Plan Your Advent Sermons & Life (A Free Workshop Offering Hope in the Overwhelm)
As Christmas approaches, many stresses become more acute and frequent—like the pressure to produce high quality (though not-over-the-top-perfect) sermons, liturgies, and music; pastoral care needs; disagreements between church leaders; and the expectations of parishioners, your family, and, perhaps, even yourself.
To that end, I’ve already started preparing for Advent. As a result, I have lots of healthy food ready to eat, my office is a place I enjoy again, my calendar and to-do lists are manageable, and there’s plenty of open space for sermon prep.
If this sounds too good to be true, I assure you it’s not. It simply takes a decision to spend a bit of time now to free up a lot of time later.
If you can spare an hour, I can help you strategize your December for a season of calm, connection, and clarity.
The Surprising Key to Writing Your Sermon Faster
There are times when muscling a sermon from the blank page through gritted teeth is actually counter-productive. When more is actually less. And when effort is not proportional to results. When we find ourselves dreading the blinking cursor at the top of our empty document, we may want to try a different tool than pure effort.
Becoming a Better Preacher: A Case Study with Pastor Andrea Myers
I'm building a more robust toolkit, or artist’s palette, so that I can deliberately choose the right tool or style to communicate a given message. While I'm still writing on Saturdays (for now!), I'm never starting from a blank page, which has helped me to fall in love with preaching again.
Seven Strategies to Keep Sermon Prep Out of Your Summer Plans
Don't want to do sermon prep on your vacation? You don't have to! Here are seven strategies to protect your time off.
One-Year Anniversary of Making Preaching Easier!
Discover a preaching community rooted in spirituality that makes sermon prep more efficient, more effective, and more fun!
How to Find The Perfect Sermon Illustration in Less Time (A Free Guide)
One of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of sermon planning is finding a good sermon illustration—or latch—for your sermon. How do you find one that truly resonates without spending hours and hours searching? To that end, I’ve created a 5-step guide to finding your latch. You’ll learn an efficient and effective process you can use every week to find a sermon illustration that connects (steps 1-4 take only 4 minutes total!). Click through to learn more!
Lenten Sermons: Before You Preach, Mind the Gap
Preaching through lent requires significant theological knowledge. What do you know? What don’t you know? How do you know? Using this 4-step process, discover your gaps in knowledge so you can prep more efficiently and effectively for honest sermons that capture the true nature of God.
Find New Sermon Ideas by Thinking Like a Reporter
Preachers and reporters often face the same challenge: to tell the same story in a new way. By thinking like a reporter, we can find dozens of ways to share the Good News from a fresh angle.
Learning to Read the Untold Stories of Scripture (A Guest Post)
Scripture—lectio divina, the Daily Office, biblical scholarship, and community study—has been a passion of mine before I knew the words to call it. This part of my life has held a privileged place in my schedule for so long, that I came up surprised and saddened to begin to realize just how much of our scriptures I had been neglecting.
A New Year's Challenge for Preachers: Reset Your Calendar in 2019
When we keep piling on the responsibilities without consideration for the prep time involved, the investment of energy required to engage, or the precedent it might be setting—then our calendars rule us instead of us ruling our calendars. That’s when preaching gets stuffed into the cracks and margins of ministry, and we end up feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by our self-defeating Sisyphisian attempts to “get on top of” our responsibilities.