Preaching

From Sermon Central

2012-01-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

7 Pitfalls of Being an Introverted Pastor

"I am an introvert. With all my public appearances on Sunday mornings, this surprises many people. But in my private life and with those closest to me, there is no questioning that fact."

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I am an introvert. With all my public appearances on Sunday mornings, this surprises many people. But in my private life and with those closest to me, there is no questioning that fact. If anything, the larger our church has grown, the more introverted I have become. I wish I were otherwise, but this is how I am wired.

Here Are 7 Pitfalls Of Being An Introverted Pastor:

1. People often think I’m arrogant, aloof, or unfriendly. Now, I may be a lot of negative things, but those are not really the main three. I sometimes have to go back and apologize once I hear someone thinks I avoided them. This happens especially with extremely extroverted people.

2. I sometimes hesitate to make the connections I should and miss opportunities to build my network.

3. I’m worn out after a long day of talking and need time alone to rejuvenate, which can impact my family time if I’m not careful. It also leads to people at the end of the day telling me I look tired…guess what? I am!

4. Crowded rooms, which I love in terms of reaching people for Christ, are actually intimidating to me as a person.

5. I’m not as quick-witted when in crowds, and when I try to be, I sometimes appear awkward on first impressions.

6. I realize the need to talk with people…it’s what I do, but wrestling through the introverted tendencies actually adds even more stress to my life.

7. If I’m not careful, and thankfully I’m fairly disciplined here, I will close out people from really knowing me, which subjects me to all kinds of temptations, anxiety and even depression.

How’s that for transparency?

Are you an introvert? Do you see how it impacts your work?

Ron Edmondson

RonEdmondson.com

Ron Edmondson is a pastor and church leader passionate about planting churches, helping established churches thrive, and assisting pastors and those in ministry think through leadership, strategy and life. Ron has over 20 years of business experience, mostly as a self-employed business owner, and he's been in full-time ministry for over eight years.

2011-12-10T07:35:00.001-08:00

A preaching 'genius' faces his toughest convert

By John Blake, CNN

updated 1:42 PM EST, Mon November 28, 2011

The Rev. Fred Craddock's stories revolutionized preaching, but few know about the pain behind them.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Fred Craddock revolutionized art of preaching
Craddock was selected as one of the world's best preachers
He only hinted at his chaotic childhood in sermons
Craddock on troubled father: "I struggled with his silence"

Blue Ridge, Georgia (CNN) -- Fred Craddock was a young preacher trying to find his voice when he received a call from his mother one day.

"You need to go see your father," she said. "He may not live longer."

Craddock found his father in a VA hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Fred Craddock Sr. had whittled down to 73 pounds. Radiation treatments had burned him to pieces. He couldn't eat or speak.

When he saw his son, he picked up a Kleenex box and scribbled on it a line from Shakespeare's "Hamlet": "In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story."

"What is your story, Daddy?"

His father's eyes welled with tears. He wrote:

"I was wrong."

'A preacher like no other'

Craddock never became a televangelist, built a megachurch or preached to an adoring crowd in a packed stadium. He is a diminutive, bespectacled man whose voice is so soft that he once compared it to "wind whistling through a splinter on the post."

Yet he is a pulpit giant, a man who, one preaching scholar says, tilted the preaching world "on its axis" after creating a revolutionary method that led to him being selected as one of the 12 best preachers in the English-speaking world.

"He is a preacher like no other" is how the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, who also made the top 12 list, describes him.

Craddock preached his last official sermon in October. He is 83 and struggling with Parkinson's disease. When he greets a visitor, he moves gingerly to his seat. He is 5-foot-5 with a plump belly and an impish smile.

He lives in Blue Ridge, Georgia, a small town in the Appalachian Mountains that looks like a rustic postcard, with its small white-steeple churches and autumn forests bristling with burgundy and gold.

Friends worry about Craddock's health, but he seems to treat his illness as an annoyance.

"I should have something by 83," he says with a quick smile when the conversation turns to Parkinson's.

His arms shake when he talks at length, but everything else is there: his phenomenal recall of names, details, places.

Though he has gathered all manner of awards during 50 years of preaching, he never received praise for his calling from the one man he wanted to hear it from most: his father.

"I struggled with his silence," Craddock says. "I wanted him to say he was proud of me."

A father like no other

Fred Craddock Sr. had plenty to say about other subjects. He stood 5-foot-7, weighed 150 pounds and even in his 50s could do one-arm chin-ups. He liked to dance, race his horse at county fairs.

Most of all, he loved to tell stories.

Fred Craddock in grade school, where he struggled to hide his poverty from classmates.

His son and namesake, Fred Jr., was one of his most devoted fans. Father and son developed a storytelling ritual. At the end of the day, the elder Craddock would return to his home in the small town of Humboldt, Tennessee, roll a Bull Durham cigarette by the fireplace and say to no one in particular, "Boy, I never hope to see what I saw today."

Craddock, his three brothers and his sister flocked around their father.

"What'd you see today?"

"Oh, you kids still up? No, you go to bed. You don't want to have nightmares."

His children protested. Back and forth they'd go before Craddock Sr. finally said, "Well, sit down, but don't blame me if you have nightmares."

Craddock Sr. thrilled his children with adventure stories about Chief Loud Thunder, Civil War battles and, on occasion, stories from the Bible. The elder Craddock taught his son some of his first lessons in theology.

Each student in Craddock's first-grade class was required to answer morning roll call with a Bible verse. Craddock didn't know any, until his father taught him one. One morning, he stood up "like a bantam rooster" and repeated his father's scripture:

"Samson took the jawbone of an ass and killed 10,000 Filipinos."

The teacher sent Craddock home with a stern note to his parents for his use of profanity. Ethel Craddock chided her husband, but he chuckled, saying, "I bet the class enjoyed it."

Draw your breath in pain to tell my story.
Fred Craddock Sr., quoting "Hamlet"

The elder Craddock developed a following. Storytellers were admired in rural Tennessee during the first half of the 20th century. Television was nonexistent. Books were expensive. People spent their day around pot-bellied stoves, whittling wood and spitting tobacco while swapping stories.

When Craddock Sr. stopped on a corner to roll a cigarette, crowds gathered, because they knew a tall tale was coming. They rarely guessed how it would end. Craddock Sr. would uncork a story, lead his audience up to the edge, then suddenly announce that he had to go to work and walk away.

Says his son: "I'm convinced now that he didn't know where his stories were going when he started."

'Another name, another pledge'

Stories, however, don't feed hungry children.

Craddock's father had enough education to devour Shakespeare in his spare time. But he discovered, after inheriting 10 acres, that he couldn't farm. He wasn't good with his hands, either. Doors, fixtures and steps hung off-kilter in his house.

The elder Craddock had a bigger problem. He was an alcoholic.

When the Great Depression tore into rural Tennessee, Craddock Sr. drank to cushion the pain. His drinking, though, only magnified his self-loathing. His mood darkened. He yelled at his family, but Craddock says he never saw his father hit his mom. When visitors came by, though, everyone was embarrassed.

Sometimes, Craddock saw his father break down in tears.

"He wanted to do better by his family. He didn't know how."

At times, Craddock Sr. would sober up. He vowed never to drink again. He found an odd job. Once, he even arranged for a dentist to pull a gold crown from one of his molars so he could buy Christmas toys for his children.

"Sometimes, when something nice happened," Craddock says, "he would just go into the kitchen, take my mom away from the stove, and they would dance around the house."

His father's pluck, though, couldn't prevent the family's slide into poverty. They lost the farm and moved into a shack with a dirt floor and no electricity. A spigot in the yard was the only running water.

Craddock's family even struggled to clothe him. He still remembers walking to grade school on a cold day, hiding his donated sweater under a bridge and walking to school shivering in his shirtsleeves. He didn't want to risk any classmate recognizing that he was wearing a sweater that had once belonged to them.

"There's something worse than being poor," Craddock said. "It's being ashamed."

Ethel Craddock held the family together. By day, she worked in a factory, sticking labels on Buster Brown shoes. At night, she gathered her children around the fireplace to play word games: "If you can say it, you can spell it: omnivorous."

And faith held Ethel Craddock together. She took her children to church, sang hymns at home to the accompaniment of her harmonica and welcomed down-on-their luck strangers who needed a hot meal or a place to stay.

At first, Craddock's father shared the pews with his family. He was even named after a preacher. But he stopped attending as his drinking grew worse.

"He felt guilty," Craddock says. "He'd say, 'Every time I go to church, they preach against the drunks like they can't go to heaven.' "

Craddock Sr.'s hostility toward the church deepened when they decided to come to him. The church dispatched preachers to his home, hoping to draw him back to the pews. He belittled them so much that Craddock's mother worried a fight would erupt.

"I know what the church wants," he'd say. "Another name; another pledge. Right?"

Craddock, though, found acceptance in the church. It was the only place where he didn't feel different -- any less or any more than anybody else. Pastors told him he would be a good preacher one day; church ladies doted on him with new shoes and a picture book filled with stories about Jesus.

"We loved our dad, but we loved the church," Craddock says.

Fred Craddock Sr. battled his own demons during the Great Depression.

Home was a place filled with fantastic stories. But Ethel Craddock kept one story from him. It centered on the horrible night when she decided her son had been set apart by God.

Saved by a miracle?

A winter night in 1928, Humboldt, Tennessee.

Ethel Craddock is sprawled in a barn on a bale of hay, crying and praying to God. Her 8-month-old son, Fred, is dying.

He has diphtheria, a highly infectious disease that forms blockages over the lungs, gradually suffocating a child.

The boy can barely draw breath. His father has run a mile to summon a doctor. But the doctor can't do much, and Craddock's breathing has grown more labored.

His mother couldn't watch him suffer any more. She has fled to the barn, where she prays:

"Dear God, if you will let him live, I will pray every day that he will serve you as a minister."

She falls asleep on the hay. When she awakens at daybreak, she runs to the house, where the doctor says her son is going to be fine. He leaves without asking for payment.

Ethel Craddock didn't reveal this story to her son until he came to her after turning 17 to tell her that he was thinking about becoming a minister.

She began to cry after hearing the news, quickly regained her composure and told Craddock the story.

He was bewildered. Why hadn't she told him before?

She didn't want him to feel pushed into becoming a minister, she said. She believed that a deed couldn't be good if the motive was wrong.

When Craddock told his father of his decision to join the ministry, he listened intently before finally saying it was a big decision. Then he simply said: "Good, son."

Craddock was deflated. No tears. No sober, fatherly advice. The only reaction his father would give to his calling in the days ahead would be to crack jokes. "Don't be like John the Baptist and lose your head."

"He might have been embarrassed that I became a preacher," Craddock says. "It was kind of the opposite of him. Maybe that created some discomfort.

"I wanted more."

His father seemed to rub away some of the luster from his calling again when Craddock went off to college.

Wanting to make sure his call to the ministry was genuine, Craddock sought out a counselor. Over several sessions, the young student ended up talking about his childhood. The counselor's verdict was devastating:

"I think I'm clear why you're in the ministry: to redeem your father."

The counselor didn't elaborate, and Craddock was too stunned to ask questions. He thought about what his mother had taught him -- and knew what he had to do.

"I thought I was disqualified," he says. "My mother had always told me nothing can be right if the reason is wrong."

He quit the ministry and started picking up odd jobs.

Dear God, if you will let him live, I will pray every day that he will serve you.
Ethel Craddock

"It crushed me," he says of the conversation with the counselor. "I didn't have a Plan B in my life. I was kicking the can down the road every night, trying to figure it out."

The answer came while reading one of his favorite books in the Bible.

The book of Philippians, written by the Apostle Paul, is regarded by some as one of the most uplifting in the New Testament. Yet the backdrop for Paul's composition is grim. He is imprisoned, and the church is splintering into factions. Paul thinks he's about to be executed; his enemies are spreading division and preaching Christ out of selfish motives.

But Paul says that none of that matters. Whether he lives or dies, or whether his enemies preach Christ out of selfish gain, what ultimately matters is that Christ is proclaimed.

Something shifted inside of Craddock. What did it matter if he preached Christ to save his father or save souls? Christ is preached.

"They're preaching for the wrong reason, yet Paul said thanks God for that," he says.

The message was clear; living it would prove more difficult:

"I had to get to a point where I disagreed with my mother. That was tough."

Craddock returned to school and started preaching at rural churches. He had ignored his father and defied his mother's teaching to pursue the ministry.

Now he was about to revolutionize preaching.

Changing the rules of preaching

Craddock had three books in his childhood home: his mother's King James Bible, his father's complete works of Shakespeare and "The Life and Times of Billy Sunday."

Sunday was a Major League Baseball player who became one of America's most famous preachers during the early 20th century by transforming preaching into an athletic event.

He'd smash chairs, throw parts of his clothing into the audience and run across the preaching platform as if he were sliding into home plate while proclaiming, "Safe at home -- by the blood of Jesus!"

Sunday was the type of pastor Craddock grew up admiring. They strode the pulpit like human firecrackers: booming voices, explosive movements, big men who radiated power.

Craddock had a problem. He couldn't bring the thunder. He was short, and his voice was weak. His high school counselor tried to talk him out of becoming a preacher because of his size. And his first church sermon landed with a thud. While preaching about three wise men visiting baby Jesus, an elderly man stood up in the back and blurted: "How do you know there were three?"

A flustered Craddock had no reply. But he eventually found a way to be heard and owed part of that breakthrough to his father.

When he started preaching in rural Tennessee during the 1950s, Craddock employed the traditional "deductive" preaching style. The sermon is structured like a term paper: thesis, three supporting points, restatement of thesis.

"Something in me said that's not the way to do it," he says.

Fred Craddock struggled as a young preacher to find an audience before experiencing a breakthrough.

Maybe it was the stories he heard growing up, but Craddock gradually stumbled onto his preaching style.

While serving as a young pastor at a church in Columbia, Tennessee, he noticed that people responded more to his informal talks outside church service than to his sermons.

He started experimenting. What if you didn't structure the sermon like a legal argument but more like an extended conversation? The listener -- not the preacher -- would be challenged to give the sermon its meaning.

Craddock never took to preachers who tried to bulldoze people into converting. He had seen plenty of preachers try to goad his father back to church. And his mother, by withholding the story of his near-death experience, had taught him that people's faith decisions must be genuine, not coerced.

So Craddock became a preacher who didn't preach. He once said that a "yes" is no good unless a "no" is possible.

"No one wants to listen to pulpit bullies, behaving as though they had walked all round God and taken pictures," he wrote in the introduction to his book "Craddock on the Craft of Preaching."

He is a preacher like no other.
The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

Over the years, people have tried to describe Craddock's style. Some use the term "inductive," a word he resists because it sounds like a legal term. One of his prize students, the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, offers one of the best descriptions of Craddock's preaching style.

In an introduction to "The Collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock," Taylor wrote:

"He assumes from the start that we are capable of attending to the text, handling some scholarship, dealing with open-ended stories, and drawing our own conclusions. He does not tell us what he is going to tell us, and then tell us what he told us. He sits down before we are ready. He lets us chew our own food."

Craddock's sermons, though, don't go down like broccoli. They are playful, inventive, filled with hyperbole. They sound like probing short stories or front-porch yarns.

In one sermon, Craddock recounts a conversation with an overweight sparrow that doesn't know it can fly. In another, he imagines bored teenagers who "sat out on the hoods of their camels" listening to a shaggy John the Baptist preach in the desert, and in another he pretends to emcee a debate at a dreary church committee meeting between early Christian leaders arguing over whether Gentiles should be included in the church.

Craddock didn't have to break chairs to get people's attention. His stories did the job. His reputation spread. He began writing influential preaching textbooks. When he became a preaching professor at Emory University in Atlanta, he spawned a new generation of preachers who took his style out into the pews. People started describing him as a pulpit genius.

In 1996, Craddock received one of his most celebrated honors. Baylor University in Texas polled 341 seminary professors and editors of religious periodicals and asked them to name the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. Newsweek magazine published the top 12.

Craddock was selected for the list. So were two pastors he heavily influenced: Taylor and the Rev. Thomas Long.

Long says Craddock tilted the homiletic world "on its axis" with his 1971 book on preaching, "As One without Authority." He calls it one of the most pivotal books on preaching to appear in the past century.

"There's a homespun nostalgic quality to his sermons," says Long, who now teaches at Emory. "He rarely preaches about the engineer with the complex ethical decision. It's more about the pot of beans served at the back door."

Taylor still remembers the first time she heard Craddock speak at Yale Divinity School in 1978. She was working as a secretary at a local church on the weekends, but listening to Craddock stirred her desire to preach.

"He simply spoke of the gospel so compellingly that I wanted know more -- about the way of life he was describing, about why his words struck me with such force and about how I could learn to use language that way, too."

Some preachers transform their eloquence into business ventures. They build megachurches, TV empires. Some even get entourages. Craddock wasn't driven to build a personal brand. He has no e-mail address, doesn't drive and refused to turn on a personal computer his son and daughter bought him several years ago.

"If Fred Craddock ever tweets, I'll know the world has come to an end," Taylor says.

Craddock used some of his renown to reach out to the region that nurtured him. He gave preaching workshops to itinerant pastors in the Appalachian Mountains and established the Craddock Center, a nonprofit group that offers free meals and storytelling to needy kids in three Southern states.

He built a family as he built a career. He married his high school sweetheart, Nettie, and they raised their two children, John and Laura, as he taught at various seminaries and accepted preaching invitations across the country.

Fred and Nettie Craddock were high school sweethearts and are still together more than 50 years later.

"Sometimes we felt like we were in competition with the church and God," says Laura, his daughter, who named her son after her father.

His son, John, never felt pressured to become a minister. He is the CEO of America's First Choice Warranty company in Atlanta. His father, he says, is the most remarkable person he has ever known.

"I don't care if it's a guy on the street asking for a dollar or the president of the United States, he makes you feel as if you're the most important person in the world when he's talking to you.

"I won the lottery as far as great fathers go."

Telling his father's story

Craddock yearned to hear such praise from his father.

Yet his father never even came to hear him preach. Craddock says he sometimes overheard his father accept praise for his son's decision to enter the ministry, but he can't recall ever hearing his father admit to anyone that he was proud of his son's choice.

"He never said it. I looked for little signals. I finally decided that I was reading into things that were not there."

His father may not have acknowledged him, but Craddock affirmed his father. In the dedication in his book "As One without Authority," he wrote:

"To my mother, and in memory of my father: She taught me the Word. He taught me the words."

One Sunday, he did get a sign that maybe his father would have enjoyed hearing him preach. At his childhood church in Humboldt, Tennessee, a man approached after hearing him preach. The man was about his father's age.

"You sound like your daddy," he said.

The comment stirred strong emotions in Craddock. He had to compose himself before he shook the man's hand and thanked him. He says it was the grandest compliment he's ever had about a sermon.

"He was a good storyteller and a good man," Craddock says of his father. "For him to relate me to my father ... I spent a lot of time working through my relationship with my father."

Perhaps he still is.

When asked in one interview whether he became a minister to save his father, he says, "I'll never know."

Yet in his memoirs, "Reflections on My Call to Preach," he wrote:

"I was confident that my being a Christian minister would have a life-changing effect on my father. With a son, his own namesake, going into the ministry, would not Daddy toss the bottle forever and return to the pew beside my mother? Surely. But I was naïve, knowing nothing about the power of addiction."

Craddock's last visit with his father revealed to him the results of addiction. His father never stopped drinking or smoking and was hospitalized with throat cancer. He was 63.

That's when Craddock received the phone call from his mom: You need to go see your father.

When he entered his father's hospital room, he noticed that it was filled with flowers and a stack of get-well cards 20 inches deep besides his bed. Every card and every blossom came from Craddock's childhood church in Humboldt, the church his father scorned.

His father confessed that he was wrong about the church and the people in the pews. They didn't just want a name and a pledge. They wanted him.

His father's admission didn't provide relief. It deepened his grief.

"It was so late. It was at the end. With his personality and his education -- he was generous to a fault; give you the shirt off of his back. He could have been such a good person, helping people, talking to people, playing with children -- he could do all these things."

Would it have been better if his father had said he was also wrong about his son and his decision to become a minister?

Would it have been better if he had finally said, "I'm proud of you, son"?

Craddock doesn't dwell on those questions.

"In my tendency to choose between yes and no, I choose yes. I really think he would be proud of me because he loved a storyteller. He would have taken credit for it, though. He would have said, 'I taught you real good, son.' ''

What Craddock remembers of their last moments together is not just his father's confession but something his father did.

After he asked his son to "tell my story," Craddock reached out and clutched his gaunt hand.

"I just held his hand. ... He couldn't move. I couldn't move."

Craddock squeezed his father's hand, and both men cried.

From SermonCentral.com

2011-11-10T18:02:00.001-08:00

8 Ways to Hook Your Congregation into Your Message

Brandon Cox
BrandonaCox.com

Date Published:

11/8/2011

Whether you’re looking back at Plato or Jesus, virtually every culture has had great communicators who realized the power of attention-grabbing hooks.

The biblical text should be the grand centerpiece of every sermon. But we often take what should be the centerpiece, and move it to the front of what we have to say. In most cases, reading the text should come first in importance, but not first in the order of a message. Whether you’re looking back at Plato or Jesus, virtually every culture has had great communicators who realized the power of attention-grabbing hooks.

1. Start with a deep, human need instead of jumping right into the exegesis and historical-grammatical analysis of the text. When you move from the need to the text, people have the context of its meaning for their lives.

2. Launch with a relevant story. We remember stories that are vibrant, funny, and powerful. And stories connect my heart to the text before my head grabs hold of it.

3. Tell a joke. That is, if you’re funny. I know a fellow Pastor who served a very discouraged congregation, but after years of opening with humor, they experience joy together every week.

4. Use an object lesson. You may not be able to match Ed Young’s capability to drive a tank on stage to illustrate spiritual warfare, but you can hand out puzzle pieces to represent how we all “fit” in God’s family or hold up your shoes as an illustration of an essential need many people live without.

5. Begin with someone’s testimony. This is also great for the middle of the message, but having someone address your topic from their life’s experience shows the congregation that there are others who struggle and others who overcome. Your words have increased credibility when someone “normal” has already proven the practical possibility of achieving what you’re about to preach.

6. Share the results of some word-on-the-street interviews. You can find these clips, or film them yourself as a chance to connect with your community. If you’re going to preach an apologetic message, interview people about their religious viewpoints.

7. Show a related video clip. Some great storytellers and artists have invested their talent into framing concepts in motion pictures. Take advantage of their work for the purpose of setting up your message in an artistic way.

8. Talk to the crowd. This, of course, depends on your setting, but with text messaging and Twitter, we can talk with our audience in real time as never before, fielding questions and allowing the crowd to speak to itself as we teach.

Our options for opening a message are almost limitless, but what we don’t have to do is jump right into the text. It’s still the most important thing we will share all day, but it doesn’t have to come first.

Brandon Cox

BrandonaCox.com

Brandon Cox is Lead Pastor of Grace Hills Church, a new church plant in northwest Arkansas. He also serves as Editor and Community Facilitator for Pastors.com and Rick Warren's Pastor's Toolbox and was formerly a Pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. In his spare time, he offers consultation to church leaders about communication, branding, and social media. He and his wife, Angie, live with their two awesome kids in Bentonville, Arkansas.

From SermonCentral.com

2011-11-10T17:54:00.001-08:00

5 Places to Find a Sermon

John McClure

Date Published:

11/10/2011

What will I preach on? Whether you're asking this question a week, a month, or a year in advance of the Sunday in question, you're looking for inspiration.

What will I preach on? Whether you're asking this question a week, a month, or a year in advance of the Sunday in question, you're looking for inspiration. Some ideas may spontaneously emerge in prayer, but for most, we have to look—in the Bible and in our own context. Here, John McClure describes five “places” to find a sermon.

1. On The Page Of The Biblical Text

In this approach, you find a sermon idea among the obvious features of the biblical text (in translation) or what is “on the page.” Of course, in order to be sure that you correctly understand what seems “obvious,” you need to study the text in its context first. But as a preacher, once you are certain what the text is saying, you will return to the words and thoughts (ideas, metaphors, images) “on the page” as the place to find the sermon. As you think about these words and thoughts, ask yourself: “What might be dynamically equivalent to this thought/image/word in today’s situation?” By dynamically equivalent, I mean to imply that you allow some well-considered latitude. Don’t remain overly wooden or literal when identifying an equivalent idea. For instance, in the story of Mary and Martha, the image of Mary seeking instruction from Jesus is dynamically equivalent to any action of attending carefully to the words of Jesus in today’s context. A non-dynamic or literal equivalent would focus only on instances when busy women take time out (or don't) to attend to Jesus’ words and thoughts. This may constrict and overly narrow the meaning of the text.

When you preach from this “place,” your congregation will not hear you referring so much to the historical context for the biblical text as to the translated words on the page of the biblical text. In effect, you are asking them to live lives that are in some way imitative of, or closely analogous to the clear and straightforward meaning of the words on the page.

2. Behind The Biblical Text

In this approach, you find a sermon idea “behind the text” in its historical situation. Through careful exegetical study, you arrive at the text’s historical, traditional, social, and religious situation (exodus, exile, poverty, empire, wilderness, passover, etc.). Having arrived at this “place” behind the text, you will preach a sermon that invites the congregation to live in historical continuity with the community of people who spoke or recorded the words on the page. You ask questions such as “How are we also people struggling with exodus, empire, or some other similar situation in these ways?”

In Ched Myers' commentary on Mark’s gospel, for instance, he argues that the “fishers of people” text is best understood in a situation of empire in which the gap between rich and poor is ever-widening. He notes that Mark’s listeners would have heard these as apocalyptic words referring to images of fishers in Jeremiah 16:16 and Amos 4:2, where fishing hooks and nets were not only used for gathering in God’s chosen people, but for separating out the evildoers from their midst. In our current post-Enron, debt-crisis situation, the preacher may discover strong historical continuities between first century struggles with empire and our own struggles, and the need for “fishers of people” who will both gather in the wounded and pronounce judgment on the purveyors of empire.

When you preach from this “place,” your congregation will not hear the words on the page as much as references to “Mark,” or “Matthew’s community,” or “during the exile,” and other indicators that your sermon comes from behind the biblical text. In effect you are inviting listeners to live lives in historical continuity with our forebears in the faith.

3. In Front Of The Biblical Text

In this approach, you find a sermon idea “in front of the text,” in what the language or rhetoric of the text does. One way to get to this “place” is to say: "This text sounds like __________” (a sales pitch, a prayer, lamentation, praise, a lover’s quarrel, a negotiation, an argument, etc.). For instance, Tom Long once preached a sermon about Jesus’ trip to the temple as a little child. He was struck with the way the language of the text seemed to shout: “Everything about this person is a mystery!” He used the litany “Do you ever get the feeling there’s something going on you don’t understand?” to draw the reader deeper into the mystery of Jesus created by the language of the text.

When you preach from this “place,” your congregation will not hear so much the actual words of the text, or about “Mark’s community’s desperate struggle with empire,” but a re-performance of the text’s rhetorical or communicative force – what it “does” to us.

4. In The Theological Claims Of The Text

In this approach, your operative theology (evangelical, liberationist, feminist, etc.) and/or tradition (Lutheran, Reformed, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Baptist, Methodist, etc.) becomes much more active and acts as a guide, leading you to the place where you find a sermon. Following the lead of this theological guide, you travel toward a key theological claim at work in a text—a claim about justice, mercy, sanctification, salvation, hope, etc., depending on your operative theology. Once you arrive at that claim you will allow it to shape the message and form of the sermon.

William Sloane Coffin, whose theology was often strongly liberationist in tone, once preached a powerful sermon on the healing of the paralytic. His theology drew his eyes to the moment in the text when the paralytic, whose sins had been forgiven, was invited to get up from his pallet and walk. For Coffin this moment in the story revealed a crucial theological claim—that new forms of ethical responsibility should accompany and in fact complete our experience of forgiveness by Christ. To paraphrase Coffin’s words “the problem for the paralytic was not forgiveness, but responsibility—response-ability—the ability to respond to the love of God...to get up off that stretcher and walk.” Coffin then highlighted the tendency among many Christians to spend their time celebrating and basking in the blessings of forgiveness in a way that effectively kept them on stretchers—unwilling and unable to get up and do the liberating work of God. For Coffin, the theological claim of the text was the unity of justification (forgiveness) and sanctification (liberative action), and it was from this theological place that he preached his entire sermon.

When preaching from this place, your theology generates both the tone and focus of your sermon. The language of the sermon will not reiterate the words on the page of the Bible (place 1), develop continuities with historical events or formations such as “empire” or “exile” (place 2) or imitate the way the language of the text works (place 3). Instead, the sermon will focus on a particular moment or set of moments in the biblical text that identify, focus, or illuminate a particular theological claim you are making. Sermon listeners will hear those biblical moments shaped into a sermon by your theological claim regarding forgiveness, liberation, hope, idolatry, obedience, love, etc.

5. In Today’s Situation As Catalyst For The Text’s Meaning

In this approach, you begin the journey toward a sermon with something significant that is going on in your situation or broader context. You then ask what meaning or idea in the text is catalyzed by its confrontation with your context today. Throughout history we have seen how meanings in the biblical text are catalyzed by our own moment in history. Often these are meanings we could never have known before. For instance, the civil rights movement catalyzed new meanings from the biblical text about slavery, systemic evil, and oppression. The feminist movement catalyzed new meanings regarding sexual violence, forgiveness, and atonement.

Adopting this approach, you might pick up the newspaper or reflect on an important issue confronting the larger community or congregation. Then, ask “What meaning lies dormant within this text, awaiting this moment in our history or life together as a nation, community, or congregation to be discovered?” Although this may lead to a dead end (or to frightful exegesis—so be careful!), it is amazing how often you will find a genuinely helpful idea, or an entire re-framing of the current situation provided by a seemingly unrelated biblical text.

The Sunday after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon I was slated to preach at a large church. I had originally chosen to preach a difficult sermon on John 3:16 in which I was trying to re-think more exclusivist interpretations of this passage. After the attack on the trade towers and Pentagon, I felt strongly that the situation at hand was catalyzing a different trajectory of meaning from the text—one that hovered around the deeper meaning of “belief” (“whoever believes in me”) as a form of trust. I moved the entire focus of the sermon toward the ultimate trustworthiness of God in a world where trust had been shaken to its core.

When preaching a sermon from this place, you will use language that shows how the listener's own context is, in fact, already there, in the world projected by the biblical text. The ultimate meaning of our context exists as a latent trajectory or horizon of meaning in the text awaiting this moment to be discovered. Instead of hearing you draw dynamic analogies from the words of the text (place 1), identify historical continuities behind the text (place 2), re-perform the text’s rhetoric (place 3), or locate specific theological claims in the text (place 4), listeners will hear you dig deep within the immediate situation and discover there a thought or image that serves as a catalyst for a hidden trajectory of meaning within the biblical text.

In summary, there are at least five places to find a sermon:

Place 1. On the page of the biblical text, finding equivalences to its obvious features

Place 2. Behind the biblical text, finding historical continuities between then and now

Place 3. In front of the biblical text, in what the text’s language does to us as readers

Place 4. In the theological claims of the text, attenuated through the lens of our operative theologies

Place 5. In our situation, where trajectories of meaning from the text await this situation to be discovered.

John McClure

Otherwise Thinking

John McClure blogs about preaching and theology atOtherwise Thinking. You can read more about these "places" in McClure's book, The Four Codes of Preaching.

Via SermonCentral.com

2011-10-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

Preaching for Life-Change

Rick Long
Grace-Alone.org

Date Published:

10/12/2011

Does preaching for life-change always produce a watered down message?

John MacArthur once addressed the issue of "Biblically-Anemic Preaching." Dr. MacArthur boldly confronted pulpits across America that have abandoned the teaching of God's Word in exchange for self-help guides, philosophical remedies and popular anecdotes that can be as easily discovered by watching any episode of Dr. Phil orOprah. I absolutely agree with him when it comes to his concern about "churches" who have reduced the teaching of God's Word to nothing more than a highlight during the weekend services; but I disagree with the degree to which Dr. MacArthur restricts methodology for preaching the Word of God. Respectfully, I would like to submit an alternate point of view.

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I believe that there is liberty within the body of Christ for a variety of approaches to teaching the Word of God. After all, the purpose of the Scriptures is clearly defined in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV). "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." As you can see from a close look at the Greek word "pros," which is translated "for," Scripture is helpful for doctrine, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, but these are not the end-all purposes. The purpose of Scripture is "so that the man of God may be mature." The purpose of our preaching and teaching is not to wow the crowds with our amazing wit or knowledge of Scripture, but to preach messages that change lives. In Romans 8:29 we find that the primary purpose for God's Word and work in our lives is to make us like God's Son, Jesus. What concerns me about those who believe the only way to teach is verse by verse and chapter by chapter is that they label preachers as topical, exegetical or some other label. Let me point out that these labels themselves are extra-biblical. When the original letters were written, they had no chapters and verses; they were sent to be read, understood and applied. Again, the ultimate purpose for the Word of God is that our minds be changed so that our obedience is a by-product of what we have learned. The goal, and I think Dr. MacArthur would agree with this point, is not merely head knowledge, but life transformation.

The majority of American Christians know far more Scripture than they are living out! (This is not to say that the Church is permeated with biblical literacy. But it is to say that biblical literacy isn’t the sole crisis we face—but rather biblical application of what we do know is also of great concern.) The bottom line is this: our preaching must lead to Christ-like convictions that produce Christ-like character which must produce Christ-like conduct. We are called to be doers of the Word and not hearers only.

In a recent article, Dr. MacArthur stated:

“…today’s sermons tend to be short, shallow, topical homilies that massage people's egos and focus on fairly insipid subjects like human relationships, "successful" living, emotional issues, and other practical but worldly—and not definitively biblical—themes.”

I don’t wish to spend energy defending those who do massage people's egos, but I can in no way concede the issue of human relationships as an “insipid subject.” Human relationships are at the heart of biblical teaching, regardless of our preaching style.

Let me break it down. Though I preach for nearly 50 minutes every week, I do believe that the amount of time spent is not nearly as important as the content of what is said. We see this borne out in Jesus’ teaching discourses, the brief parable of the sower as a clear example of power not being sacrificed for brevity. I have heard some of the most life-changing messages that were no longer than ten minutes.

So I don’t find the length of a sermon being proscribed in the Bible. All Bible-loving preachers will agree with the dangers of massaging egos. But I believe I’m on solid ground when I defend the value of preaching biblically on topics that encourage and give hope. (Perhaps Dr. MacArthur would also affirm this.)

The Bible is filled with hundreds of examples of human relationships that demonstrate the type of husband, son, employee, friend, relative, brother, boss and so on that I am called to be, and the passages that teach me how to live out these responsibilities are just as numerous. Teaching soundly about these matters is critical. And while I may not teach in what appears to me as a narrowly-defined style of preaching, I believe I’m on track in imitating Christ in both my purpose and manner of preaching.

God help me as I articulate what God has done at our church of 2,300 in Colorado. It is a place where 67 percent of all the members came to know Christ in and through this church. In 19 years we have grown from 23 curious onlookers to 2,300 (mostly!) active believers. We are living the purposes of God and reaching out to the community through 52 unique ministries in our church. We have trained 300 churches how to be active in their community and have become a church to which the local rescue mission sends their recovering addicts. We are made up of doctors, lawyers, orthodontists, as well as prostitutes, drug addicts and criminals—people who have gloriously come to know Jesus and are learning to surrender to his Lordship in every area of their lives. Last year 750 adults came to Christ in our services, yet we do not take on the label "seeker" church, because I believe God does the seeking, we're just chucking the seeds. He gets all the glory and he deserves all the praise. But I share what God has done in our midst to illustrate that he is active in our church, which operates under a style some would reject as “unbiblical.” I just won’t concede that! The truth is, we would never have seen such impact had we regarded issues of human relationships as being insipid.

In my finite and limited years of experience, I have come to believe that a "deep" study of the Word of God means that we are called to live what we read. I have a conviction that preachers must not lose touch with the culture around us, the very culture with which we have been called to share the message of Christ. I have no apologies for a pursuit of relevance.

There are only two types of people who will ever walk through your doors: your family or your mission field. Each person deserves the most powerful and persuasive presentation of God's Word we can provide. If I am teaching on the subject of love, why would I limit myself to a narrow study of 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, when the subject is addressed in 1200 passages in Scripture? I want the full counsel of God so I may bring light to the subject, but I compel the hearer to action with a well-thought-out approach and a variety of tools to bring the sermon to life. In a culture of multimedia as well as church resources around every corner, it is not just my prerogative to use these tools—but my duty to use them. My God deserves the best I can give him, and that is exactly what we strive for at Grace Church of Arvada.

We see in Scripture an emphasis on application. Romans is 50 percent application. Ephesians is 50 percent application, Philippians is 100 percent application, and James is over 80 percent application. We are not just to inform our people, but to preach for transformation—and that is done by application teaching. We use videos and testimonies almost every week. We utilize examples from pop culture and often deal with the headlines of the day. People, Christians and non-Christians alike, are searching for answers to life's most difficult questions, and we have the answer—it is the Word of God.

My production team, made up of qualified staff members and pastors, discusses every sermon and every Scripture. We plan every detail of the weekend and make sure that God's Word is handled correctly and remains the focus of all we do. We are planned ahead, and I preach sermons, complete with all the "bells and whistles," to the production team two-and-a-half weeks before the actual weekend it will be delivered. This is how careful we are with the Word of God—but my approach certainly differs from that of Dr. MacArthur. I consider myself on his same team—and would value being validated in my approach rather than being viewed as having somehow compromised God's Word—though God is certainly the final judge over all of our preaching. I believe that there are a variety of approaches or methods to delivering the message. And as long as God's Word is handled accurately and with reverence, and as long as lives are being transformed by the clear Gospel of grace, then God is pleased. I preach for life change and nothing else. If my people leave on the weekend and say, "Wow, my pastor is so smart, did you hear the words he used?", I have failed. But if their week is impacted by changed behavior as they live for Christ, then I have succeeded.

My fellow pastors, my word to you is this: I pray for you and can understand the burden you bear every day. God has placed you in the position you’re in and he wants you to preach exactly the way he created you. Don't try to be someone you’re not. Preach the way God has gifted you. Stay true to your studies and to the Word and lead your people in its light. I am praying for all of you.

In closing, I want to say that friendly tension is what sharpens our faith. Dr. MacArthur challenged me in many areas, and I hope I have done the same for you.

Rick Long

Grace-Alone.org

Rick is the Executive Director, Grace Church of Arvada, Arvada, CO; Speaker and Workshop Teacher. He founded Grace Church in 1989 and since then he has seen God grow the church exponentially. The ministry has over 2000 members and is a Purpose Driven Church committed to the Global glory of God. Rick has been instrumental in laying the groundwork for Dare 2 Share Ministries in Colorado.

Via SermonCentral.com

2011-10-12T10:15:00.001-07:00

6 Reasons to Preach the Same Sermon Twice

Joe McKeever
JoeMcKeever.com

.5Date Published:

10/7/2011

Joe McKeever: "Have fun preaching those repeats, pastor. At least this is one time you do not have to reinvent the wheel or discover fire all over again."

As a young pastor, I couldn't repeat a sermon any more than I could eat yesterday's breakfast again. Each sermon was a one-time thing. When it was over, it was gone forever. Then invitations began to come in to preach in churches pastored by friends who thought I had something worth sharing with their people. That's when I had to get serious about repeating a sermon. After all, my friends' members hadn't heard my stories or sermons. Anything I did would be new to them.

Those early attempts to preach repeats were fairly pathetic, I think. Since my sermon notes were always one thing and the actual sermon something else entirely, nothing in writing told me what I had preached the first time, so I couldn't reproduce it verbatim. I had to go from memory, or better, get with the Lord anew on that sermon. These days—I'm now 70 and retired—almost every sermon I preach is on a topic I've preached before (with the occasional exception; hey, I'm not living on reruns here!). As a result, I have more or less figured this thing out, at least to my satisfaction. Maybe pastors will find something of benefit here.

Don't expect it to be an exact copy of the first time.

The absolute worst thing you could do in repreaching a sermon would be to take the earlier manuscript and deliver it verbatim. After all, a lot has changed since you preached it:

The world has changed. Circumstances change, cultures evolve, technology advances. Illustrations get outdated, and language changes.
You are at a different place in life. You've grown. You know more about the Lord and His Word than you did even a year or two ago.
You are preaching to a different congregation. As any preacher will tell you, the hearers of a message have a lot to do with how it is preached, and your congregation has changed (physically and spiritually) since you last preached the message.

I think of the pastor who preached in the afternoon to a different congregation the same message he delivered to his own people that morning. Asked why it had been so powerful in the morning and had bombed four hours later, he said, "Poor preaching is God's judgment on a prayerless congregation." Every congregation is different. Therefore, sermons will not be the same everywhere or work in the same way in every setting.

Go to the Lord to see what He wants updated.

The fact that the Holy Spirit led the preacher the first time does not automatically mean He has said all He has to say on that subject or has nothing to new to add. In fact, on the second time around, the pastor is ready to receive more from the Spirit than he was when he first produced the sermon. He now has a grasp of the basic text and a good understanding of the thrust of the message. So, as he prays over it and rethinks the material, he is able to do something pastors rarely get a chance to do: improve on a sermon he has already preached. This is one of the most exciting aspects of repreaching an old sermon. You get to make it better. As a result, you become a better preacher yourself.

Ask any schoolteacher. The first year a teacher covers a subject, he or she labors every night trying to assemble the material for the next day's class. It's an ordeal. The second year improves, since the teacher has been through the jungle before. He has carved out a path and knows he can get to the destination. Fortified by the experience of the first year, she looks around to see if there is a better way to teach this difficult event or explain that hard-to-grasp concept. The second year is typically more fun, more effective, and more productive than the first. At this point, the teacher faces a crucial decision: He can reteach the first year's material again and again, or he can keep learning on the subject and trying to perfect his methods.

Pastors sometimes have the experience of a church member hearing him preach a repeat in another church and observing, "That was great, pastor. You ought to preach that for us sometime." He thinks he did, but he didn't. He preached an earlier incarnation of that sermon. A slimmer version. The embryonic form.

Pastors who simply regurgitate previously delivered sermons without restudying them, praying them through anew, and looking for better ways and sharper insights, are failing their people. I expect we all have known pastors who went from one short-term pastorate to another doing this—and they wonder why the people in the pews never grew. The number one reason people in the pews are not growing is that the man in the pulpit has long since ceased to grow.

Always be working to improve your best sermons.

A good preacher reads something and realizes it fits with the sermon on grace. He finds a great illustration that works for the sermon on stewardship. He stumbles across an insight from Scripture that is ideal for the message on God's Word. How he incorporates these into his files so it will be there waiting the next time he preaches that sermon is up to him. If, like I tend to be, he is a totally right-brained preacher (that is, spontaneous in his impulsiveness, disorderly in his scheduling, and haphazard in his filing system), he will drop the note into a drawer or file it in the pages of his Bible and may or may not find it when he needs it. The stories I could tell about searches for those gems I had hoped to use the next time I preached a certain sermon!

Experience the sermon anew with the congregation.

This little insight came straight from the lips of Professor James Taylor, teacher of preaching at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-1960s. This is also how Christian entertainers like Dennis Swanberg and Andy Andrews do it. They relive whatever they're sharing along with their audiences. Look at their faces, and you know in a heartbeat that even though they have their material down pat and know exactly what comes next, they are experiencing it afresh along with you. It's a neat trick (or, if you prefer, a masterful art) that comes from loving people and devoting oneself to one's craft.

Revisit the material you couldn't use the first time.

You can't preach every insight you have found, can't use every good story you have uncovered on a subject, and can't bring in every text that pertains to the message. You will have to pick and choose. This is great, because it means you can give your very best stuff to your congregation. They get to hear the choicest offering you can give.

Young pastors have to learn the hard way not to toss in every insight, every story, or every text that fits a sermon. Audiences do not have an infinite capacity to take in and retain all the preacher throws at them. He needs to respect their limitations and keep the sermon at a reasonable length by laying aside all but the most important elements. After all, the pastor's goal is not to convince his audience he knows all there is to know of a subject; he's trying to convey the Lord's message on that subject.

Don't hesitate to preach repeats to your own people.

Most pastors I know tell the congregation when they are preaching a repeat. They might dress several up as "summer reruns" or "back by popular demand." I know at least two pastors who, each year on the anniversary of their arrival at that church, will deliver the same message year after year. I have no idea how well they do it, and I sometimes wonder why they do it.

However, if the sermon was preached more than a couple of years earlier, calling attention to its being a rerun is completely unnecessary. After all, as we've seen, the sermon will not be the same as it was before (or, it shouldn't be!).

Invariably, some church member will seek out the preacher following the sermon with her finger pointing to a verse in her open Bible. "Pastor, you preached this same sermon three years ago." Count on it happening. But don't let it bother you. The proper answer to that is: "I preached the same text. But it's a different sermon. And by the way, don't be surprised if I preach on this again. It's a great Scripture, isn't it?"

Have fun preaching those repeats, pastor. At least this is one time you do not have to reinvent the wheel or discover fire all over again. What a privilege to be a co-laborer with the Lord in preaching this Word!

Joe McKeever

JoeMcKeever.com

Dr. Joe McKeever is a preacher, cartoonist and the retired Director of Missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans. Currently he loves to serve as a speaker/pulpit fill for revivals, prayer conferences, deacon trainings, leadership banquets and other church events. Visit him and enjoy his insights on nearly 50 years of ministry at JoeMcKeever.com.

2011-09-07T19:03:00.001-07:00

(Christian Century) Thomas Long—Why sermons bore us

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

Like other teachers of preaching, I listen to a lot of sermons, sometimes a dozen in a single day. I have noticed that this fact rarely evokes covetous sighs from my faculty colleagues, many of whom imagine a daily regimen of multiple homilies as akin to endless trips to the periodontist.

Contrary to expectations, though, I find that helping students preach for the first time carries the excitement of teaching skydiving to beginners. There is always that telltale widening of the eyes as they stand in the open bay of the pulpit feeling the wind whip by, staring into the depths below and suddenly becoming aware of what they are about to do as you tap them on the shoulder and say, "Go!"

Read it all.

From Themelios

2011-08-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

A Preacher’s Decalogue

Sinclair B. Ferguson
Sinclair Ferguson is Senior Minister at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, and Professor of Systematic Theology at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, Texas.

Listening to or reading the reflections of others on preaching is, for most preachers, inherently interesting and stimulating (whether positively or negatively). These reflections then are offered in the spirit of the Golden Rule and only because the Editor is a long-standing friend!

Forty years exactly have passed since my first sermon in the context of a Sunday service. Four decades is a long time to have amassed occasions when going to the church door after preaching is the last thing one wants to do—even if one loves the congregation (sometimes precisely because one loves the congregation and therefore the sense of failure is all the greater!). How often have I had to ask myself, “How is it possible to have done this thousands of times and still not do it properly?”

Yes, I know how to talk myself out of that mood! “It’s faithfulness, not skill, that really matters.” “How you feel has nothing to do with it!” “Remember you’re sowing seed.” “It’s ultimately the Lord who preaches the word into people’s hearts, not you.” All true. Yet we are responsible to make progress as preachers, indeed evident and visible, or at least audible progress (1 Tim 4:13, 15 is an instructive and searching word in this respect!).

All of this led me while traveling one day to reflect on this: What Ten Commandments, what rule of preaching-life, do I wish someone had written for me to provide direction, shape, ground rules, that might have helped me keep going in the right direction and gaining momentum in ministry along the way?

Once one begins thinking about this, whatever Ten Commandments one comes up with, it becomes obvious that this is an inexhaustible theme. My friend, the Editor, could easily run his journal for a year with a whole series of “My Ten Commandments for Preaching.” I offer these ten, not as infallible, but as the fruit of a few minutes of quiet reflection on a plane journey.

1. Know Your Bible Better

Often at the end of a Lord’s Day, or a Conference, the thought strikes me again: “If you only knew your Bible better you would have been a lot more help to the people.” I teach at a seminary whose founder stated that its goal was “to produce experts in the Bible.” Alas I was not educated in an institution that had anything remotely resembling that goal. The result? Life has been an ongoing “teach yourself while you play catch-up.” At the end of the day seminaries exist not to give authoritative line-by-line interpretations of the whole of Scripture but to provide tools to enable its graduates to do that. That is why, in many ways, it is the work we do, the conversations we have, the churches we attend, the preaching under which we sit, that make or break our ministries. This is not “do it yourself,” but we ourselves need to do it.

As an observer as well as a practitioner of preaching, I am troubled and perplexed by hearing men with wonderful equipment, humanly speaking (ability to speak, charismatic personality, and so on), who seem to be incapable of simply preaching the Scriptures. Somehow they have not first invaded and gripped them.

I must not be an illiterate. But I do need to be homo unius libri—a man of one Book. The widow of a dear friend once told me that her husband wore out his Bible during the last year of his life. “He devoured it like a novel” she said. Be a Bible-devourer!

2. Be a Man of Prayer

I mean this with respect to preaching—not only in the sense that I should pray before I begin my preparation, but in the sense that my preparation is itself a communion in prayer with God in and through his word. Whatever did the apostles mean by saying that they needed to devote themselves “to prayer and the ministry of the word”—and why that order?

My own feeling is that in the tradition of our pastoral textbooks we have over-individualized this. The apostles (one may surmise) really meant “we”—not “I, Peter” or “I, John” but “We, Peter, John, James, Thomas, Andrew . . . together.”

Is it a misreading of the situation to suspect that preachers hide the desperate need of prayer for the preaching and their personal need? By contrast, reflect on Paul’s appeals. And remember Spurgeon’s bon mot when asked about the secret of his ministry: “My people pray for me.”

Reflecting on this reminds me of one moment in the middle of an address at a conference for pastors when the bubble above my head contained the words “You are making a complete and total hash of this.” But as my eyes then refocused on the men in front of me, those men seemed like thirsty souls drinking in cool refreshing water, and their eyes all seemed to be fixed on the water carrier I was holding! Then the above-the-head-bubble filled with other words: “I remember now, how I urged the congregation at home to pray for these brethren and for the ministry of the word. They have been praying.”

Alas for me if I don’t see the need for prayer or for encouraging and teaching my people to see its importance. I may do well (I have done well enough thus far, have I not?) . . . but not with eternal fruit.

3. Don’t Lose Sight of Christ

Me? Yes, me. This is an important principle in too many dimensions fully to expound here. One must suffice. Know and therefore preach “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). That is a text far easier to preach as the first sermon in a ministry than it is to preach as the final sermon.

What do I mean? Perhaps the point can be put sharply, even provocatively, in this way: systematic exposition did not die on the cross for us; nor did biblical theology, nor even systematic theology or hermeneutics or whatever else we deem important as those who handle the exposition of Scripture. I have heard all of these in preaching . . . without a center in the person of the Lord Jesus.

Paradoxically not even the systematic preaching through one of the Gospels guarantees Christ-crucified centered preaching. Too often preaching on the Gospels takes what I whimsically think of as the “Find Waldo Approach.” The underlying question in the sermon is “Where are you to be found in this story?” (are you Martha or Mary, James and John, Peter, the grateful leper . . . ?). The question “Where, who and what is Jesus in this story?” tends to be marginalized.

The truth is it is far easier to preach about Mary, Martha, James, John, or Peter than it is about Christ. It is far easier to preach even about the darkness of sin and the human heart than to preach Christ. Plus my bookshelves are groaning with literature on Mary, Martha . . . the good life, the family life, the Spirit-filled life, the parenting life, the damaged-self life . . . but most of us have only a few inches of shelf-space on the person and work of Christ himself.

Am I absolutely at my best when talking about him or about us?

4. Be Deeply Trinitarian

Surely we are? At least in some of our churches, not a Lord’s Day passes without the congregation confessing one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But as is commonly recognized, Western Christianity has often had a special tendency to either an explicit or a pragmatic Unitarianism, be it of the Father (liberalism, for all practical purposes), the Son (evangelicalism, perhaps not least in its reactions against liberalism), or the Spirit (Charismaticism with its reaction to both of the previous).

This is, doubtless, a caricature. But my concern here arises from a sense that Bible-believing preachers (as well as others) continue to think of the Trinity as the most speculative and therefore the least practical of all doctrines. After all, what can you “do” as a result of hearing preaching that emphasizes God as Trinity? Well, at least inwardly if not outwardly, fall down in prostrate worship that the God whose being is so ineffable, so incomprehensible to my mental math, seeks fellowship with us!

I sometimes wonder if it is failure here that has led to churches actually to believe it when they are told by “church analysts” and the like that “the thing your church does best is worship . . . small groups, well you need to work on that . . . .” Doesn’t that verge on blasphemy? (Verge on it? There is surely only One who can assess the quality of our worship. This approach confuses aesthetics with adoration).

John’s Gospel suggests to us that one of the deepest burdens on our Lord’s heart during his last hours with his disciples was to help them understand that God’s being as Trinity is the heart of what makes the gospel both possible and actual, and that it is knowing him as such that forms the very lifeblood of the life of faith (cf. John 13–17). Read Paul with this in mind, and it becomes obvious how profoundly woven into the warp and woof of his gospel his understanding of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is.

Our people need to know that, through the Spirit, their fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. Would they know that from my preaching?

5. Use Your Imagination

Does this not contradict the immediately preceding observations that the truth of the Trinity should not be thought of as speculative metaphysics? No. Rather it is simply to state what the preaching masters of the centuries have either explicitly written or, at least by example, implied. All good preaching involves the use of the imagination. No great preacher has ever lacked imagination. Perhaps we might go so far as to say it is simply an exhortation to love the Lord our God with all of our . . . mind . . . and our neighbor as ourselves.

Scripture itself suggests that there are many different kinds of imagination—hence the different genres in which the word of God is expressed (poetry, historical narrative, dialogue, monologue, history, vision, and so on). No two biblical authors had identical imaginations. It is doubtful if Ezekiel could have written Proverbs, for example!

What do we mean by “imagination”? Our dictionaries give a series of definitions. Common to them all seems to be the ability to “think outside of oneself,” “to be able to see or conceive the same thing in a different way.” In some definitions the ideas of the ability to contrive, exercising resourcefulness, the mind’s creative power, are among the nuanced meanings of the word.

Imagination in preaching means being able to understand the truth well enough to translate or transpose it into another kind of language or musical key in order to present the same truth in a way that enables others to see it, understand its significance, feel its power—to do so in a way that gets under the skin, breaks through the barriers, grips the mind, will, and affections so that they not only understand the word used but feel their truth and power.

Luther did this by the sheer dramatic forcefulness of his speech. Whitefield did it by his use of dramatic expression (overdid it, in the view of some). Calvin—perhaps surprisingly—did it too by the extraordinarily earthed-in-Geneva-life language in which he expressed himself. So an overwhelming Luther-personality, a dramatic preacher with Whitefieldian gifts of story-telling and voice (didn’t David Garrick say he’d give anything to be able to say “Mesopotamia” the way George Whitefield did?), a deeply scholarly, retiring, reluctant preacher—all did it, albeit in very different ways. They saw and heard the word of God as it might enter the world of their hearers and convert and edify them.

What is the secret here? It is, surely, learning to preach the word to yourself, from its context into your context, to make concrete in the realities of our lives the truth that came historically to others’ lives. This is why the old masters used to speak about sermons going from their lips with power only when they had first come to their own hearts with power.

All of which leads us from the fifth commandment back to where we started. Only immersion in Scripture enables us to preach it this way. Therein lies the difference between preaching that is about the Bible and its message and preaching that seems to come right out of the Bible with a “thus says the Lord” ring of authenticity and authority.

This is, surely, a good place to end the “first table” of these Commandments for Preachers. Now it is time to go and soak ourselves in Scripture to get ready for the “second table.”

6. Speak Much of Sin and Grace

In his exposition of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Martin Luther insightfully uses the words of Jeremiah’s call:

The sum total of this epistle is to destroy, root out, and bring to naught all carnal wisdom . . . All that is in us is to be rooted out, pulled down, destroyed, and thrown down, i.e., all that delights us because it comes from us and is found in us; but all that is from outside of us and in Christ is to be built up and planted.

If that is true of Paul’s “preaching” in Romans, it ought to be true of ours as well. Sin and grace should be the downbeat and the upbeat that run through all our exposition.

But there are some cautions. Preaching on sin must unmask the presence of sin, and undeceive about the nature of sin, as well as underline the danger of sin.

This is not the same thing as hammering a congregation against the back wall of the “sanctuary” with a tirade! That requires little more than high levels of emotion. A genuine, ultimately saving, unmasking and undeceiving of the human heart is more demanding exegetically and spiritually. For what is in view here is the skilled work of a surgeon—opening a wound, exposing the cause of the patient’s sickness, cutting away the destructive malignancies, all in order to heal and restore to life.

Doubtless people need warnings against the evils of contemporary society (abortion, apostasy in the visible church, etc). But we cannot build a ministry, nor healthy Christians, on a diet of fulminating against the world. No, rather we do this by seeing the Scriptures expose the sin in our own hearts, undeceive us about ourselves, root out the poison that remains in our own hearts—and then helping our people to do the same “by the open statement of the truth” ( 2 Cor 4:2).

There is only one safe way to do this. Spiritual surgery must be done within the context of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Only by seeing our sin do we come to see the need for and wonder of grace. But exposing sin is not the same thing as unveiling and applying grace. We must be familiar with and exponents of its multifaceted power, and know how to apply it to a variety of spiritual conditions.

Truth to tell, exposing sin is easier than applying grace; for, alas, we are more intimate with the former than we sometimes are with the latter. Therein lies our weakness.

7. Use “the Plain Style”

This is a familiar enough expression in the history of preaching. It is associated particularly with the contrast between the literary eloquence of the High Anglican preaching tradition and the new “plain style” of the Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. William Perkins’s The Arte of Prophesying served as the first textbook in this school.

But this seventh commandment is not insisting per se that we should all preach like the Puritans. Indeed, acquaintance with the Puritans themselves would underline for us that they did not all preach as if they had been cloned from William Perkins! But they did have one thing in common: plain speech that they believed Paul commended and should be a leading characteristic of all preaching (2 Cor 6:7, cf. 4:2).

There are many ways this principle applies. Do not make eloquence the thing for which you are best known as a preacher; make sure you get the point of the passage you are preaching, and that you make it clear and express its power. True evangelical eloquence will take care of itself. Despite Charles Hodge’s reservations, Archibald Alexander was in general right in urging students to pay attention to the power of biblical ideas and then the words used in preaching will take care of themselves.

The “masters” of clear style can teach us here. Paradoxically, in this context, two of them were themselves Anglicans. C. S. Lewis’s counsel on writing applies equally to preaching:

Use language that makes clear what you really mean; prefer plain words that are direct to long words that are vague. Avoid abstract words when you can use concrete. Don’t use adjectives to tell us how you want us to feel—make us feel that by what you say! Don’t use words that are too big for their subject. Don’t use “infinitely” when you mean “very,” otherwise you will have no word left when you really do mean infinite!

In a similar vein, here is J. C. Ryle’s counsel: “Have a clear knowledge of what you want to say. Use simple words. Employ a simple sentence structure. Preach as though you had asthma! Be direct. Make sure you illustrate what you are talking about.”

Of course, there are exceptions to these principles. But why would I think I am one? A brilliant surgeon may be able to perform his operation with poor instruments; so can the Holy Spirit. But since in preaching we are nurses in the operating room, our basic responsibility is to have clean, sharp, sterile scalpels for the Spirit to do his surgery.

8. Find Your Own Voice

“Voice” here is used in the sense of personal style—“know yourself” if one can Christianize the wisdom of the philosophers.

That being said, finding a voice—in the literal sense—is also important. The good preacher who uses his voice badly is a rara avis indeed. Clearly, affectation should be banned; nor are we actors whose voices are molded to the part that is to be played. But our creation as the image of God, creatures who speak—and speak his praises and his word—really requires us to do all we can with the natural resources the Lord has given us.

But it is “voice” in the metaphorical sense that is really in view here—our approach to preaching that makes it authentically “our” preaching and not a slavish imitation of someone else. Yes, we may—must—learn from others, positively and negatively. Further, it is always important when others preach to listen to them with both ears open: one for personal nourishment through the ministry of the word, but the other to try to detect the principles that make this preaching helpful to people.

We ought not to become clones. Some men never grow as preachers because the “preaching suit” they have borrowed does not actually fit them or their gifts. Instead of becoming the outstanding expository preacher, or redemptive-historical, or God-centered, or whatever their hero may be, we may tie ourselves in knots and endanger our own unique giftedness by trying to use someone else’s paradigm, style, or personality as a mold into which to squeeze ourselves. We become less than our true selves in Christ. The marriage of our personality with another’s preaching style can be a recipe for being dull and lifeless. So it is worth taking the time in an ongoing way to try to assess who and what we really are as preachers in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

9. Learn How to Transition

There is a short (two pages) but wonderful “must-read” section for preachers in the Westminster Assembly’sDirectory for the Public Worship of God. Inter alia the Divines state that the preacher “In exhorting to duties . . . is, as he seeth cause, to teach also the means that help to the performance of them.” In contemporary speech this means that our preaching will answer the “how to?” question. This perhaps requires further explanation.

Many of us are weary of the pandemic of “how-to-ness” we find in much contemporary preaching. It is often little better than psychology (however helpful) with a little Christian polish; it is largely imperative without indicative, and in the last analysis becomes self- and success-oriented rather than sin- and grace-oriented. But there is a Reformed and, more importantly, biblical, emphasis on teaching how to transition from the old ways to the new way, from patterns of sin to patterns of holiness. It is not enough to stress the necessity, nor even the possibility, of this. We must teach people how this happens.

Years ago I took one of our sons for coaching from an old friend who had become a highly regarded teaching professional. My son was not, as they say, “getting on to the next level.” I could see that but no longer had (if I ever had!) the golfing savoir faire to help. Enter my friend, and within the space of one coaching session, the improvement in ball-striking was both visible and audible (there is something about the sound of a perfectly struck drive—or home run for that matter!).

This is, in part, what we are called to effect in our handling of the Scriptures—not “this is wrong . . . this is right” but by our preaching to enable and effect the transition.

But how? For all its criticism of the pragmatism of evangelicalism, Reformed preaching is not always skilled in this area. Many are stronger on doctrine than on exegesis and often stronger on soul-searching than on spiritual up-building. We need to learn how to expound the Scriptures in such a way that the very exposition empowers in our hearers the transitions from the old patterns of life in Adam to the new patterns of life in Christ.

How do we do this? To begin with by expounding the Scriptures in a way that makes clear that the indicatives of grace ground the imperatives of faith and obedience and also effect them. This we must learn to do in a way that brings out of the text how the text itself teaches how transformation takes place and how the power of the truth itself sanctifies (cf. John 17:17).

This usually demands that we stay down in the text longer, more inquisitively than we sometimes do, asking the text, “Show me how your indicatives effect your imperatives.” Such study often yields the surprising (?) result: depth-study of Scripture means that we are not left scurrying to the Christian bookshop or the journal on counseling in order to find out how the gospel changes lives. No, we have learned that the Scriptures themselves teach us the answer to the “What?” questions and also the answer to the “How to?” question.

Do we—far less our congregations—know “how to”? Have we told them they need to do it, but left them to their own devices rather than model it in our preaching?

Some years ago, at the end of a church conference, the local minister, whom I knew from his student days, said to me, “Just before I let you go tonight, will you do one last thing? Will you take me through the steps that are involved so that we learn to mortify sin?”

I was touched—that he would broach what was obviously a personal as well as pastoral concern with me, but perhaps even more so by his assumption that I would be able to help. (How often we who struggle are asked questions we ourselves need to answer!) He died not long afterwards, and I think of his question as his legacy to me, causing me again and again to see that we need to exhibit what John “Rabbi” Duncan of New College said was true of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching: “His doctrine was all application, and his application was all doctrine.”

The ministry that illustrates this, and that understands what is involved in how preaching transitions its hearers from the old to the new, will have what Thomas Boston once said about his own ministry, “a certain tincture” that people will recognize even if they cannot articulate or explain why it is so different and so helpful.

10. Love Your People

John Newton wrote that his congregation would take almost anything from him, however painful, because they knew “I mean to do them good.”

This is a litmus test for our ministry. It means that my preparation is a more sacred enterprise than simply satisfying my own love of study; it means that my preaching will have characteristics about it, difficult to define but nevertheless sensed by my hearers, that reflect the apostolic principle:

What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. (2 Cor 4:5)

We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. (1 Thess 2:8)

In Jesus Christ, the church’s One True Preacher, message and messenger are one. He is the Preacher, and also the message. That is not true of us. But, in union with Christ (and we preach “in Christ” as well as live and die “in Christ”), a coalescence of a lesser sort takes place: the truth of the message is conveyed by the preacher whose spirit is conformed to the grace of God in the message. How can it be otherwise when preaching involves “God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20)? “A preacher’s life,” wrote Thomas Brooks, “should be a commentary upon his doctrine; his practice should be the counterpane [counterpart] of his sermons. Heavenly doctrines should always be adorned with a heavenly life.”

Conclusion

A “Preacher’s Decalogue” might be helpful, but at the end of the day we are nourished not by the commands of law but by the provisions of God’s grace in the gospel. It is as true of our preaching as of our living that what law cannot do, because of the weakness of our flesh, God accomplishes through Christ, in order to fulfill his commands in us by the Spirit. May it be so for us! Then we will be able truly to sing:

Happy if with my latest breath

I might but gasp his Name,

Preach him to all and cry in death,

“Behold, behold the Lamb!”

From SermonCentral.com

2011-05-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

A Preacher and His Notes

Darrin Patrick
Acts29Network

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5/14/2011

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Preaching, Church Leadership, Planning,Wisdom
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Do you use a full manuscript, an outline, or something in between when you preach?

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Sermon Manuscripts

Preachers aren't actors. We don't have to memorize our "script," although many effective preachers take a 12-page manuscript into the pulpit. Likewise, pastors aren't stand-up comedians. We aren't required to "take the stage" armed only with a few thoughts scribbled on a piece of paper, though many good pulpiteers use only a simple outline. There are merits and drawbacks to both of these radically different approaches. A full manuscript allows you to craft more pregnant phrases that tend to stick in the mind of the hearer. The manuscript approach protects you from tangents that might lead you away from the main points of the text. The downside to a manuscript is that you are tempted to interact more with your notes than with God and people. It’s harder to follow the prompting of the Spirit when you are locked into a specific direction.

Using Outlines

The benefits of an outline are that you keep the big picture in front of you and tend to consistently move in that direction. Using fewer notes means that eye contact and interaction with people will happen more frequently. Many folks who use outlines say they go into the pulpit with a sense of freedom and confidence that they might not get with a manuscript. The downside of an outline is that it is easy to miss important details of the text. Outline preachers tend to preach longer because they are tempted to chase thoughts that occur to them in the preaching moment. Also, off-the-cuff humor and illustrations are usually underdeveloped and might not convey your intended meaning.

Something In-between

I use something between an outline and a manuscript. I write out certain parts of the sermon verbatim. The parts are phrases that I think will help expose the text, phrases that will stick with people. I often close the sermon by leaving people with questions to chew on. When I do this, I write them out very carefully and usually project them on a screen to focus the congregation on the questions. But I also step into the pulpit with bullet points that highlight the big ideas I want to communicate. This allows me to keep the sermon moving forward in a logical flow, and more importantly, leaves room for me to hear from the Lord in the "preaching moment." I can camp out on a particular verse or skip a particular illustration as the Spirit leads. There is not a prescribed biblical manner for preparing and delivering your sermon, which means you have freedom to explore your particular style as you prepare a sermon and proclaim the gospel. You may enjoy taking a look at thisblog series by Josh Harris, where he posts the preaching notes of several well-known pastors, showing you what they take with them into the pulpit.

Finding Illustrations

2011-02-07T10:34:00.001-08:00

This is a post from my Illustrations blog:

I've only heard from one user of this blog, and I would love to hear from others. What do you find helpful? Where do you find illustrations?

It has been my experience that sometimes illustrations find you. For example, the illustration below this one was on NPR one morning as I was driving to the church that I serve. Other times finding the right illustration can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating pursuit. Here are some places that I have found to be helpful:

1. Homiletics. Homiletics is a bi-monthly magazine that is superb in the art of illustration. Sometimes (often?) their direction for a particular sermon is not quite what I'm looking for, but combing through what is now an online resource (homileticsonline) can be very rewarding. Homiletics is pricey, but it is worth it. These folks have been called the "metaphor guys" and rightly so.

2. sermoncentral.com I am a contributor and I find that most contributors whose work I look at are not good illustrators. However, if I'm stuck for one it is worth the time to look through the sermons there.

3. books, movies, television, radio, general culture - These can be the ideal source for illustrations, but sometimes they aren't as timely as you would like.

4. Your life - for some this is the best place. I personally try to keep a balance on this and I also make sure that I'm not the hero of all my stories.

That's my list, what's yours?

The Spiritual Landscape: "The Dave Test"

2010-10-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

After operating on 120 patients a month who needed repairs to shattered bones and severed blood vessels, one commonplace Tuesday afternoon, he took the results of his MRI, went in to see the chief of surgery, and explained, "I can't operate anymore and you can't afford to have me operate." Now he is trying to sort out what he can do with his life in a world made smaller by damaged eyesight.

But he doesn't go to church anymore in order to find help with that struggle. Why? Well, as he explains it, there are at least three reasons and I think that they help to explain why an increasing number of people think of themselves as spiritual but not religious.

One is that the church won't stop talking to him about money. Oh, he understands the need for stewardship. He gets the expenses involved in real mission. What he doesn't understand is the way in which the church so often lets the appeals for money take precedence over nearly everything else. Rightly, he notes, "Jesus risked everything to save others. The church risks anything and everything to save itself."

Second, the churches he has attended won't talk to him in a way that speaks to his life. He's listened to clergy talk over and around life's challenges without ever saying anything real about them. The preachers he has heard either string together a series of twenty-five dollar words they learned in seminary, or soft-ball life's hard realities. One way or another there is little or nothing with which he can connect.

Third, on the rare occasion when the church does speak to him about the challenges he faces, as he puts it, the preacher usually "blows sunshine up my ass and tells me that everything will be alright." It's hard, he points out, when you've been told that you have a brain tumor to hear people tell you that God has a plan, that the best is yet to come, or that you are living a blessing in disguise. Saying that to someone with a tumor that claims the lives of all but 3 percent who have them is worse than useless. "It's horse shit, not just false hope, to argue that at age 52 I can do more good without my surgical skills, than I did with them."

It's no surprise that the two friends he has that speak most readily and directly to him about the spiritual demands of life are no-nonsense, plain-spoken, recovering alcoholics. They may lack the theological vocabulary of a priest or pastor, and they may not have the time to dedicate their lives to a study of scripture, but they have sharpened what they believe and they have refined the way that they live by bringing their faith to bear upon the hard realities of life. "The institutional crap doesn't mean anything to them. Living their lives does."

The conversation has led me to begin applying what I call "The Dave Test" to what I write. Am I writing for real people who work in the real world? Am I writing for people who think that their faith in God ought to make a difference and are looking for a book to help them in the press of busy lives that demand that most of their attention?

If you are convinced that the way we think shapes the way we pray and the way we pray shapes the way that we think, but you find it hard to get advice that speaks to you - advice that is honest about life and spiritually grounded -- then this column is written for you.

I won't argue that I have all of the answers. I won't claim to have named all of the challenges that you are facing. For all that we hold in common, each of us have an experience that is all our own.

But I will offer you a place to begin doing your own spiritual work, a place to talk about what is happening "out there" in the spiritual landscape that we all journey, a conversation partner, a place to begin thinking spiritually about the life you live, and thoughts to build on or to reject. Come what may -- and your responses will have a lot to do with what we discuss -- my hope is that you will be a little clearer about what you believe, why you believe it, why it matters, and how it shapes your life.

Check back every Monday for the latest column in The Spiritual Landscape.

The Reverend Dr. Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr. is Director of Spiritual Formation and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. An Episcopal priest, he also serves as the director of the Episcopal studies program. He is the author of several books, including Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Luke (Morehouse, 2009) and What God Wants for Your Life (Harper One, 2005).

From http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Spiritual-Landscape-The-Dave-Test.html

Top Fifteen Signs Your Sermon Isn’t Going Well

2010-01-14T07:22:00.000-08:00

15. Your associate pastor is warming up in the bullpen.

14. The praise band begins playing you off the stage.

13. You are using PowerPoint.

12. When asked to read from the King James Version, you involuntarily blush every time you say the word “ass.”

11. The congregation is filling in the blanks of your outline before you get there.

10. You think the lyrics to a bluegrass song are really connecting with your audience.

9. When you pause for dramatic effect, several people giggle.

8. Your cell phone starts ringing, and you answer it.

7. The person signing for the deaf just pulled on mittens.

6. When the children are dismissed to junior church, most of their parents go, too.

5. Your sermon took shape over a glass of wine and volume three of Left Behind.

4. Your interpreter just rolled his eyes and put your last statement in quotation marks.

3. Desperate mothers are pinching their babies.

2. The ushers are handing out refunds.

1. You began your sermon with “Top 10 signs your sermon isn’t going well.”

Source: Monday Morning Quarterback (blog) via Treading Grain (blog)

Preaching the Mystery of God

2009-04-14T05:21:00.000-07:00

Mark Galli is senior managing of Christianity Today. He and his family were members of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL. when I was the assistant rector there. ed.

Why it's good news that we cannot explain everything about God.

By Mark Galli »

We are said to live in a postmodern era, in which logical proofs for God's existence and rational explanations of his character are no longer of interest to people. This may be true of many people, but classic apologetic books like Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity still sell briskly, and new rationalistic apologists like Lee Strobel are widely read and sought as speakers. It seems we have a God-given longing to make sense of God, and all the postmodernism in the world cannot kill it.

But the more I've probed the sensible God, the smaller he seems to get. I think most preachers, after a few years in the pulpit, start to feel this instinctively. Our heads may be able to form answers as to how God is three in one, why Jesus died on the cross, or how a loving and powerful God can allow evil, but the more we delve into the Word, the less our hearts are satisfied with these answers. The more we try to pinpoint where and how God acts in the world, the less sure we are of our pinpoints, but nonetheless more sure that God acts!

We have the odd experience of Moses: The more God makes himself known, the more dark he becomes:

On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire….1

We hear the thunder and see the lightning of God, but when we try to find God, all we see is smoke.
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This is what I call a "morning of the third day" event. It was on another morning on the third day that there was an earthquake, the appearance of dazzling angels—and confusion and fear. Mary thought she was talking to a gardener; the disciples did not fathom why the tomb was empty; the disciples on the road to Emmaus were blinded to the One walking with them.

To be sure, when it comes to God, "his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse."2 God's presence is sensed, but it's pretty tough to create a profile of a God from a world that includes both daisies and hurricanes, both kittens and rattlesnakes, one who is so in love with the world he's willing to send his Son—and wills that he be killed.
The mind can fashion a rational explanation, but the heart remains both perplexed but deeply moved, in fear and trembling, and in joyful, inexplicable gratitude.

---------

Why is God so elusive? This is not only personally puzzling, but socially embarrassing for preachers who serve the Christian God, the God who is supposed to be in the business of making himself known! We keep telling people that God is near, that God loves them. It would help our preaching if he'd show up and at least shake hands when we're trying to introduce him to people. Instead he often hides behind the door as we yak away about him, motioning him to come on over.

The mystery of God is not a new problem. Some of the most evocative expressions of God's elusiveness come from a deeply religious age and people, and at the very moments when God is supposedly revealing himself. We just read one description from the Book of Exodus. Here is another, from the prophet Ezekiel who had a vision of God:

And … there was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness with a human appearance. And upward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around. And downward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness around him. Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around.
Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord…3

Even in this so-called epiphany, God remains shielded by the vague and evasive language Ezekiel is forced to employ: "the likeness of" and "the appearance of." His summary is doubly vague: "Such was the appearance of the likeness…"

In other words, though Ezekiel had a vision of God, God remained hidden.

"To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?" says Isaiah4 as he strains to find ways to describe God. In the end, I think he just gave up: "Truly, you are a God who hides himself…"5

Paradoxically, things don't get much better when Jesus—"God with us"—shows up. While he does indeed "show us the Father" in a lot of ways, Jesus, the very revelation of God, talked about God's hiddenness time and again. Note how he talks about the "kingdom of God," that is, the experience of God in all its fullness: It is like a treasure hidden in a field. It is like a field in which both wheat and weeds are so mixed up, you can hardly separate them. It is like a parable, which hides as much as it reveals, which for "outsiders" are given that "they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand…"6

Jesus himself—"God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God" as the Nicene Creed says—remained a stumbling block and an offense from birth to death and resurrection. His own people knew him not. The descriptions of God and heaven in Revelation match the excruciating incoherence of Ezekiel. Paul, after trying to explain God's plan for Israel, throws up his hands and says, "How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!"7

While God clearly is about the business of giving us glimpses of himself, he is also clearly in the business of hiding himself. This makes the job of the preacher no small challenge. People expect us to clarify who God is and what he's about, while the one we're trying to explain making it harder and harder to do just that.

The God Who Hides Himself
So, again—why is God so elusive, and why does he make our job so hard?

I believe God hides himself because he does not want to be found if people are apt to mistake him for an idol.

Truly, you are a God who hides yourself,
O God of Israel, the Savior.
All of them are put to shame and confounded;
the makers of idols go in confusion together.8

God leaves us confused and confounded whenever we try to make God fit our ideas of who God should be.

Our God is the God who answers prayer, but he is not a divine bellhop, who jumps at our every request. He refuses sometimes to hear prayers that are attempts merely to manipulate him.

Our God is full of mercy and love—yes!—but he is not the Cosmic Nice Guy. Just when we think we need a pat on the back, he gives us a kick in the rear. Just when we expect a little praise for how much money we raise for him, he gets out a whip and drives us from the Temple. Just when we need him most, when we're hanging on a cross looking for him to strengthen and sustain us like he's supposed to, he is nowhere to be found, even when we cry about feeling utterly forsaken.

To know God, to live with God, and to love God, one must be willing to embrace this sort of confusion. It means you will be regularly mystified by God. An old bumper sticker described conversion with the phrase, I found it. That is part of the journey of faith. But it should be matched later by another: I lost it.

God is beyond everything that exists and every conception we can have of him, says Eastern Orthodox theologian Vladimir Loski. "In order to approach him, it is necessary to deny all that is inferior to him," especially our small and confined images of who he is. "It is by unknowing that one may know him…"9

I misplaced my keys one day. I looked in each place where they should have been, where I always leave them: in my coat pockets, my pants pocket, on top of the chest of drawers. I checked and rechecked these places over and over in disbelief that the keys were not to be found in one of those places. Only after many minutes of rising frustration did I give up that search. I then started to look in places where the keys were not likely to be. That's when I found them, lying on a window sill.

God is often near, right there on the window sill, but only when we give up our ideas about where he is and how exactly he is to be found, will we find him. That's why we can rejoice when we bump into the mystery of God, when God seems more confusing than ever. That's the first, necessary step in discovering where he really is.

The Elusive Lover
The mystery of God also acts like a magnet for us. It is not dissimilar to falling in love.

As I started to fall in love with the woman who was to become my wife, I became increasingly fascinated with her. I wanted to know what books she liked, what hobbies she enjoyed, what her favorite color was. I wondered what her family was like, if she had previous boyfriends, and what goals she had for her life.

The more I probed, the more I became curious. When I learned she had two sisters and a brother, I wanted to know how she got along with each. And once I found that out, I wanted to know why.

There came a time in our marriage when, sadly, Barbara no longer seemed a mystery to me. I thought I pretty much had her figured out. I knew her so well, she began to grate on me—her opinions, her habits, her turns of phrase were all so predictable! Instead of longing to be with her more and more, I wanted to get away.

This is a necessary chapter of marriage: We must become disillusioned with the familiar before we can move toward deeper intimacy. The problem was not that Barbara had become boring; it was that I had put her in the Barbara Box, a neat little container that defined who she was.

Becoming "born again" is like falling in love, and our spiritual courtship is a series of emotional highs as we discover the manifold wonders of God. But a little knowledge of God is a dangerous thing, and after awhile, we think we've got him figured out. And we put God in that neat little container.

Then one day, we go to get God out of that container—we expect him to answer a prayer or bless a venture, or we look for an answer to some tragedy we face—and we open it and find he is not there. Just when we needed him, he's up and gone! And we are angry. What happened to my God?

We stomp around the room in a fury, and we pout, and we vow never to be so naïve again about religion. And then we start to cry. We remember our first love. Even more than our desire to manipulate God is our desire to love God. More than wanting to merely use God, we simply want God.

That longing is not only resurrected by the mystery of God; it is heightened by it. We can, yes, say many things that are true about God. We can list and discuss his attributes and learn much in the process. But we will not have grasped God until we have recognized that the more we understand him, the more we don't know about him. But the more elusive God is, the more we want him. The more he teases us—flirts with us—the more we chase after him.

This can become the beginning of a new stage of faith, where the mystery of God becomes not a stumbling block, nor a puzzle to be solved. It is a new falling in love with the Lover of our souls. It is a mystery that ever draws us toward him, in both wonder and joy.

Preaching the Mystery

The upshot for preachers is simply this: Let's not shy away from proclaiming the mystery. Yes, week by week, we need to explain the gospel and its implications in the clearest language possible. As Hosea put it, the people perish from lack of knowledge. This should be a portion of the homiletical meal we serve our parishioners. At the same time, if every sermon and every class is wrapped up neatly, with every question answered and every concern addressed, then we have probably misconstrued the truth about God. If the God we preach is one whom we can explain, we are not preaching the God of the Bible.

This means it's okay to tell our people that we don't understand some parts of Scripture, that we don't get why God acts or doesn't act as we think he should, that despite the truthful revelation of God in Jesus Christ, it is not a full revelation. There is still much about God that we cannot fathom.

But we must preach this as good news—not with a shrug of the shoulder or in resignation, but in hope. For while the God of the Bible can be an elusive one, he is elusive precisely because he wants to share more and more of himself with us, drawing us to himself like a lover draws the beloved, slowly, teasingly. He wants to reveal himself not as some dime-store idol who makes perfect sense to us, but as God Almighty, Holy and Wondrous, the God who in his infinite love revealed himself to us in Christ and started us a journey of love that will never end.

1 Exodus 19:16-18 (ESV).

2 Romans 1:20.

3 Ezekiel 1:26-28.

4 Isaiah 40:18.

5 Isaiah 45:15.

6 Mark 4:12.

7 Romans 11:33

8 Isaiah 45:15-16.

9 The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Press, 1957), p. 25.

Two recent books on preaching

2009-04-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

Fairly recently I received two book recommendations: Why Johnny Can't Preach and The Power of Speaking God's Word. The two make for an interesting comparison.

Why Johnny is written by a professor of religion at Grove City College and The Power is written by a seasoned pastor. Professor T. David Gordon bemoans the bad preaching that he has heard in "conservative evangelical and conservative Reformed churches" (p. 12). He hasn't heard really bad preaching, I mean really bad preaching, until he's heard liberal mainline (or sideline, if you prefer) preaching. Gordon's antidote comes from the "cardinal requisites" of Robert Lewis Dabney in his Lectures on Sacred Rhetoric (first published in 1870). Gordon's approach is highly literary, whereas The Power is written to advocate a more oral approach to preaching.

The author of The Power is Wilbur Ellsworth, a baptist pastor with thirty years experience. While I enjoyed this book, I think preachers would be better off getting a copy of Clyde Fant's Preaching for Today. Fant's book was published in 1987; I was first exposed to Fant at the College of Preachers in the 90s. Ellsworth draws highly from Fant as he lays out a model for a more oral approach to preaching, utilizing Fant's "sermon brief."

While the two books come from two different directions I do find that a fruitful synthesis is possible. Gordon's use of Dabney's principles is helpful, particularly on organization of the sermon. Ellsworth also argues for strong organization although his concern for orality means that the finished sermon will be much less a literary project and more an oral event. Both are worth reading, but as I said, I would opt for Fant's book over Ellsworth's work.

Preaching to the Younger Unchurched

2009-03-02T03:57:00.000-08:00

From SermonCentral.com:

By Ed Stetzer and Jason Hayes

We know what you are thinking: How does one go about preaching to the unchurched, much less the younger unchurched? Since preaching is most commonly practiced within a church, it might seem counterintuitive to consider how we might preach to connect with people who aren’t there. Is it even possible to preach to the unchurched? And if so, what does such preaching look like?

Let us begin by saying that not only is it possible to preach to the unchurched, it’s quite probable you’re already doing so, perhaps weekly. Just because someone has awareness of your church or has attended a service at your church does not make them churched. Consider those that show up for their annual visits on Easter and Christmas. They may have sat through the last 20 years of your holiday cantata, but that doesn’t make them churched. Entertained? Sure. Inspired? Maybe. But certainly not churched.

Next, think about the guests (hopefully) visiting your church. For all you know, your service could be the first religious gathering of any kind that they’ve ever participated in.

Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches that Reach Them

Finally, note that we are more than a decade into the Internet age. Think of all the ways your services and sermons are available to the general public–churched or not. An unchurched individual doesn’t have to step one foot onto your campus to be exposed to your preaching, if they are interested. Churches that are effective in reaching the unchurched are leveraging mediums like the web, radio, and television to introduce themselves (and their preaching) to the world. All things considered, it is hard to deny that in some fashion most of us have the opportunity to preach to the unchurched.

Convincing each other it can be done is one thing. It’s yet another to reflect on how we can do it effectively. In our book, Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches That Reach Them, we address this very question. While the research that we share in the book discusses a broad scope of issues related to young adults and their opinions, we will focus in this space specifically on preaching and teaching. We’ll leave specific stats for the book, but we hope you’ll be encouraged as you read through the provided recommendations we’ve drawn from our research. Take note especially that so much of what the younger unchurched are looking for lines up directly with the biblical instruction we’ve received as teachers.

Examine Your Approach

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “It is not length of life, but depth of life.” Interestingly enough, our research shows that young adults agree. The survey data confirms that the younger unchurched maintain a high level of interest in theology, apologetics, worldview, and other religions.

Many churches have chosen to lessen their emphasis on depth in order to complement their inaccurate stereotypes of this generation. This isn’t working now, and it certainly won’t in the future. In fact, most young adults are turned off by shallowness and are beginning to walk away from environments (including churches) that foster it.

The days of spiritual clichés and cuteness were never wise, but we can afford to engage in superficiality even less today. No matter your worship or preaching style, study the Word deeply and seek to communicate it thoughtfully. We know you’ve heard the common wisdom to “make it simple,” “make the application your points,” and “make it simple to apply” —and these are not necessarily bad approaches—but many young adults are finding simplistic communication less helpful than their Baby Boomer counterparts.

What young adults are interested in, however, is preaching that engages on several levels, provokes deeper thoughts, and reveals complexity. This doesn’t mean watering down the truth; it means teaching the truth in all its challenging fullness. Preaching that engages the younger unchurched is deliberate preaching crafted with depth of thought and delivered with conviction. Think and rethink. Evaluate and reconsider.

Encourage Struggle

Directly connected to the younger unchurched’s aversion to simplistic preaching is their aversion to “tidy” preaching. The Church has somehow forgotten that life is not always about having a neat, pat answer. Almost nobody is living “The Brady Bunch” any more, least of all the unchurched, and as much affection as young adults may have for retro entertainment, they instantly recognize when someone is trying to pass off a sitcom as real life. God gave us Jesus, and He gave us His Word. However, He did not give us all of the answers. Too many sermons imply that God and His plan can be wrapped up with a pretty bow in 30 minutes, just like “Diff’rent Strokes.”

Young adults are looking for something real – something that issues real challenges, reflects real struggles, and prompts real examination. This level of depth, as described by young adults, is characterized by a continual pursuit of knowledge, experience, wisdom, intellect, understanding, and exploratory learning.

This means that the moralizing of our preaching past is out like the 80s. Our preaching should encompass more than do’s and don’ts. It should reach to the why and the how behind our proclamation. Great preaching requires mining truth down to its deepest core and assigning it to resonate within the hearts of our listeners. As a result, our preaching must go beyond appeals to behavior modification, beyond pithy platitudes on being happy and living well. Our preaching must wrestle with the meat and marrow of human existence, because this is what young adults are already doing. Otherwise it becomes like tossing a fortune cookie to a man starving in the desert.

Be Authentic and Transparent

We must remember that preaching is not just about what you say; it’s very much about who you are. One of the reasons so many young adults think negatively about churches is because they see very little authentic struggle from their leadership. Indeed, a large majority of the younger unchurched believe the church is full of hypocrites.

Consider the “foolishness of preaching” from the perspective of an unchurched young adult. They see a pastor standing up and presenting the message in a way that implies the pastor already has everything figured out. When pastors relate no doubt, no struggle, and no experiential element, they just begging to be tuned out. But preaching is not just about the level of intellectual content; it’s also about the teacher’s relationship with that content.

Leaders who know the value of speaking to people, not over people, are leading churches that are reaching young adults. There is no substitute for authenticity. Preaching with transparency has to do with being open and honest with a purpose that is redemptive and developmental. A preacher who is being transparent opens a window for the divine and pure purpose of helping others change in positive ways, without hidden motives or pretense. This is the kind of transparency that will connect with younger adults.

Prepare Effectively

We realize very few Bible teachers set out to provide shallow teaching. No sincere pastor desires to develop biblically ignorant Christ-followers, and none deliberately set out to disseminate false teaching. But it’s happening. Our hunch is that these things aren’t happening because of bad motives but, instead, are the result of weak and inadequate preparation. If this is the case, we each must look long and hard at our approach to studying God’s Word and evaluate our need to improve in this area.

As with most things, great preaching takes commitment, and connecting to the younger generation takes even more. Are you willing to evaluate your methodology and approach in preaching? Are you committed to being authentic and transparent as an example for others? Are you willing to go beyond the surface and challenge your people to do the same? If your answers to these questions are no, then it’s time to start making changes. If you can answer yes, then your preaching is ready to engage this generation.

Ed Stetzer (Ph.D.) is author of Breaking the Missional Code, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can Too and Planting Missional Churches. For the second consecutive year, the LifeWay Research team led by Dr. Stetzer has contacted churches, gathered data and produced the OUTREACH 100 lists. Stetzer’s upcoming book, Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and Churches that Reach Them (B&H), tackles the 20-something trend he explores in this report. He currently serves as the President of LifeWay Research. You can interact concerning this article at www.edstetzer.com.

Jason Hayes is a speaker, author, strategist and church consultant for Threads, a movement from LifeWay Christian Resources connecting young adults to God and the Church. Jason is a prolific blogger, and his work has been featured in numerous websites, articles and magazines across the U.S. and internationally. In addition to co-authoring Lost and Found with Dr. Stetzer, he is also the author of Blemished: How The Message of Malachi Confronts Empty Religion. Jason is a graduate of the University of Tennessee and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

THE 2009 TOP TEN PREACHING HINTS.

2009-01-05T13:18:00.000-08:00

From Bishop David Bena, suffragan bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America:

As we move into the new year, this might be a good time to review your preaching style. SO I offer these hints in that light.

1) "You preach for how many minutes???????" At one point, after I had
been ordained a number of years, I was surprised to be told by parishioner
that I had just preached for 40 minutes. When I explained that the subject
TOOK 40 minutes to cover, his response was, "Well okay. But the next time
you need to cover a subject in a sermon for that long, can you at least make
it interesting?" OUCH> But his comment caused me to rethink my style. As I
did the rethink, I soon realized that one of the reasons my sermons had
gotten so long was that I was no longer carving out enough time to prepare
my sermon or even to go over it adequately once I had it ready. So it ended
up that I was "doing my preparation while preaching it." That can be deadly!
I resolved that I would try to make my sermons no longer than 15 minutes,
and spend the time in preparation so that the 15 minutes would be
interesting as well as content filled. I decided to take that 11th
Commandment - Thou Shalt Not Bore People with the Gospel" - seriously.

2) "Chasing Rabbits - There goes one!" If you've made the preparation,
you will not "chase rabbits." What is chasing rabbits? It is starting out on
one thought, but before finishing that thought, jumping on to another
thought (Seeing a rabbit trail and chasing that rabbit) and going with that
one for a while until a new thought hits you. Once again, preparation is
necessary so that I have a plan and I STICK TO THE PLAN.

3) "Outline? Why should I use an outline? I've been ordained twenty
years." That's WHY you need an outline - so you don't start flying with a
faulty autopilot which takes you in circles rather than delivering you and
your congregation to the spiritual destination you started out for. Always,
always - outline your sermon. And stay with the outline. One of the
greatest outlines is this:

Point One: What's the passage say? (context & content)

Point Two: What's the passage mean? (theology of this passage)

Point Three: What's the passage mean to US? (APPLICATION)

Here's another outline:

Point One: Situation - what's the life situation here that's being
addressed?

Point Two: Complication - what keeps this situation from staying Godly?
SIN

Point Three: Resolution - How does the Gospel of Jesus Christ resolve it?

4) "Of course I use illustrations. I just used one, when was it, five
years ago." If you don't use illustrations, only rationalists will follow
you. And there are fewer of them every day. Really? You already have the
thinkers by putting in intellectual content. Now how about drawing the
majority of your congregation - the feelers. They need illustrations! They
need SHORT stories thrown in which will bring the intellectual content to
life. Newspapers, blogs, TV programs and movies - all good ground for
finding hard hitting illustrations.

5) "Funny? Why should I be funny? The Gospel is no laughing matter."
Well, maybe. Although I can find no scripture text that says we need to be
stand-up comedians, I can find stories Jesus told that are comical (ex.
"I've bought a cow and have to go check it out; I've bought some land and
have to go check it out; I've just gotten married...and, well, I can't be
there either"). Funny lines can melt people's resistance. I try to find at
least one comical short story or tell one CLEAN joke per sermon. Did you
know that some of your parishioners hear no laughter all week? Help them
laugh.

6) "What do you mean by APPLICATION? Why'd you capitalize that word?"
Anglican sermons tend to lack one vital thing - application. Last Sunday, I
went to church with my wife and sat in the pew. It was a very good Roman
Catholic church, with a good priest. He gave an excellent presentation of
Epiphany - good intellectual stuff, orthodox, biblical. But when it was
over, I found myself asking, "What do I do with this information?" He made
no way for me to apply the sermon to my life. So although I now knew that
there were not necessarily three kings in number, and although I now knew
that they were not really kings and that they were not Jewish, there was
really nothing in the sermon that called me to do anything, like witness the
power of the Gospel to people who might not look like me, or even to those
who do look like me but don't "get" who Jesus really is (to the Gentiles). A
sermon should always have some kind of application. Some Protestant services
call it a Call for Commitment, and follow the sermon with a "Hymn of
Commitment." Protestants often preach more effectively than we liturgical
types because they know their sermons need to bring out a commitment from
their listeners.

7) "You mean I need to practice my sermons after all these years?" YES.
Every so often, stand in front of a mirror and preach. You will be
surprised! I found at one point, I subconsciously had a scowl on my face and
used my right hand like an axe. Yikes! You might even want to record your
sermon ahead of time, just to get an idea of how you look and sound these
days when you preach. You'll also find that you're bored with listening when
your sermon starts to go over 15 minutes.

8) "Why should I look at them when I preach? I already know what they
look like." It has longed been established that people in today's world
listen better when the speaker makes eye contact with them. In a big church,
you can't establish eye contact with 1000 people, but you can make eye
contact with a few in each section of the church and everyone in their
vicinity will believe you are looking right at them.

9) "Hey, I don't need to use a scriptural text all the time>" Really? I
beg to differ. We need to use a scriptural text ALL the time. We are
preachers of God's Holy Word. That's why we were ordained. There is a
temptation, after preaching 20 times on the multiplication of the loaves and
fishes to decide to just lay that text aside and instead preach on Barak
Obama's stay at the Hay-Adams Hotel and all the money he's wasting staying
there. Don't do it. Your parishioners are not there to hear you jump in with
Fred Barnes on political commentary. They're there to be continually
converted to Jesus, to be empowered with the Holy Spirit, and to apply the
Gospel to their life. If you stay with that plan and use the scripture text
of the day, you'll feed your sheep.

Speaking of the scripture text: some preach by taking something from
the Old Testament reading, something from the Epistle, and something from
the Gospel and spinning those three together after doing an exposition of
each. Holy Smokes! That's 30 minutes right there, before you even get down
to application. Isn't it better to concentrate on ONE of the readings rather
well than to try for all three in one sermon? I remember the story of the
woman coming out of church, greeting the priest and saying, "Father, I
counted at least five sermons in what you said today. Next time, try for
one."

And 10) "Maybe I don't pray enough before I preach?" yeyahh> You need to
start praying about next Sunday's sermon on Monday morning...praying
fervently that what you say is directed by the Holy Spirit and that He will
use the sermon to touch lives for Him. Each day, take a little time to pray
about your sermon as you look at the scriptural texts and decide which one
God wants you to hone in on. Take a little time to pray as you outline the
sermon. Take a little time to pray before you put together the intro, the
conclusion, and the transitions from one point to the next. Take a little
time to pray before you practice the sermon. Go through your church building
on Saturday or early Sunday morning and pray for the people who will come to
church - you no doubt know where most of them sit in the congregation. Go by
each chair or pew and silently pray for them by name.

The Importance of Preaching for Anglican Renewal The Importance of Prea The Importance of Preaching for Anglican Renewal

2008-12-13T05:38:00.002-08:00

Editor's Note: The editor of this blog is an Anglican and I concur with the thrust of this essay.

by The Rev. David Beckmann

The hearts of the faithful in the Communion are aching for renewal. We long to see a resolution to the weakening, the fragmentation, and the loss that Anglicanism has experienced, not just recently, but over decades. We recognize that God has to bring this about: “Apart from me, ye can do nothing.” Yet, we remember the element of responsibility, and seek the Lord’s leading in good works which may assist renewal. As we pray, we try to be obedient. We are holding conferences, conducting evangelism, blogging, making statements, fighting in courts, and taxing our alphabet to the limit in organizing different Ecclesiastical bodies. But in our desire to be obedient, surely it makes sense to ask, “Where did we go wrong? Where were we disobedient? How did the Anglican Communion in North America get into such a mess?” Many have been asking these things, and there are, of course, many answers. But the answers that really matter are those that come from our Shepherd. Is not our first duty and only real hope, when we are troubled by such questions, to consult the Divine Oracle, the Holy Scriptures?

The Marks of the Church

As we read the Scriptures concerning the life of the Church, we find certain basic elements that define the Church. In the Articles, our fathers helped us to understand what the Bible says these basic elements are. Those of you who are familiar with the Reformation tradition will recognize these immediately:

XIX. Of the Church.

The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same….

XXXIII. Of excommunicate Persons, how they are to be avoided.

That person which by open denunciation of the Church is rightly cut off from the unity of the Church, and excommunicated, ought to be taken of the whole multitude of the faithful, as an Heathen and Publican, until he be openly reconciled by penance, and received into the Church by a Judge that hath the authority thereunto.

Here are references to the classic three “marks of the Church” which our fathers expounded from the Scriptures: the preaching of the Word, the Sacraments, and Church discipline. These three marks of the Church also appear in the question asked of the priest at his ordination by the Bishop (BCP, 1928):

Bishop. Will you then give your faithful diligence always so to minister the Doctrine and Sacraments, and the Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded, and as this Church hath received the same, according to the Commandments of God; so that you may teach the people committed to your Cure and Charge with all diligence to keep and observe the same?

In this last quotation, you will notice how “the pure Word of God preached” has been replaced with “Doctrine . . . of Christ.” Such interchange of language is common enough. We find this in Calvin’s Institutes, for example, when, in speaking of the mark of the Church pertaining to the Word of God, he uses such terms as “preaching,” “ministry of the Word,” and “the administration of doctrine.”[1] Bishop Jewel does the same thing in his Homily for Whitsunday: “The true Church is an universall congregation or fellowshippe of GODS faithfull and elect people. . . . And it hath alwayes three notes or markes whereby it is knowen. Pure and sound doctrine. . . . ”[2] Hooker says that “preaching,” understood as the public proclamation of the Word of God, includes both preaching, per se, and public reading of the Bible.[3] While I agree with his arguments, I’ll be limiting the word “preaching” to proclamation through exposition of the Word, viz., expository sermons.

So how do we compare to these marks? When it comes to the administering of the Sacraments, in various respects, we have probably done fairly well. There are bishops that are trying to hold the church spiritually accountable; others obviously are not! On a Communion-wide scale, the GAFCON primates are trying to address the accountability issue, which leading up to GAFCON, had been a disaster. How many people are talking about the state of Anglican preaching in North America? Not many. Why should they be? As one reads, talks with people, listens to what people from outside the continent say, and makes other observations, it becomes very apparent that Anglicans in North America have lost the vision of what the preaching of the Word of God is supposed to be, what it does, and how important it is. A fellow priest told me recently that he hears comments from Episcopalians that belittle the place of preaching “all the time.” I’ve found people who think that a simple, homily—strangely different in nature from The Homilies—of no more than ten minutes is what the “Sermon” is “supposed to be.” It’s only window dressing for the real event, which is Holy Communion. I have even heard priests apologise for taking the time to preach! This is nothing but ignorance of the Anglican tradition and of the Biblical ordinance of preaching. It is also, sadly, why the Episcopal Church has managed to degenerate so badly. The flock has not been fed; there has been a famine of the Word of God. The sheep have not been kept by the truth of the Word, and so they have been devoured by the wolves.

I herein contend that the preaching of the Word is the most important means entrusted to the Church for ministering the Word of God, and that consequently the condition of our pulpits is a barometer of how well the Church is fulfilling her duty with respect to this particular mark of the Church. If we are failing in our preaching, there is no way we are going to see the Communion improve in a lasting way.

Why Preaching Has Declined

The ministry of the Word of God is absolutely necessary for both the mission of the Church (Romans x.17) and the life of the Church (John xvii.17). Richard Hooker considers the ministry of the Word to be “first and chiefest” of the gifts God has given the Church. Let me quote him in full:

Because therefore want of the knowledge of God is the cause of all iniquity amongst men, as contrariwise the ground of all our happiness, and the seed of whatsoever perfect virtue groweth from us, is a right opinion touching things Divine; this kind of knowledge we may justly set down for the first and chiefest thing which God imparteth unto his people; and our duty of receiving this at his merciful hands, for the first of those religious offices, wherewith we publicly honour him on earth. For the instruction therefore of all sorts of men unto eternal life it is necessary, that the sacred and saving truth of God be openly published unto them. Which open publication of heavenly mysteries is by an excellency termed Preaching (V.xviii.1).

If this is so, then why has the ministry of the Word been so neglected in North American Anglicanism? We may begin to answer this question by recognising that this is not a new condition for our Church. There have been other periods when preaching has waned and for much the same reasons, such as, 1) a low view of Scripture, 2) moral failure among the clergy, and 3) an unbalanced sacramentalism.

Over the last century, a low view of Scripture has been fostered by our educational institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical. Heeding the sirens of German Rationalism and Higher Criticism, the Scriptures lost their traditional authority in the minds of many Episcopal clergy. If a man believes the Scriptures are merely a faulty record of men’s religious ideas, reworked regularly for the sake of different agendas, then he is surely not going to be inspired to sweat very much over preaching from its pages.

A gracious, moral character is very important for a strong pulpit, for otherwise the preacher has no ethos with his hearers or simply not the moral ability to get into a pulpit with an informative and well-prepared sermon. In our day, the moral deficiency may be connected with a lack of a spiritual understanding of the role of the priest. One cannot expect people who style the priest as a kind of CEO of an organization—or worse, the head of a political action committee—to approach the pulpit in a spiritual fashion. Sadly, moral failure, ignorance, indolence, and wrong ministry ideals among priests are everywhere around us. Thankfully, I am too new to North American Anglicanism to personally know of many instances of the above, but surely, the TEC could not have become what it is without such things being present.

We can find also in times past, when the pulpit was weak, a competition between the ministry of the Word and other aspects of the life of the Church; some good, some bad. It seems to me that we have a modern day example of this in an unbalanced sacramentalism. It is obvious that the Tractarians made great inroads on this side of the Pond. North American Anglicans generally have a high view of the sacraments. They are held to be necessary means of grace, so much so, that Holy Communion is, today, universally considered the most important service in the Church. The symbolism in the sacraments is also carefully considered, and it is commonly conceived that the sacraments are “the Word preached” in symbol. There is thus a strong tendency to hold the sacraments on par with the ministry of the Word, as if they were both of equal necessity.

The problem is that many of us have apparently not held these two ordinances on par. Instead, we have exalted the sacraments above the Word to the neglect of the preaching of the Word. As exampled above, the ministry of the Word has become only window dressing for the Eucharist. Along with this tendency is the unprecedented decrease in the use of the Divine Service. The loss of Mattins and Evensong has aggravated the loss of the ministry of the Word. Thus, an unbalanced sacramentalism has, in some places, contributed to the loss of the traditional Anglican vision of preaching, and in its own way, to the weakening of our pulpits. This has certainly not been the intent of those involved, but the result is there nonetheless.

Preaching is the Pre-eminent Means of Ministering the Word

To recover the ministry of the Word, on what should we focus? Should we focus on instruction and application in the pulpit, or should we be more concerned with Sunday school, Wednesday evening classes, Bible conferences, and the like? Hooker being so fresh on my mind, let me dip again into his Fifth Book to answer this question.

The problem Hooker addressed was that some men in his day believed that salvation was only available through the extemporaneous preaching of the Word. These same men, consequently, attacked the practice of reading the Word, or reading sermons expounding the Word, in the Church. Hooker ably defends these traditional means of ministering the Word against these attacks. He argues that the Word of God may be savingly ministered in a variety of ways: conversation “in the bosom of the church,” religious education, the reading of “learned men’s books,” private conference, and “whatsoever pain and diligence in hearing, studying, meditating day and night on the Law, is so far blest of God as to work this effect in any man.” (V.xxii.8) It is in this context that he includes the public reading of the Word with sermons as “Preaching,” as I have stated above. Thus, as he seeks to maintain the sufficiency of Scripture and its various means of dissemination, he argues for an equality of value between these various means.

At the same time, however, interwoven among his arguments, are admissions that there is something special about preaching. He says that he does not want to speak derogatorily against that which men esteem about sermons (V.xxii.1). He admits that sermons naturally have an especial advantage over reading in procuring attention (V.xxii.20). But there is one place I think especially important, where he writes:

It is true that the weakness of our wits and the dullness of our affections do make us for the most part, even as our Lord’s own disciples were for a certain time, hard and slow to believe what is written. For help whereof expositions and exhortations are needful, and that in the most effectual manner (V.xxii. 17).

Well may he speak in such terms, because the Scriptures lead us to this conclusion. We need only observe the work of John the Baptist, of Jesus Himself, and of the Apostles as recorded in the Acts. Here we see examples of the proclamation of the Word of God, accompanied by logical interpretation and argument, with pointed application, and even rhetorical devices. In this fashion, these preachers not only disseminated the Word of God, but so brought it to bear upon the minds and wills of men as to effectively bring them into confrontation with God Himself. It is because the Word needs not only to be read, but also applied to the heart that The Homilies were published, seeing as how not every priest was sufficiently gifted to so handle the Scripture.

Note also that they preached with reference to the same Scriptures which were read regularly in the synagogue. The fact is that the Scriptures, however they are inculcated, require the illumining work of the Holy Spirit for their truth to be brought to bear upon the heart in a life-giving, life-changing way. God may move the heart by His Spirit directly as the Scripture is read by oneself or by another. Indeed, such action of the Spirit is one of His “ordinary” works. It is evident, however, that God loves to use means in this age, and that his particular means for bringing the Scriptures home to the heart is preaching. “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (II Timothy iv. 2).[4] Without disagreeing with Hooker’s contention against those who think there is no salvation without preaching, it has to be admitted that apparently the Jews, hearing the Word read, just weren’t “getting it.” The Holy Spirit saw it necessary to use a preacher to bring the truth home. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”[5]

I conclude, therefore, that due to the human condition, due to the fact that God uses means, due to the instructive acts of God and apostolic admonition we find in the New Testament, the preaching of the Word has a pre-eminence among the other means of ministering the Word. Therefore, if we seek renewal and reformation in Anglicanism and the world around us as well, we must pay attention to our pulpits. Reorganizing ourselves and duplicating our old programs under new leadership is not going to bring new life. John 6:63: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” We need a renewal of Biblical exposition from the pulpit that is informing, arresting, and persuasive. There is no telling the kind of changes that God will powerfully make in our Church and this world if we give His Word the place for which it has been ordained and heed it.

Concluding Remarks

If our pulpits are to be renewed, attention must be paid by the preacher to the study of Scripture and personal holiness. In other words, he must pay serious and diligent attention to those aspects of his ordination vows that pertain to such duty. At the same time, we need to have instruction in the Scriptures for our people by every other means as well. We need to do all we can to soak them in the life-giving Word if there is going to be hope for North American Anglicanism.

My brother in the ministry, when was the last time you picked up a book on preaching to inspire you or to instruct you to become a better preacher? Are not such studies a part of your vows? As one priest to another, this is something we all need from time to time. As you should know, there are tons of such books out there, but may I recommend the following: John R. W. Stott’s Between Two Worlds (originally, I Believe in Preaching); The Christian Ministry, by Charles Bridges; Bryan Chappel’s Christ-Centered Preaching; Evangelical Eloquence, by R. L. Dabney; Preaching and Preachers, by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones; and Charles Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students.

It would also do us all good if we were to pick up such books which tell of the lives of great preachers in the past and how God has used them. Many of the greatest preachers in the history of the Western Church have been Anglicans, and the reading of such books should spark the desire within us to see God bring such refreshing times to our Communion and our countries as he has in the past through the means of expository preaching. Read the life of George Whitefield. Read Bishop J. C. Ryle’s Christian Leaders of the 18th Century, where you will read of Whitefield, Wesley, Romaine, Venn, Hervey and others. Read the lives of the Reformers, such as Latimer, and of later men such as Charles Simeon. See if the Lord will not fire you up to fervently seek for a renewal of preaching in our Church today.

Finally, let me speak a word of encouragement. As I have stated above, much of what we face today is nothing new. The Anglican Church has seen her times when the Word of the Lord has been scarce, her ministers weak, even in error, and her members going astray. She was in such a condition before the Reformation. She was certainly so in the days before George Whitefield began his ministry. Yet when God raised up men to preach the Word of God in the apostolic fashion, great awakenings occurred and God gave new life to the Anglican Church. God can do it again. As we do all the other things we do in hope of a new day for North American Anglicanism, let us not forget the first and chief gift God has given to us for spiritual health and power:

The preaching of Holy Scripture.

Ken Gurley: Why Churches Die

2008-04-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

From HoustonBelief.com

Posted 4/22/2008 8:23 AM CDT

Editor's Note: This may appear to be off topic, but I think you'll find some good perspective for preaching as well as congregational leadership.

A few years ago, a pastoral friend and I were shopping for used religious books in London. We noticed that a high percentage of religious bookstores were housed in former churches. Churches that once held human letters read of all men now contained dusty tomes stacked to the rafters.

Churches close often in America - an estimated 3,500 each year. The number of churches per capita in the United States has fallen steadily. One estimate says that no county in this country has more churches today than it did a decade ago. Astounding if accurate!

What causes a church to close its doors? In Why Churches Die: Diagnosing Lethal Poisons in the Body of Christ, authors Mac Brunson and Ergun Caner diagnose the toxins which destroy churches. The chapter titles alone are colorful and illustrative:

* Extending the Right Fist of Fellowship
* Atrophy: Shrunken Faith and Coasting on the Pat
* Glossolitis: Swollen Tongues of Fire
* Myopia: Nearsighted and Shortsighted
* Arteriosclerosis: Harden Not Your Heart
* The Poison of Jealousy and Vengeance
* The Martha Syndrome: Obsessive-Compulsive Christians
* Phobias: The Fearful and the Faithful
* Anorexia and Bulimia: Eating Disorders of the Word of God
* Hypochondria: The Gift of Discouragement

Finger-pointing remains the kryptonite of super-churches. When people lose sight of their own weaknesses and highlight those perceived in others, the church's heartbeat begins to slow.

The authors recommend the "holy dozen," touchstones for all vibrant churches:

* Be in agreement with one another (Romans 12:10).
* Pursue that which builds up one another (Romans 14:13).
* Accept one another (Romans 15:5, 7, 14).
* Show courtesy to one another (1 Cor 11:33).
* Carry one another’s burdens (Gal 6:2).
* Tolerate one another (Eph 4:2).
* Forgive one another (Eph 4:32; Col 3:13).
* Submit to one another (Eph 5:21; 1 Peter 5:5).
* Admonish one another in wisdom (Col 3:16).
* Comfort one another (1 Thess 4:9-18).
* Promote love and good works (Heb 10:24).
* Love one another (1 Peter 1:22, 4:8-9).

A church dies when it worships at the totem pole of self: I, me, my, mine, myself. A church flourishes when it focuses on God and others.

More from Kent Anderson via SermonCentral.com

2008-01-28T18:01:00.000-08:00

Integrative Model for Preaching Series

The following is taken from the appendix of "Preaching with Conviction".

My daughter and I had a disturbing conversation a few months ago. It was a typical father/daughter discussion. She wanted to do something I thought might be inappropriate and I said so with all the fatherly tenderness and respect I thought necessary for such an occasion. She was quick, however, to sense the nature of my rebuke. "Dad, I don't need to hear a sermon," she said as she turned her back on me and walked away. She was nine years old.

Her response stung, given that I make my living preparing and delivering sermons. Unfortunately, it is not only my daughter who has decided that listening to sermons has become unnecessary. It would appear that the whole culture has concluded that preaching is anachronistic, that it is at best a relic of bygone times and at worst an arrogant abuse of religious authority.

I have concluded, however, that the Lord has not revoked my calling and that he still expects me to preach. Still, it seems to me that preaching in these days might demand some fresh thinking and an alternate form.

Principles: Theology and Theory

Authority: "Oh yeah, who says?"

There are two primary issues relevant to the task of preaching. The first is the matter of authority. Anyone who wishes to persuade must provide warrant for his or her claim. It may have been in distant times that listeners would attend sermons in an agreeable and docile frame of mind, unquestioningly receiving whatever the preacher cared to suggest.

Those listeners have long since been replaced by a newer more skeptical group who listen with one finger on their mental remote control, challenging the preacher to prove that this sermon is worth the investment of their time and energy.

"Love one another," the preacher says, "be good to your enemies."

"Oh yeah," the listener responds, "who says?"

"Well, God says," the preacher answers. It is a good answer, but for many it may not be enough. Listeners today come ready-built with their own authority. They could choose to daydream or close their mind. They could get up and walk noisily out, shaking their fist as they do. The listener has power in the transaction known as preaching and they are not afraid to use it. The preacher, then, must make an authority level choice between text and today, between divine authority and human authority.

authority
text----------------------------today

On the one hand, the case is made on the basis of God's revealed Word. Thus saith the Lord, settles the question.

On the other hand the point is established upon the foundation of the listeners own preset assumptions and experiences. "Sounds about right," the listener says, processing the message through their inborn authority system.

Apprehension: "O.K. How Do I Say It?"

The second primary concern for the preacher is to discover the most effective means of helping the listener own the truth. Apprehension, is the taking hold of a truth, like a constable apprehending a suspect, or a student taking hold of a book. It is the preacher's desire that the listener 'get a grip' on the message being offered.

There are two primary approaches a preacher could choose. The first is by means of explanation and the second is by means of experience.

apprehension
head -------------------------------------heart

Traditionally, preachers have emphasized the cognitive path, explaining the propositions of the text and sermon, making things clear and making things orderly. The idea is that if the truth is made comprehensible to the mind, the listener will be compelled to respond and the preacher will have done his or her job.

More recently, preachers have been rediscovering intuitive experience as an avenue to listener apprehension. Gripping stories and emotional appeal compel a listener to want to respond to the message on offer. Whether the propositions can be explained is less important when a listener feels a need to respond.

Integration: "Refuse to Choose."

The recent history of homiletics has tended to describe a spasmodic lurching from pole to pole in the struggle between text and today, explanation and experience. Cognitive forms of exposition square off against more intuitive narrative sermon forms. Text based authority structures stand against listener based "seeker" forms or preaching. In the end, however, such polarized approaches might not be helpful.

Integration describes the bringing together of seemingly contrary options in such a way that the integrity of each substance remains uncompromised. Is it possible that preachers could integrate text and today, explanation and experience? Is it possible that preachers could refuse to choose?

Overlaying the two continuums, authority and apprehension, creates an interesting opportunity for preachers to integrate these seemingly opposing concerns.

Move 1: experience (apprehension) of the text (authority)
Move 2: explanation (apprehension) of the text (authority)
Move 3: explanation (apprehension) of today (authority)
Move 4: experience (apprehension) of today (authority)

God endorsed integration as a means of communication in the incarnation of his son, Jesus Christ. The Word become flesh is more than just an analogy of the preaching task. It is the substance of the preacher's message.

Process: Discover, Construction, Assimilation, and Delivery

First Stage: Discovery (the Message)

The first stage in the preparation of a sermon, then, is discovery . Specifically the preacher seeks to discover the message, which is "what God wants to say through this text to these people at this time." It is an unrepeatable, virtually unpublishable moment in time when the people encounter the voice of God through the Word of God for their unique moment and place in history. The message can be discerned by four simple questions corresponding to the above four integrative moves.

Move 1: What's the Story?
Move 2: What's the Point?
Move 3: What's the Problem?
Move 4: What's the Difference?

What's the Story? (Experience of the Text) Even in the book of Hebrews, there is always a story. There really were Hebrew people with a story. Identifying that story can help the listener see the humanity in the text, creating an experiential encounter with the message that will not easily be shaken off.
What's the Point? (Explanation of the Text) The Bible, while not exclusively propositional, is conceptual in its makeup. The Bible offers truth that can be examined, detailed, ordered, and for the most part, understood. The preacher need not shy away from offering points, well explained and carefully put.
What's the Difference? (Experience of Today) Of course, head knowledge without heart response is hardly worth the effort. Every text intends a difference in the life response of the listener as they grow in obedience to the God who created them.

Answering these four questions will lead the preacher to know what it is that God is saying to these people through this text at this time.

Second Stage: Construction (The Sermon)

The second stage in homiletic presentation is construction. What is to be constructed is the sermon, which is simply a framework sufficient to communicate the message. Just because a preacher has an understanding of the message does not mean that he or she is ready to preach. The preacher needs a sermon, a vehicle that will help the people hear from God.

The preacher is wise to begin by seeking to get the listener involved (engaged) in the message. It is no longer wise to assume that the listeners will invest the energy needed to engage themselves in the experience. Having gained the listener's involvement in the process the preacher can declare the propositions offered by the text (teaching). From there, the preacher ought to work to convince the listener of the truth of the teaching.

Finally, the preacher needs to motivate the listener to a reckoning with the implications of the message. The preacher is looking to encourage a response.

The concepts chosen by the preacher need to use appropriate language and argumentation in order to address the following important listener issues:

Move 1: "so what" (tell the story)
Move 2: "what's what" (make the point)
Move 3: "yeah, but" (engage the problem)
Move 4: "now what" (imagine the difference)

"So what?" In the first move the preacher seeks to convince the listener of the relevance of the message. The listener needs to be given a reason to listen. Usually, this is most effectively achieved by getting the listener emotionally involved, connecting their own story with that of the biblical text.
"What's what" In the second move the preacher makes the point overt. This is the place for explanation - only so much explanation as necessary to inform the listener's mind without bogging him down with confusing details. The challenge is to be clear and intellectually stimulating.
"Yeah, but..." In the third move the preacher acknowledges the listener's objections, seeking to overcome the inevitable reticence the listener will harbor. Minds don't change wihtout a fight. Preachers that can get under the surface and deal with the real cognitive objections of the listener will speak powerfully.
"Now what?" In the fourth move, the preacher offers the possibility of a tangible alternate future according to the call of the gospel. Biblical texts intend substantive life-change. Our sermons must intend no less.

Stage Three: Assimilation (Unction)

Many preachers having discovered their message and constructed their sermon understand their task to have been completed, but there is another stage that is essential to powerful, biblical preaching. This is the stage in which the preachers seeks the "unction" of the Holy Spirit, the empowering passion that makes a sermon live. The preacher must be filled with the message from God by the Spirit of God. Assimilation involves three concerns, spirit, word, and life .

Spirit refers to the power of the Holy Spirit that gives the sermon it's impact. Preaching intends eternal impact for spiritual purposes. Spiritual business cannot be accomplished without the Spirit's power. This kind of power is only accessed through prayer - much fervent prayer . While it is important that the preacher bathe the entire process of preparation in dedicated prayer, it is helpful at this stage in the process to engage in a protracted time of intentional prayer. One is not prepared to preach until one has truly met with God.

Word refers to the practical business of choosing and assembling the language of the sermon. Whether the preacher chooses to sit down at a computer and write the sermon or rather to go on long walks to consider how to say what needs to be said, the preacher needs time for " working it out ". Wrestling with the language of the sermon is an important use of time and energy at this point in the process. The preacher needs to struggle at " locking it in ", striving not so much to memorize the words, but to grow comfortable with the language, perhaps committing key phrases and transition points to memory.

The process of assimilation is an attempt to embed the sermon in the mind and character of the preacher prior to preaching.

To that end, the concept of life is most crucial. The preacher ought to look intentionally towards ways to obey the message of the sermon. Obedience to the claims of the text on the part of the preacher is important to win the approval of the listener. Further the effective preacher will pursue identification with the life and experience of the listener. The congregation needs to sense that the preacher understands their lives and that the sermon is more than theoretical.

Stage Four: Delivery (The Event)

The sermon event is a unique moment in time when people hear from God. Virtually unpublishable, the sermon event is much more than just the worlds that are uttered. It is a dynamic event inw hich people are able to hear from God by means of the preacher. An inviting physical style coupled with conversational passion and a minimum of obstacles (including even pulpits and notes) will enhance the possibility that the listener will be drawn into the presence of the Lord.

One of the mysteries of preaching is that God would use a human instrument at all. Human preachers are tempted to get in the way of the task, fearing men (which leads to debilitation) instead of fearing God (which offers motivation). Yet God, for his own good reasons has chosen to integrate the human with the divine in the process of making his word known. God uses preachers!

A few years ago while attending a conference on preaching in Boston, I returned to my hotel room late in the evening and turned on the television. Much to my delight, they were broadcasting a hockey game between the Boston Bruins and my beloved Vancouver Canucks. I confess, however, I spent most of the time thinking more about preaching than hockey. I noticed as the team was returning to the ice from the dressing room for the second period, a motivational saying that was embedded in the carpet in the hallway out toward the ice. This was the last thing the players saw before stepping out onto the playing surface and it struck me that while it was good advice for hockey players it was even better advice for preachers. It said, "Master technique, but let the Spirit prevail.'

We do the best we are capable of to master the various theories and techniques of the homiletical task, but in the end the power belongs to the Spirit of God. We do our part, but if anything of eternal importance and value is going to happen in the sermon event it will be his doing.

Master technique, but let the Spirit prevail!

How to Craft a Good Sermon … or a Great One

2008-01-28T17:59:00.000-08:00

A fine article from SermonCentral.com:

Kenton C. Anderson

Trinity Western University

Most people can recognize a good sermon when they hear one, though they might have difficulty articulating why. For those of us who try to preach those “good sermons,” it is useful to understand what it takes to get those positive responses from our listeners.

Of course, listeners vary and have different things that they are looking for in a preacher. A listener’s theology will determine his or her sense of the sermon. Those who are committed to a high view of Scripture might expect something different than one committed to a more active view of the work of the Holy Spirit. Learning style is a factor in considering the effectiveness of a sermon. Some listeners learn best through reflection; others prefer a more active and participatory approach. Culture will affect one’s evaluation of a sermon. Where we come from, what generation we belong to, our denomination, our economic situation and our gender all play a part in determining the kind of preacher we best respond to.

Still, if preaching is preaching, there are certain things that can be said across the board. If the following things are in place, we can be fairly confident that our sermons will be well-appreciated and lead to the kinds of responses we expect. These, then, are the factors that result in “good” and maybe even “great” preaching.

A good sermon is rooted in the Bible. A sermon ought to find its footing in the Word of God. Many fine things could be said by a preacher, but if the listener doesn’t feel that the sermon has been helpful in engaging the Bible, it falls short as a sermon. This means that the Bible will be used as more than window dressing or as a jumping-off point. The Bible will govern the sermon and be the source of its big idea if the sermon is any good. Good preachers understand that God still speaks through his Word. The Bible is the one instrument that God has promised to bless. When it comes to good preaching, the Bible is where the power is.

A good sermon helps people hear from God. This is as helpful a definition of preaching as I know. Preachers work to connect people with the voice of God. If a listener does not sense that she or he has been in the presence of God and heard something meaningful from him, then the sermon could not have been that good. As such, the sermon does not have to fit any particular pre-fab form. The sermon as a medium can flex to respond to the interests and concerns of any culture and situation. If it helps people hear what God is saying, it is a good sermon, regardless of the preacher’s style. This underlines, of course, a dependence on the Scriptures.

A good sermon will be easily understood. Some preachers seem to confuse complexity with depth. In my experience, it is the simple truths that are the most profound. Listeners can understand good preaching. Good preachers work to understand the language, the culture, and the interests of those to whom they preach. They work hard to clarify and unify the presentation so that there will be no confusion about what they are trying to say. In most cases, good sermons offer one idea – an idea big enough yet simple enough for listeners to appreciate and apply to their lives.

A good sermon exalts the person of Jesus Christ. We are Christian preachers, which means that every sermon we preach will exalt the person of Jesus Christ. While not every text is directly Christological, I believe that every sermon ought to be. What are we saying that a Jewish priest couldn’t say? What are we offering that goes beyond what people hear on Oprah? At the end of the day, Christian preachers offer Jesus Christ as the hope of mankind. A good sermon will be sure to make that clear.

These four principles apply to any good sermon I have ever heard. A good sermon will integrate the person and presence of God with the person and presence of the preacher. The divine and the human collaborate in the mystery that is good preaching.

In terms of the content of good preaching, I would suggest four elements that ought to be present in one form or another whenever we preach. While people are individual and unique, the basic needs of human beings are universal. Preachers can help their people if they pay attention to a few basic elements…

: Tell a Story: Every text in Scripture has a story because it is always written in the context of real people and real situations. Preachers need to help their listeners connect with the humanity in the Bible in order to see the relevance of what God wants to say. Good preaching, then, places the sermon in the context of real human experience. It tells the stories of actual people in real time so that contemporary listeners can locate their own life in the context of the sermon.; Make an Argument: The Bible is also about ideas. Good preachers will teach the listener the truths that can help them live in accordance with God’s will. God challenges people with an alternative approach to understanding and living life. People will grow in their faith if they are led to understand the propositions of God’s word. Preachers need to work to help listeners appreciate the reasons for their faith.; Solve a Mystery: Preaching needs to respond to the deep-seated questions people have for God. We can’t accept that just because listeners understand what we are saying that they are prepared to give their lives. While we might not always like the things we hear, preachers need to help their listeners struggle with the mysteries.; Paint a Picture: Sermons ought to offer listeners a compelling vision of the future. Preachers need to show listeners how their encounter with God’s word can change their lives forever. What will it actually look like in our lives because we have heard from God and responded to him in faith? Can we motivate listeners to respond faithfully to the things we have heard from God?

Preaching that integrates these four features will offer the authority of God’s word while respecting the dignity of the human listener. It will nourish the listener’s mind, while at the same time, speak to the listener’s heart. People of all cultures and levels of experience can be encouraged to hear from God and grow in their faith as a result.

Of course it could be said that aspiring to “good” preaching doesn’t take us far enough. We ought to be pursuing preaching that is “great.” No doubt the move from good to great would be preferred. It may even be possible if we are willing to make the effort and if God has given us the necessary gifting. For now, however, I would be satisfied to hear a lot more of what is good than the “fair-to-middling” preaching I hear so often.

My sense is that listeners tend to be gracious people. If we can faithfully help them into the presence of God each week, our listeners will be grateful. Here’s to all the good preachers who do just that, faithfully serving to help people hear from God.

You are invited to read more from Dr. Anderson in his article, An Integrative Model for Preaching.

Kent Anderson, PhD, is dean of Northwest Baptist Seminary, and associate professor of homiletics at the Associated Canadian Theological Schools (ACTS) of Trinity Western University in British Columbia. He is the author of numerous books on preaching as well as past president of the Evangelical Homiletics Society. Dr. Anderson is also a former pastor and current manager of Preaching.org.

32 Quotes on Effective Preaching

2007-12-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

From Sermoncentral.com:

James O. Davis

Billion.tv

Personal power and charisma are not mysterious. Some believe that one cannot earn it or learn it. This is not true. The effectiveness of your communications determines the effectiveness of your life.
Leaders whom people respect and follow are those who are able to communicate effectively. They have a dynamic presence.
If you desire to make a difference, you will have to learn to communicate with a powerful presence. You must be able to communicate what you want to get done in the church, in the ministry, and in life.
The pulpit is no greater than the evangelist or pastor who fills it on a weekly basis.
If the preacher is boring to the congregation, the people will think God is boring.
Some ministers have style without substance, while others have substance without style.
Many souls are not saved because the sermon was never delivered to the lost.
It is possible for the preacher to speak the message, use up a portion of time, give an altar call, and still not accomplish the intended purpose of the sermon.
Many ministers of the Gospel spend most of their time thinking about what they are going to say to the audience, yet the average person is persuaded more by feelings than by facts. Mannerisms, gestures, head movements, facial expressions, platform movement, eye contact and clothing project the overall presence of the presenter.
The verbal persuasion of the sermonizer will be greatly determined by the choice of words and phrases. Emotive words drive the theme of the message home. The communicator must be enthusiastic about the message.
We must always remember we are not called merely to impress people but to influence their decision making for Christ.
A sermon is not too long because the clock says so. It is too long if the audience says so.
If you are wondering if the people are following you, walk to the outskirts of the platform and watch the heads of the people. If their heads turn as you walk, they are with you.
Some suggestions regarding style are:

Never read from or memorize a manuscript.
Never speak in an angry tone.
Never point at people.
Never embarrass people.
Respect people and their time.
View yourself as a role model.
Say “thank you” for having the opportunity of speaking to them.
Start on time and finish on time.

It is possible to study the spirit, substance and style of the evangelistic preaching of Jesus. Twenty percent of the New Testament is comprised of the actual words of Christ. The total recorded words of Jesus “would equal approximately ten 30-minute sermons” (Ralph Lewis, 13).
The more the evangelist builds a commonality between the message and the listeners, the higher the level of communication between him and his audience.
It is the responsibility of the evangelist to make sure the audience understands and applies the message to their lives.
There must be a balance between beginning with the needs of the people and the precepts of Scripture. On the one hand, people determine the starting point of the sermon. On the other hand, the Scripture determines the subject and substance of the sermon.
Evangelistic preaching requires the evangelist to speak in a language that can be understood.
The evangelist or pastor must have a point of contact with the audience. If there is no contact during the sermon, there most likely will be no response to the invitation.
The evangelistic preaching of Jesus scratched where people itched in everyday life. Technology may change, but the needs of people remain basically the same.
Sermonizers must be cautioned not to make the basis of their sermons contemporary stories. Stories move people, but the Word of God changes people.
You must connect at the emotional level, or you will not connect with your listeners at all. You may be able to get facts across intellectually but not be able to persuade your audience.
Our brains are made to respond to emotion.
There are nine skills for connecting with your audience:

Eye Factor:

Eye communication
Posture and movement
Facial expressions and gestures
Dress and appearance

Energy Factor:

Voice and vocal variety
Language and non-words
Listener involvement
Humor

Example Factor:

Natural Self

The four critical skills to developing a powerful presence are:

Good eye communication
Tall posture and varied movement
Animated gestures and facial expressions
Use the voice energetically but with pauses

The stories of your life are among the best tools in your tool kit. The use of images and metaphors, whether created by language or by visual support, helps you keep the connection to people.
Our audience has a chronic case of information overload. The average attention span of an adult is only eight seconds. For children, the attention span is only six seconds.
The evangelist and the pastor must preach a Christ-centered Gospel.
The evangelist and the pastor must preach in order to confirm the Gospel.
The goal of Jesus was simple: To preach the Gospel effectively through the power of the Holy Spirit. Without the conscious anointing of the Holy Spirit upon the life and ministry of the minister, there will be no long-lasting fruit in the local church.
The end result of a salvation sermon is not decisions for Christ but disciples for Christ. The end result of the soul-winning message is “changed lives.”

A Preaching Log

2007-09-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

As I said in my previous post, I have been preaching for nearly 25 years. I do keep my sermon manuscripts and notes, but being a lectionary preacher it is sometimes time- consuming to go back and look at a previous sermon. There are at least two ways to organize past sermons to make them more accessible. The first is to order them by Bible books, Genesis to Revelation. I've started this process and it in itself is time-consuming. The second way is a preaching log.

A small notebook will suffice for a preaching log. In it record the Bible passages that you have preached on with the date of the sermon. This make retrieval much easier.

I have heard one preacher, Martin Smith (once a Cowley Father) recommend burning your old sermons and starting afresh, but why would you want to do that? Isn't it possible that looking at an old sermon might spur new thoughts and directions for a future sermon? This has been the case for me. Besides, it's good to have a record of what you've said in a given place. For example, I've been in my present parish for nine years, I've preached on nearly every lectionary passage except for most of the Psalms, and it's good to have a ready resource (if I can find it!).

Try a preaching log. It could be a helpful part of going deeper when you're preaching a passage for a second, third or whatever number of times.

A Preaching Journal

2007-09-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

I've been preaching now for nearly 25 years and over that time I've kept my sermon manuscripts and sermon notes. Recently I began a new practice - a preaching journal. A preaching journal for me is a spiral bound notebook where I record my sermon preparation. This includes verse by verse exegetical notes, thoughts that might be useful in the sermon and a list of books or other materials that could be helpful for preparation or quoted in the sermon. A preaching journal will simplify future work on a passage since you've got a running start from your previous effort.

From the College of Preachers, UK

2007-05-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

What did you make of your preaching?

Link:
http://www.collegeofpreachers.org.uk/uploads/files/what_did_you_make_web_version.pdf

Clergy tap variety of sources for sermons

2007-05-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

From The Providence Journal via TitusOneNine:

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, May 6, 2007

By Richard C. Dujardin

Journal Religion Writer

When the Rev. Joseph Protano Jr. heard a couple of weeks ago that there was a minister in Providence under fire for plagiarizing sermons, he had to laugh.

“Stealing? Isn’t that what we all do?” exclaimed the priest of 44 years, the pastor of St. Andrew Church on Block Island. “Every time we use the scriptures, we’re using the words of Peter and Paul and Matthew and Luke and all those guys.”

The Catholic priest acknowledged that members of some Protestant churches whose congregations pay big salaries to their ministers to hone finely crafted sermons with their needs in mind may take a dim view of a minister pulling a canned sermon off the Internet.

But while he says it’s not something he would do himself, he would not think any less of a priest who does.

“Preaching is very difficult. It’s not an easy art. It takes brain, a heart, a stomach and courage to get up in front of an audience and try to change their minds to a ‘Jesus way of life,’ ” he says.

“I sympathize with priests who don’t think they have the art to create their own sermons. How would I feel if someone took one of my homilies and used it as his own? I’d be flattered, I would be honored, and I would be ecstatic, though I can’t imagine any priest being so desperate to use a homily of mine.”

To be sure, many worshipers see the world as Father Protano does and really don’t care how a sermon or homily ends up flowing from the pastor’s lips as long as it’s uplifting and inspirational.

But it’s not a view shared by all, as evidenced by the dismay shown recently by members of the First Unitarian Church in Providence when they learned that their minister, the Rev. Donald Cameron, had recycled, practically word for word, sermons delivered by other preachers 10 and 11 years ago. Mr. Cameron ended up resigning late last month.

The Rev. Donald C. Anderson, pastor of the First Baptist Church in East Greenwich, says that while he searches for sermon illustrations through a service, Preaching Today, he would never think of using someone else’s sermon without attribution. He typically spends 8 to 16 hours developing his weekly sermon.

“I know those services are out there, but I rarely look at them because I enjoy putting a sermon together. It’s really a labor of love.”

He thinks drawing on fully composed, ready-to-deliver sermons is really a form of pastoral cheating.

The minister, who for the last eight years headed the American Baptist Churches of Rhode Island Standing Committee on Ordained Ministry, said he is not aware of an instance in Rhode Island of a Baptist preacher found to be cheating. “If it did happen, it would be a case of clergy misconduct.”

Mr. Anderson noted that while Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Episcopalians see the liturgical rites associated with the Eucharist as the central part of the worship service, Baptists place a great deal of emphasis on the preaching. Someone who does not like to preach is not likely to become a Baptist preacher. “It’s what they do.”

“The sermon is not a college lecture where your goal is to communicate facts. It’s persuasive speech where you’re trying to change attitudes. And you can do that best when you are giving part of yourself. Speaking from your own experience is always better than the sermon some bellwether preacher has put together.”

Mr. Anderson was named Thursday by the Rhode Island State Council of Churches to be the organization’s executive minister and will leave his pastorate to take the position.

The Rev. Sharon Key agrees that speaking from personal experience is best. A former chaplain at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., and a former interim executive minister for the Council of Churches, she has been pastor of Woodridge Congregational United Church of Christ in Cranston for 4½ years.

She says she used to panic as she neared the end of the week and hadn’t quite nailed down what she was going to say. But no longer.

“Since I’ve become a full-time pastor, I never panic. It’s a creative process and I trust in the Holy Spirit. I know there are going to be some weeks when my sermon isn’t going to be as good as others. But one of the things is that the congregation sticks with you. They are incredibly kind and loving. … When you speak to your own people week after week you can do sermon series.”

Most clergy interviewed said they generally begin working on their sermon topic on Monday. Typically, Reverend Key reads the selected scripture passages and allows them to stay with her and “percolate” for several days. Along the way, a conversation with friends or a sermonette in Christian Century magazine will trigger an idea or two, so that by Thursday she’s ready to put it all together.

She usually writes down her sermons, sometimes going through several versions between Friday and Sunday. When she delivers it, she always tries to make sure to give credit where credit is due, even if only to acknowledge that a certain idea came from a conversation with a friend.

“I think a congregation likes to know how a sermon came about,” she explains. “They love to hear how it evolved. They also love to hear stories that come out of the life of the congregation.”

The Rev. Dennis P. Kohl, pastor of Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Warwick, says he typically begins his preparation on Monday by going over the upcoming scripture readings in their original Greek, so as to more fully appreciate their meaning. Then on Tuesday he and a half-dozen other Lutheran clergy gather to discuss the texts, bouncing ideas off one another about possible themes.

He acknowledges there have been times when the ideas don’t come as easily as he would like. But while his wife has pointed out to him that there are sermons that can be gotten from the Internet, he rejects that approach because it would be like putting a square peg into a round hole.

“You just know that kind of stuff doesn’t work. Partly it’s because of our theology, which teaches us ministry is both word and sacrament. We have an obligation to address where people are in their lives. Yes, it’s sometimes difficult, but I think it’s better for people to see the preacher wrestling with the texts.”

He says he has also come to realize there’s another thing a preacher can do if he runs into a brick wall: keep the sermon brief. “You make your point and know enough to sit down.”

Father Protano, the priest on Block Island, says he usually prepares by going through the Scriptures and then reading a professional commentary on the text. Then, he says, he’ll try to find a good story from a newspaper or a book or from Connections, a periodical out of New Hampshire, which he frequently finds helpful

“To give a good homily, you do have to be well prepared. The secret, I think, is that the preacher must be spiritually grounded in what he’s preaching. If I’m not moved by the things in my sermon, I know my sermon will be lousy. If I am moved, I know others will be moved as well. If I’m not convinced in the truth of what I’m saying, I’m a phony in the pulpit.”

Father Protano said back in his earlier days, there were people who came in with recorders to tape his homilies — not because they were real fans but because they suspected he was preaching heresy and wanted to send the tapes to the bishop. “I spoke loud and clear so they could capture every word. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it.”

While he sympathizes with clergy who resort to using canned sermons, saying he does not believe it to be morally wrong, he adds that he would never do it himself.

“For one thing, all those sermons seem to be written for people in the Midwest, not for those of us in Rhode Island. That’s one of the problems. I can say without hesitation that every parish has its unique population, with different background, different levels of education and interest in religion. The people on Block Island — especially those who are here for the summer — are more laid back. You can’t preach the same homily in Providence that you preach on Block Island.”

Stolen goods

2007-04-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

Tempted to plagiarize

by Thomas G. Long

A couple of years ago, a student in one of my preaching courses was struggling terribly. The sermons he preached in class were plodding, disorganized and weakly supported exegetically and theologically. He was aware that he was not meeting expectations, and he was frustrated and embarrassed by his performance. But then, in his final opportunity to redeem himself in the course, he surprised us all by preaching a stunning sermon, both profound and lyrical. It was unexpectedly excellent.

Too good, in fact. Sadly suspicious, I plugged one of his more delicious phrases into Google. Alas, up came the whole sermon on a church's Web site, preached by the pastor of that church many months before. It was an unfortunate but clear case of plagiarism. That was not, however, the whole story. My search actually produced dozens of hits, disclosing that, evidently, my student was not the only preacher to find this particular sermon compelling. A number of others, all with their sermons posted online, had lifted paragraphs and pages from the original sermon, mostly without credit. In a last and unexpected twist, this much-copied sermon itself turned out to contain a long section cribbed without attribution from a Living by the Word column in this very journal. With a few clicks of the mouse, I had uncovered a crime wave of homiletical petty larceny.

The stealing of sermons is nothing new, of course, and the legends of such mischief abound. Typical of the genre is the story of Ernest T. Campbell, now retired as pastor of New York's Riverside Church. He was once invited to fill the pulpit of a church in a distant city, and he chose to preach "Adam's Other Son," a creative sermon on the biblical character Seth, one which bears the unmistakable mark of Campbell's style and which Campbell had published in a sermon collection. As he preached that Sunday, however, he had a sense that something was awry. "My sermon," he said later, "was landing like marbles on a tile floor." After the service, he was told that a young associate pastor had preached the same sermon nearly word for word the week before. No wonder the congregation had sat in shocked silence, convinced that the celebrated guest preacher had stooped to pilfering another pastor's material.

Pulpit plagiarism may not be new, but there is plenty of evidence that the practice is spreading and that the kerosene on the fire is the Internet. Not only are thousands of sermons available for the snatching on church Web pages, but scores of commercial sites hawk complete sermons, illustrations, outlines, images and PowerPoint accompaniments for a fee. The proprietors of these sites are aware, naturally, that their customers may have a flicker of conscience over downloading sermons, so several sites include words of reassurance. "We know you may be worried about plagiarism," they essentially warble, "but the authors of these sermons want you to use them. And besides, these sermons are designed to stimulate your imagination as you create your own sermons. You'll still be doing the work."

Right. Rick Warren, of the Saddleback Church, who markets his sermons online, told the British journal Christianity, "If my bullet fits your gun, shoot it," and Craig Brian Larson, writing about pulpit plagiarism at PreachingToday.com, cites a preacher who says, "When Chuck Swindoll starts preaching better sermons, so will I." When it comes to preachers desperate to feed the incessant pulpit hunger, "the Internet," as one of my colleagues likes to say, "is like having a drug dealer on every corner."

But the Internet is not only the supplier, it is often the police officer too. More preachers may be stealing sermons these days, but more are also getting caught in the fine mesh of Web crawlers and search engines. Four years ago, early on a Sunday morning, the parish nurse at the National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., ran an Internet search on the sermon title that her pastor had announced for that day, only to find a sermon with that exact title on the Web site of a church in Manhattan. She carried a printout of the New York sermon with her to worship, and sure enough, she heard the same sermon from the National City pulpit that morning, almost word for word. This was the first evidence of what turned out to be a long-standing pattern of pulpit plagiarism on the part of the pastor, and its discovery threw the congregation into turmoil.

Because of the prominence of this church and the pastor, that controversy made national news, but there have been numerous other, less-publicized local occurrences where preachers have been caught in the pincers of Google or Yahoo. Almost every community has a story of a church torn apart and a pastor embarrassed, if not dismissed, over "borrowing" sermons. In the future, churches may well adopt the strategy of many colleges and universities, which have begun to combat plagiarism with powerful new software programs, such as Turnitin, that comb through extensive databases as well as every nook and cranny of the worldwide Web, comparing student papers with possible sources and sleuthing out similarities in language. There may come a time when pastors seeking new calls or appointments will have to pass their sermons under the watchful eye of such software, as a kind of plagiarism background check.

What can we say about the ethics of preaching, without attribution, other people's sermons, in whole or in part? It is tempting to keep it simple, to cite the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" and be done with it. However, the issues surrounding pulpit plagiarism are more complex than they may appear at first glance. To begin with, the reality of the Internet is not merely a change in technology. As the music industry has already discovered, the use of the Internet carries with it major cultural shifts in how we understand the ownership and use of information.

The rules of attribution that obtain in one cultural place or moment do not necessarily apply in another. (For example, notice that there is nary a footnote in Matthew's Gospel to give credit to Mark, his main source.) Some voices are now arguing that the whole concept of intellectual property, on which many of our convictions about plagiarism rest, is a post-Enlightenment, modernist illusion that is rapidly being unmasked. The very idea that people create new things out of words and thus own them falls in the face of the evidence that every literary creation is an amalgam—known and unknown, acknowledged and unacknowledged—of previous oral and literary acts. We are now entering, goes the argument, a kind of postmodernist "open source" society in which the whole notion of plagiarism evaporates because, when closely examined, everything is a kind of plagiarism. A recent issue of Harper's Magazine includes an elegant essay by novelist Jonathan Lethem arguing just that. "Any text," he writes, "is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations . . . are quotations without inverted commas." Then, to prove the point, and as a kind of literary joke on the reader, Lethem reveals at the end of the essay that virtually every line of his piece was cribbed from other sources (the quotation just cited is not Lethem after all, but Roland Barthes).

Some pastors have picked up a theological version of this open-source argument. Sermon words are gifts from God, they say, and thus fair game for any and all who wish to appropriate them. How dare preachers do anything but sing the doxology, they ask, when their sermons show up in the mouths of other pastors? Moreover, with God-given words in ripe clusters of low-hanging fruit all over the Internet, originality becomes a highly overrated virtue, perhaps even a sign of hubris. For these preachers, the goal is to create an impact upon hearers; who cares where the words come from?

"Don't be original—be effective!" urges Steve Sjogren of the Cincinnati Vineyard Community Church, in an essay at Pastors.com. "In my mind," he continues, "there is a tremendous amount of pride (let's call it what it is) when we insist on being completely original as communicators. . . . The guys I draw encouragement from—the best communicators in the United States . . . get 70 percent of their material from someone else. Remember, Solomon wrote that 'there is nothing new under the sun.'"

This vaunting of free gift over originality could be called the "Dizzy Gillespie Theory of Preaching." When Gillespie heard that Phil Woods, a young sax player, had been accused of stealing the style of famed saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, Gillespie defended Woods. "You can't steal a gift," he said. "Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it, you can have it."

Others make a more practical argument in favor of softening the boundaries of pulpit plagiarism: borrowing a good sermon is far to be preferred over numbing a congregation into submission with a poor one of your own. When a pastor in my city was caught preaching cut-and-paste sermons from the Web and then distributing printed copies under his own name, he repented and was given a second chance by the congregation. However, one concerned member of the congregation wrote to Randy Cohen, whose column "The Ethicist" regularly appears in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times. The letter described the case and asked for Cohen's opinion. Cohen responded by roundly criticizing the pastor for preaching another's sermons without credit and, even more, for publishing them under his own name. But then he wondered, "Perhaps sermon writing should not be a job requirement." Being a pastor, Cohen said, requires many different gifts, and no one can possess them all in abundance. "If an otherwise excellent pastor is clumsy with his pen," he mused, "his parish would be better served by hearing him deliver the profound and stirring words of a more talented author."

Really? Poor preachers should simply stop the pain and treat their congregations to sermons composed by steadier hands? Surprisingly, Cohen would find agreement from no less an authority than St. Augustine, who wrote, "There are, indeed, some people who have a good delivery, but cannot compose anything to deliver. Now, if such people take what has been written with wisdom and eloquence by others, and commit it to memory, and deliver it to the people, they cannot be blamed, supposing them to do it without deception."

Complicating the plagiarism issue even more is the fact that some congregations in primarily oral cultures—for example, sectors of the African-American church and some Appalachian white churches—preserve and honor the tradition of repreaching well-known "set piece" sermons, such as "Jesus' Funeral" or "The Deck of Cards" (a sermon in which the preacher symbolically deals out cards, one at a time, making a biblical allusion for each one). The preaching of such sermons is folk performance art, and originality of composition is not the issue. Many of the hearers would have heard these sermons time and again and, as in the case of hearing a jazz riff, would be interested mainly in how the performer improvises on the old material.

The ethics surrounding pulpit plagiarism, then, are not simple, but a good bit of clarity is achieved, I think, when we keep two factors in focus. The first is truthfulness. "Plagiarism," writes Richard A. Posner in The Little Book of Plagiarism, "is a species of intellectual fraud." Posner goes on to name the two key ingredients of fraud in every act of plagiarism: one, somebody copies something and then claims ("whether explicitly or implicitly, and whether deliberately or carelessly") that these words are his or her original composition; and two, this deception causes the readers (or hearers) of these words to act differently than they would if they possessed the truth.

So, if a preacher takes a paragraph or a page or a story from a novel, a movie, another sermon or anywhere else and fails to signal to the congregation that this is borrowed material, then the first element of plagiarism is present. Sermons are not term papers, of course, and giving the full details about sources is not a must. A simple "as one biblical scholar has put it" or "another pastor tells the story about . . ." will usually do. Beyond this, source details should be filled in on the basis of how helpful they will be to the hearers. If it makes a difference to the hearers to know that sermon words have been borrowed from Luther or Anne Lamott or Walter Brueggemann, then say so.

Giving credit to others is not merely a matter of keeping our ethical noses clean; it is also a part of bearing witness to the gospel. No sermon stands alone, but instead takes its place in a "cloud of witnesses." The proclamation of the gospel does not spring forth from our cleverness or ability to generate novelty. To borrow words from others and to show that one's sermon dips into the deep well of shared wisdom is itself part of Christian testimony, a fresh expression of Paul's confession, "I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received."

But what of Posner's second ingredient of fraud— namely, that pulpit plagiarism occurs when the preacher's deception about sources causes the hearers to behave differently than they would have had they known the truth? Perhaps as much or more than any other form of communication, preaching depends upon a cord of trust binding together the speaker and the listener, the preacher and hearer. A good sermon consists not primarily in flawless logic, soaring poetry or airtight arguments, but in passionately held truth proclaimed with conviction. To compromise the truth in ways that hearers would consider deceptive makes them reluctant to extend this necessary trust and damages the witness. For evidence, we can point to the hard disillusionment and sense of betrayal experienced by many in congregations where pastors have been caught plagiarizing sermons.

Preaching, like all forms of communication, rests upon a tacit agreement between the parties involved. When Jon Stewart sends up the news on the Comedy Channel's The Daily Show, it is not necessary for him to say, "Now this part of what I am saying is absolutely true, but this other part is satire." His viewers already know this; it is woven into the implied agreement. When a revival preacher in a Pentecostal church in Galax, Virginia, pulls out a deck of cards and begins dealing them out and chanting, "When I see the Ace, I am reminded there is but one God, . . ." nobody needs to be told that the preacher is performing a script. This is already well known, and no deception is involved. But preachers who stand up on Sunday morning with a sermon ripped off the Internet and preach the words as if they were their own almost certainly violate the implied agreement with the congregation.

A good test of this point is to ask, What would happen if the preacher told the truth? "Hey folks, it's been a busy week and I didn't have time to work on a sermon, and honestly, I'm not all that creative anyway. So this is a little something I found on the 'net." The fact that the air would immediately go out of the room is a reliable indicator that the tacit agreement of the sermon event has been violated. This is why plagiarists, for all their blather about God's words being free for all, never confess their true sources and always imply that these words are coming straight from the heart. Yes, Augustine made space for preachers to memorize the words of other, more eloquent proclaimers, but note well that he added the test of truth: "supposing them to do it without deception."

In addition to the standard of truthfulness, the second factor to keep in focus is immediacy. While there is surely room in the pulpit for the "set piece" sermon and the oft-repeated illustration, finally preaching is a word from God for these people in this place at this moment. Preaching is not just about inspiration; it is ultimately about proclamation: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Jürgen Moltmann once described the act of preaching as someone getting up from the assembly, standing in front of God's people, and speaking and acting in the name of Christ. The church, Moltmann says, "does not want to listen to itself and to project its own image of itself; it wants to hear Christ's voice." That is, God's people want to hear Christ's voice speaking now, and to them.

Moltmann's picture points to the location of the preacher, at once joyful and agonizing. The preacher comes from the pews to stand in the pulpit. Only preachers who deliver their own sermons stand with one foot in the life of the people and one foot in the biblical text. No Internet preacher stands in this same place. No borrowed sermon, however fine, can answer the question that cries out from every congregation, "Is there a word today, a word for us, from the Lord?" This is not the same as saying that sermons must be fully original. All preachers borrow from others, and should. There is a difference between being a debtor and being a thief. All preachers stand on the shoulders of biblical scholars, theologians and faithful witnesses from across the generations. We do not owe our congregations an original essay; we owe them a fresh act of interpretation.

Gray areas remain, of course, and judgment calls must be made. If a preacher finds a superb Fred Craddock story in a sermon by Jane Doaks, must Doaks be credited along with Craddock? If a preacher reads a wonderful sermon by Jim Forbes and borrows not a single word of it, but adopts the structure of the sermon, should Forbes be cited? Is the phrase "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake side" so much a part of the culture that it is, in effect, in the public domain, or should Albert Schweitzer be explicitly credited as the author?

Preachers who strive to tell the truth, who seek to honor the communion of saints, who desire to maintain the trust of the faithful community—that is to say, preachers with ethical integrity—will wrestle with these questions and make the best decisions they can. Pulpit plagiarists, however, in the name of expediency, will grab what they wish wherever they can find it and claim it as their own. Their stolen sermons may occasionally sparkle, but in the end they will have spread the banquet table of God with the empty calories of homiletical fast food.

Thomas G. Long is professor of preaching at Emory University's Candler School of Theology.

Ashamed of the Gospel? Missed Opportunity at Virginia Tech

2007-04-24T12:22:00.001-07:00

By Frank Pastore
Sunday, April 22, 2007

Let's test your knowledge of world religions. Below is the entire message
delivered by one of the four religious leaders at last week's convocation at
Virginia Tech, in the aftermath of the horrible mass murders that left 32
dead and 21 injured.

The test is simple: determine the religion being represented.

We gather this afternoon for many purposes. To weep for lost friends and
family, to mourn our lost innocence, to walk forward in the wake of
unspeakable tragedy, to embrace hope in the shadow of despair, to join our
voices in a longing for peace, and healing, and understanding which is much
greater than any single faith community. To embrace that which unifies, and
to reject the seductive temptation to hate. We gather to share our hurts and
our hopes, our petitions and our prayers.

We gather also to drink deeply of the religious streams which have refreshed
parched peoples for many generations. We gather together, weeping. Yes, we
weep with an agony too deep for words and sighs that are inexpressible. But
also we gather affirming the sovereignty of life over death.

At a time such as this, the darkness of evil seems powerful indeed. It casts
a pall over our simple joys, joys as simple as playing Frisbee on the drill
field. We struggle to imagine a future beyond this agony. If we ever
harbored any illusions that our campus is an idyllic refuge from the
violence of the rest of the world, they are gone forever. And yet, we come
to this place to testify that the light of love cannot be defeated.

Amid all our pain, we confess that the light shines in the darkness and the
darkness has not overcome it. We cannot do everything, but we can do
something. We cannot banish all darkness, but we can by joining together,
push it back. We can not undue yesterday's tragic events, but we can sit in
patient silence with those who mourn as they seek for a way forward.

As we share light, one with another, we reclaim our campus, let us deny
death's power to rob us of all that we have loved about Virginia Tech, this
our community. Let us cast our lot with hope in defiance of despair. I
invite you to observe a moment of silence.

Difficult, isn't it?

The message was delivered by Reverend William H. King, Director of Lutheran
Campus Ministries at Virginia Tech, and a member of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America (ELCA). The video of the message is available online.

Each of the four speakers were there to represent their religion, to bring
the message of comfort and hope rooted in their faith tradition. The Muslim
speaker read passages from the Koran in Arabic and appealed to Allah, the
Jewish speaker read from Ecclesiastes 3 while an assistant repeated the
passages in Hebrew, the Buddhist quoted the Dalai Lama, while the Christian
did not even quote from the Bible, nor mention the name of Jesus - the
namesake of his religion.

What Mr. King said should be studied in every seminary in America. It is
precisely what not to do when given the opportunity to bring the message of
the Gospel of Jesus to those grieving the loss of loved ones and struggling
to make sense of the evil visited upon them.

The nearest thing to Christianity anyone heard at the Convocation was the
playing of Amazing Grace and the unison recitation of The Lord's Prayer.
There was far more Bible coming from the pews than being preached from the
pulpit.

Preaching the Cross

2007-04-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

Whether it's Good Friday, a Sunday, or another day, preaching the cross is a challenge. The challenge I am thinking about is the many ways that the cross can be preached. Some of my sermon titles from Good Friday sermons illustrate this (these titles are meant to be explanatory and were not put in any bulletin).

1995 The Sacrificial Love of the Atonement
1996 The Completed Work of Christ
1997 Reconciliation to God
1998 The Final Sacrifice
1999 The Glory of the Cross
2002 The Cross at the Center
2003 The Healing Cross
2005 Obedience to His Father
2006 A Band of Crucified Followers
2007 The Love of God in the Cross

A short book that I have found helpful as a sermon starter for sermons on the cross is John Piper's The Passion of Christ. In it, Piper offers 50 ways to preach on the cross. Another book that I have found helpful in terms of a variety of approaches to the cross is The Gate of Glory by George Carey. Any other recommendations?

Some Theological Works on the Cross

John Stott, The Cross of Christ
Leon Morris, The Atonement
Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God

From the San Diego Union-Tribune

2007-03-06T19:03:00.000-08:00

Revival tactics

Shrinking Protestant congregations take a cautious turn toward evangelism

By Sandi Dolbee
RELIGION & ETHICS EDITOR

March 3, 2007

Martha Grace Reese doesn't sugarcoat the numbers.

Between 1960 and 2000, membership dropped by 5 million people in the seven mainline Protestant denominations she studied. Meanwhile, the population of the United States grew by 100 million.

“That's not good,” writes Reese in “Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism” (Chalice Press, $19.99), which is the culmination of a four-year national study.

The reasons for the slide depend on who is asked. Reese, a former pastor who is now a church consultant, acknowledges that the country isn't as traditionally religious as it used to be. Still, she offers another possibility for empty pews: Mainline churches, many of which tend to be more liberal, are suffering from a fear of evangelism.

Reese's Mainline Evangelism Project, funded by the Lilly Endowment and based in St. Louis, looked at hundreds of congregations in the American Baptist denomination, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Presbyterian Church USA, Reformed Church in America, United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and United Methodist Church.

She found that many mainline Protestants are embarrassed, even angry, about evangelism – turned off, in part, because of the emphasis evangelical, conservative churches put on conversion as the only way to salvation.

“Mainline churches don't want to look fundamentalist,” says Reese, who was in San Diego in January to conduct a workshop at Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church and meet with Methodist clergy. “They don't want to do all the cartoonish bad stuff of threatening people, scaring people. They want people to know that God is love.”

But she has a message for them: Embrace your inner evangelist. She thinks they can do it without threatening people or offending other faiths.

As it turns out, evangelism is slowly starting to make a comeback in mainline churches, from staff being hired to concentrate on outreach to training programs launched to revitalize congregations.

Different look

At First United Methodist Church in Escondido, senior pastor Faith Conklin is looking for a director of evangelism and marketing.

“United Methodist churches have been scared of the word for the most part and, in many ways, we've given it up, which is unfortunate because it's foundational,” says Conklin.

For the Escondido church, and like-minded congregations, evangelism is more about relationships than conversions. “Evangelism is our work, and conversion is God's work,” says Conklin. “It's not my job to save your soul. That's God's task.”

Instead, she speaks of evangelism in terms of study groups, sports teams and even a monthly movie night at the church. “How do you share your passion (for Jesus) in such a way that other people aren't put off by it?” she says. “And the answer, I think, is that you start by listening. And you have to listen to where people are and sometimes we're not good at listening. We go out and tell them the answers to questions they don't ask.”

Last month, the Rev. Erin Martinson was formally installed as pastor for outreach at Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach. Her job: Bridge the gap between the church and the community.

Martinson suggests that much of evangelism is about getting comfortable with talking about religion. “We have a generation who have learned we don't talk about our faith and we don't talk about our politics,” she says.

But current events have taught otherwise. “Politics is a part of our lives, period,” says Martinson. “I think the same is true about faith.”

Again, her emphasis is not on converting people. “I don't think it's our business to convert,” Martinson says. “I think that's the work of the Holy Spirit. It's our business to be present in the world.”

Inside out

The United Church of Christ also has climbed aboard the evangelism bandwagon, or at least a version of it, launching a Congregational Vitality Initiative designed to offer a “holistic approach” to evangelism, education and leadership.

“The church is reaching out,” says the Rev. Arthur Cribbs, who attended a Congregational Vitality training workshop last month in San Bernardino County. “It is not necessarily saying everybody has to come in. We're saying everybody who is inside must move out.”

For Cribbs, pastor of Christian Fellowship Congregational Church in Emerald Hills, evangelism is about encouraging people on their own spiritual path. Using it to proselytize is not only wrong, he says, it's sinful. “I believe it is a great mistake to think that I have the answer for the world.”

Reese is reluctant to talk about specific churches in her evangelism study but she will say that Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian was one of the healthier models she encountered.

Besides being good at outreach, it has strong programs once visitors get inside the doors, she says. “There is excellent worship, extraordinary preaching, wonderful educational programs, great prayer training. It's all in place.”

The Rev. Joe Farrell, associate pastor for spiritual growth, says members are encouraged to invite friends on social service projects like cleaning up the beach. He believes people need to feel like they belong to something of value before they are willing to adopt the beliefs of that community.

Farrell says talking about his Christianity doesn't have to be a turnoff. “As a Christian, I still believe there is one truth, but I don't negate other people's stories.”

Besides the research in it, Reese says her book is designed to be a how-to manual for the evangelically squeamish. Much time is spent coaxing people to share their faith and to figure out how their own church is doing at outreach.

Whether evangelism will fill the pews of emptying churches, revitalize sluggish ones and strengthen those that are already healthy remains to be seen. If Reese has her way, it will. She's adamant that the best way to practice a spiritual life is in a congregation. “You have to have a community for support,” she says. “There's no way of being a Christian alone. You just can't do it.”

Second Page First

2007-01-26T06:32:00.000-08:00

One of the disconnects in preaching can be at the very beginning of a sermon. It is all too easy to come up with a dazzling introduction that has little bearing on the content and general direction of the rest of the sermon. My suggestion: do your biblical interpretation work first in the sermon, not just in your study prior to preparing the sermon. Do your second (and third and following) page(s) first and then you are ready for illustrations. I believe that this practice will tighten up the logic of your sermons and enhance memorability and understanding for your hearers.

Andy Stanley on Preaching

2006-08-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

The Birth of a One-Point Preacher
by Andy Stanley

Editor’s Note: Andy Stanley hardly needs an introduction. As Senior Pastor of North Point Community Church, he leads one of the most dynamic and impactful transformational churches in America today. He’s written numerous books including How Good Is Good Enough, The Next Generation Leader, and most recently, Communicating for a Change (with Lane Jones). This topic is highly pertinent for pastors boldly leading their churches into the future. He asks the blunt question every pastor should ask: “When You Talk, Are People Changed?” And he answers with compelling insights-and with a church and preaching that clearly demonstrates what he teaches. Here Andy shares his thoughts on the heart of effective preaching.

I never felt called to preach. I just volunteered. I wanted to feel called. But it just never happened for me. Several of my friends felt called while we were in high school. They went forward during a Sunday night service and shared it with the congregation. Everybody clapped. Some of them are still in ministry. I think one of ‘em is in jail.

One afternoon I was driving somewhere with my dad. After one of those long moments of silence that fathers and sons have when driving together, I spoke up and said, “Dad, does a person have to be called into ministry or can they just volunteer?”

He thought for a moment. “Well, I guess it’s okay to volunteer.”

“Good,” I said. “I would like to volunteer.” So I did. In fact, it was two volunteer environments that shaped me as a communicator.

During my sophomore year of college our youth pastor, Sid Hopkins, asked me if I would help him lead our Wednesday night student Bible study. That was a really strange request since we didn’t even have a Wednesday night Bible study. Upon further investigation I discovered that he wanted me to start a study for our students. I had never led or taught anything in my life. I was a whopping two years older than some of the students I would be teaching. But I agreed to give it a try.

The good thing about being so young was that I knew what wouldn’t work. Preaching wouldn’t work. Teaching for twenty or thirty minutes wouldn’t work. A verse by verse Bible study wouldn’t work. Telling a bunch of stories and tacking on a point wouldn’t work. So I decided to err on the side of simplicity. Nobody told me how long our “Bible study” was supposed to last so I didn’t feel compelled to fill up a lot of time. I had been given a blank page.

On week one about twenty students showed up. I passed out three by five cards with one verse printed on one side and one question printed on the other side. The verse for that first week was John 17:4.

“I GLORIFIED YOU ON THE EARTH, HAVING ACCOMPLISHED THE WORK WHICH YOU HAVE GIVEN ME TO DO.”

We talked about what it meant to glorify something. I explained that glorifying the Father was Christ’s chief purpose for coming and that it should be ours as well. Then I had them turn the card over and spend thirty seconds thinking about an answer to the following question: What can I do this week to glorify God in my world?

Then I closed in prayer. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes. One point. One question. One application. Everybody stayed awake. Everybody was engaged. Everybody could remember what the lesson was about. Sid was a bit concerned about the brevity. But the next week the crowd grew. And it kept growing. Every week I handed out a card with a verse and a question. No music. No pizza. We didn’t even have a PA system. That was my first experience as a communicator. It taught me a valuable lesson that would be reiterated a few years later.

In 1981 I moved to Dallas, Texas to attend Dallas Theological Seminary. At the end of my first semester, the principal of a local Christian high school asked me if I would present a message for their weekly chapel service. I accepted. Since it was high school students I decided I should pick a narrative portion of Scripture. Somehow I landed on the story of Naaman and Elisha. Naaman was the captain of the army of Aram. Elisha was…well, you know who Elisha was. Anyway, Naaman has leprosy and Elisha sends him to take a dip in the river. Naaman obeys and is healed.

I spent hours pouring over the story. I drew upon my vast knowledge as a first semester seminarian. I went to the library and researched the Arameans. I had pages of notes. I had an outline that went something like this: Naaman’s Problem, Naaman’s Pride, Namaan’s Plea, Namaan’s Proof. I was so overprepared.

The night before I was to give the message I was down beside my bed praying. I started praying for the students I was going to speak to the next day. I didn’t know any of them personally, but I knew that from their perspective this was going to be just another chapel led by yet another unknown chapel speaker. Yawn. As I was praying, it occurred to me that they weren’t going to remember one thing I said five minutes after I said it. I had spent hours preparing a lesson that no one was going to remember! What a waste of time and energy.

I got up off my knees, sat back down at my desk and determined not to let that happen. I got rid of my alliterated points and boiled it down to one idea. Then I worked on it until I had crafted a statement upon which I could hang the entire message.

The next day I told the story. I concluded with the idea that sometimes God will ask us to do things we don’t understand. And that the only way to fully understand is to obey. We will all look back with a sigh of relief or feel the pain of regret. Then I delivered my statement: To understand why, submit and apply. I repeated it several times. I had them repeat it. Then I closed.

When I left the platform that day I knew I had connected. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had stumbled onto something that would shape my approach to communication.

Two years later, on a Sunday morning, a college student walked up to me and said, “Hey, you’re that guy. You spoke at my high school chapel.” Then he paused, collected his thoughts and said, “To understand why, submit and apply.” He smiled, “I still remember,” he said. Then he turned and walked away. He didn’t remember my name. I never knew his. None of that mattered. What mattered was that those thirty minutes in chapel two years earlier were not a waste of time after all. One simple, well-crafted truth had found its mark in the heart of a high school student.

That Sunday morning was a defining moment. Since then I have prepared hundreds of outlines and preached hundreds of sermons. But my goal has been the same since that exasperating night in my efficiency apartment wrestling with the story of Namaan. Every time I stand to communicate I want to take one simple truth and lodge it in the heart of the listener. I want them to know that one thing and know what to do with it.

Adapted from Communicating for a Change by Andy Stanley and Lane Jones (c) 2006 by North Point Ministries, Inc.