preaching on Practices

There once was a popular shaman in India whom people would seek out for advice. People would stand in line for hours, waiting to hear the choices they should make in their lives or the changes that wo...

The only person who likes change is a wet baby. –Mark Twain (Attributed) To Change or Not to Change, That is the Question When do we decide to change ? I’m not a Tony Robbins acolyte, but I do l...

How do you choose what to preach on any given Sunday? Are you a… Lectionary Preacher ? Occasional use of the lectionary, select seasonal use of the lectionary, or full-throttle every Sunday and any...

Ancient lens? What can we learn from the historical context? Context and Tone Paul was writing from prison to a Christian community that he didn’t establish. Rather, it was his co-laborer, Epaphr...

Your life is in the pulpit with you Fred Craddock said, “Not everything that’s in the Bible is in the Bible .” That’s why we have, among other things, commentaries . The most helpful ones throw o...

You may think of quotes as a great thing to add a little gravity, insight, or humor to your sermons. And they are! But have you considered Lent quotes as a jumping-off point for sermon ideas? We pick...

Preaching Commentary Preaching Angle: Preach the Word, Rest in God’s Work Maybe I tend to focus on the negative, but when I read the parable of the soils, I tend to focus on the soils that struggle...

Introduction Easter stands out from every other day. It’s time to celebrate and to reflect: how will you “preach the resurrection” and proclaim the new life we have in Jesus Christ? How do we invite ...

Preaching Angle: Preach the Word, Rest in God’s Work Maybe I tend to focus on the negative, but when I read the parable of the soils, I tend to focus on the soils that struggle (the soil too close to...

That little vertical bar on the white screen at the beginning of the blank line just keeps blinking. It flashes over and over. Is it mocking you , or is the late hour finally getting to you?  Chance...

Your Inner Life Matters While I have long recognized the significance of a pastor’s inner life, I hadn’t pondered the relationship between our inner life and the act of preaching until recently. Our ...

Easter after Resurrection Sunday One of the challenges of the Christian calendar for pastors is that we often put so much energy into Holy Week, that by the time we reach Easter Sunday , and parti...

Kate's Crisis: Values vs. Church One damp afternoon during the fall of 2016 I was sharing a pastoral conversation with Kate, a professional artist in her late 20s. Over years of meals and convers...

How Will We Preach and Teach from Proverbs? Reading, let alone preaching, from The Book of Proverbs comes with its challenges. Sometimes those sayings can seem just plain obvious and not much help ...

300 10-Minute Devotions For the past six years I’ve been a volunteer chaplain at Haywood Pathways Center , a Christian residential program for people working to turn their lives around from addict...

It looks so easy. Prewrite. Draft. Revise. Edit. Publish. Substitute “Preach” for “Publish” and you’ve adapted it to sermons. Just five steps and you’re done. The problem is that, even though we taugh...

I repeat: the pressure to apply is a modernist pressure, not a biblical pressure. William Willimon observes that most congregations love hearing preaching with this application emphasis. The only pr...

A 4-Part Series on Sermon Writing Imagine what you would have thought on the first day of class if your professor told you that you would have to write an original theological paper every week that h...

I’m not sure that I could have articulated the ground rules for the search for resilience the way I understand them today, but I must have intuited them nevertheless. Some of the basic ideas were thes...

Let's Explore Ephesians! This summer, we’re inviting you—and your congregation—to join us in a journey through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. As your congregation's minds turn toward rest,...

Our people probably already know 90 percent of any biblical instruction we plan to give them. The reason they are not yet obeying biblical truth is not because they don't know it but because they ...

It must be pointed out to the preacher, if he is to cause his people profit and not to embarrass himself with vain joy and presumption, that preaching is a spiritual exercise rather than a vocal one. ...

As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context i...

Building anticipation into one's preaching simply calls for one basic understanding of the task of the pulpit: the goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.

At the heart of it, preaching is the telling and retelling of Christ's story and our stories from creation to parousia. It is the remembering of the stories with a special kind of remembrance of w...

Introduction This message is primarily directed to my friends for whom the word “lectionary” sounds like a disease. I, too, once shared your visceral shudder when someone uttered the phrase “lectiona...

I came to this resolved principle, that I would preach wholly and altogether sound and wholesome words, without affectation of wit and vanity of eloquence. . . . I . . . have continued in that purpose...

A Game of "Who's the Best Preacher?" What is preached matters far more than how it is preached or who preaches it. In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he addresses a troubl...

Joining the Story “We read to know that we are not alone” (Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands ). That’s also why we listen to sermons. Someone once told me that in every sermon they hope ...

Diane Ackerman was talking about life, but I think it applies to preaching when she wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived to the length of it. I want to have liv...