Risking Your Job to Preach The Gospel? Two Questions to Ask First
We often preach a message people already agree with, a message that reinforces what people already believe. When we preach to the choir, we probably don’t feel vulnerable about the anticipated reaction: we expect more kudos than pushback. But what happens when we preach against the choir?
3 Lessons Yoga Taught Me About Preaching
I am a yogi not because of the poses I can hold or the shapes I can twist my body into, but simply because I practice. And practicing yoga about three times a week for several years has taught me useful life lessons about my source, foundation, and mindset, many of which apply to preaching.
Who are the People in Your Neighborhood? How Knowing Your Neighbors Will Strengthen Your Sermons
“In my work, I frequently meet clergy who don’t know their neighborhood colleagues, or only know the people in their own faith traditions, or only know those in their own ideological bubbles. They don’t know the leaders of local food pantries, transitional housing shelters, and other social services except in a transactional way: the clergy are valued for the donation they can organize or what sound bite they can give.
What if clergy took the time to build relationships in the community and in the congregation? What happens when we take the time to get to know the people in our neighborhoods?”
“If Anyone Has Ears to Hear, Listen (to the Gospel)”
As preachers, how do we tell when we’re crossing over from gaining essential knowledge for preaching into the world’s sorrow to too much information? How do we help our listeners discern the same? Ask these three questions.
How—and why—to preach Transformation in An unsafe world
Adaptive theology is uncomfortable because it doesn’t come with a blueprint, rule book, or even stick-figure assembly directions. Instead it offers a snapshot of cleared ground where the reign of God waits to be built; a rendering of the renovated halls of justice where peace keepers hold dialogues instead of guns; a silhouette of all the peoples gathered to save the planet.
The Joy of Preaching: Lifting the Veil
We live without clarity of vision…about most everything. This veiled understanding is the human condition. As preachers, we struggle with the enormous task and great privilege of wrangling the words that might help others see beneath, behind, within, beyond that veil. But the joy of preaching is finding the word that lifts the veil to reveal Good News.
What I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Preaching
I trust you are as capable as I was at finding your way and learning the lessons about preaching that you need. But learning by trial and error takes a long time, and I wish I hadn’t lost so much of mine. Alas, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I’m sharing the main challenges I faced along with what I wish I’d known: suggestions to make this preaching life easier—no matter how many years you’ve been in the pulpit!
Your Free, At-home easter retreat
Designed to use whether you have ninety minutes, three hours or six, this Easter retreat will help you come away renewed, seeing that hope is the only thing that can make sense of our days.
Four Ways to Preserve Your Humanity When Stressed
When we’re under stress, our body releases hormones that interfere with our executive functioning—our ability to make thoughtful, strategic decisions. As a result, we know we have a ton of work to do, but we don’t know what to do right now to move forward, leaving us stuck in overwhelm. Or worse, we turn on those around us. Read on for suggestions to pause the surge of fight-or-flight hormones, regulate your emotions, re-enter a thinking state, and do the good work.
Going small for Sermon Inspiration
God's glory is revealed in the small as well as the big: in the sparrow and the heavens, the mustard seed and the mountains, the little children and the disciples. And our preaching grows stronger when we learn to attune ourselves to the way God appears in the smallest details of the Bible's stories and text.