechism occasioned Mahaney's challenge.
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Posted on October 16, 2010, 10:41 am | 3 comments
Topics: Preaching
The following is a sermon given at a funeral for a 19-year-old who took his own life.
Tommy, for years you always made us laugh–but not a week ago Saturday.
Tommy–son, brother, foster son, dear friend: What happened to you? Where did the laughter go? What could anyone have done? We still can’t believe you’re gone.
Those are just some of the questions probably everyone here has asked since last Saturday. Questions like that beg for rational answers, but what Tommy has gone through and what family and friends are going through now defy reason. We can analyze all we want and the questions will still scream at us.
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Posted on January 27, 2010, 7:57 am
Topics: Preaching
The Center for Excellence in Preaching provides many helpful resources for preaching. These include podcasts of sermons by a wide variety of preachers, “sermon starters” with exegetical and expositional essays, lists of conferences on preaching, sermon evaluation forms for parishioners and more.
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Posted on January 8, 2010, 4:59 pm | 15 comments
Topics: Preaching
It’s coffee time, Friday morning but Sunday’s comin’—though not like Tony Campolo exultantly preached. Friday is sermon crunch day. So the preacher flails through her Bible from one lectionary passage to another. Commentaries and articles cascade around the room. It looks like the Taliban raided her study...
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