Sermon Resources on institutional church

In an institutionalized church, the good has become the enemy of the best, and activity has choked out productivity.

We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience…The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions...

The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no man...

Even deliberately nonreligious people pray at times. Studies have shown that in secularized countries, prayer continues to be practiced not only by those who have no religious preference but even by m...

In her excellent book, Liturgy of the Ordinary , author Tish Harrison Warren deals with an issue on many people's minds: why is it that so many people, especially younger generations, don't...

Churches, seminaries, and nonprofit organizations are notorious for saying they need change and then resisting the very leader they called to bring it. One of my consulting clients told me that he cal...

Painful Truths Sandy, bravely revealing his pain, schooled me. He attended a focus group I hosted that sought to create a safe environment wherein a person could express their truest feelings about ...

Transformation Starts With You Transformation of an established church requires transformation of the leader (usually before transformation can happen in the congregation). Simon Sinek wrote Le...

Earlier this month Michelle Yeoh won the Best Actress Academy Award for her work in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once . In her moving acceptance speech, she said, “For all the little boys an...

Picture this: you are just about a year into your first call as a minister. Everything seems to be going swimmingly. You caught up with a seminary friend over the weekend and you slightly brag about h...

Preaching Commentary The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break up the text int...

The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break up the text into manageable chunks. I ...

Preaching Commentary Introduction The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break u...

You know the adage “People resist change.” It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people r...

The Church, however, is a self-governing society, distinct from the State, having its officers and laws, and, therefore, an administrative government of its own.

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...

Ministers run the awful risk . . . of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives — let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to — of a living God who transcends ...

Ministers run the awful risk . . . of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives — let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to — of a living God who transcends ...

The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.

In most cases, the existing church culture is from a former era that is only meaningful to those in the church, not those in the community.

The church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.

History shows that when the church uses the tools of the world's kingdom, it becomes as ineffectual, or as tyrannical, as any other power structure. And whenever the church has intermingled with t...

I grew up attending churches designed for church people. No one said it, but the assumption was that church was for church people. The unspoken message to the outside world was, “Once you start believ...

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

When the church, in the name of political power, allies and aligns too much with the current secular left or right, it is sapped of both spiritual power and credibility with nonbelievers. Theologicall...

The membership of every local church is no accident; it is by divine design. There is no one there who is a spare part, a third foot, or second nose. There is no one there who is not necessary, or who...

Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.

The church is a covenanting people. It consists of those whom the Spirit has called out of the world through the gospel proclamation to walk together as God’s people. This covenanting people, however,...

In this short excerpt, Father Roderick Strange speaks to those who want to write off the church. It is written primarily to a Roman Catholic audience, but it relates quite well to Protestants as well:...

When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom.