Easter Inspiration to Guide Your Eastertide Preaching
What might happen were we to learn a few more notes of God’s song of resurrection? What few notes might we add to our own song of being healed, set free, unafraid? And then, what might happen were our new notes to be sung from the pulpit?
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!
Holy Week Sermons: Choose Your Words Wisely (A Guest Post)
There is a temptation, I feel, during seasons like Lent, Holy Week, or Advent, to lose our own way of communicating God's truths, in favor of covering all of our theological bases. We sometimes wish to be right more than we wish to be ourselves in the pulpit. One can do both. But it all depends on the words we choose.
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.
Five Ways to Preach a Countercultural Lent (A Guest Post)
Let’s be honest: The observation of Lent is often reduced to artificially somber and ritualistic practices of self-denial without an honest, whole-hearted attempt to genuinely experience the flow and meaning of the season. The “practices” undertaken involve simply giving up chocolate or wine. That’s suffering for Jesus, for sure, but what does it accomplish if we’re not focused meaningfully on what we should be? So I’d like to suggest that in our preaching, we shake things up a bit. Let’s preach a countercultural Lent.
A Lenten Preaching Series on Fasting
Fasting at lent can seem rote or compulsory or just a convenient way to drop a few pounds. But Jesus has bigger plans for our lives than watching the scale drop. In this post, I offer a 6-week lenten sermon series for your use. But before you dive into its structure and content, let’s take a moment to consider Jesus’s why and how for fasting.
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.
Preach Like an Amateur
To be an amateur means you do what you do for the love of it. Not because you have to. Not because you get paid for it. And not because you have a deadline to meet. You do it because you love it. The “greats” in any craft become great because they’re amateurs first. They pursue their craft with joy, zest, and fascination.
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.
"Why Do You Want to Preach?"
If someone asked why we’re called to preach, we’d likely have a ready answer. We’re practiced in the art of the spiritual answer, abdicating the role of our “self” in arriving at ministry’s doorstep, preferring to lay responsibility at the feet of a divine, outside call. And that’s true. But perhaps not complete.