Three Preaching Hacks I Learned from Writing My New Book
A few weeks ago I turned in the manuscript for my next book: The Gospel People Don’t Want to Hear: Preaching Challenging Messages (Working Preacher Books, anticipated Spring 2020). While I’m pleased with this first draft, it was much harder to write than I anticipated. What I learned from writing it are at least three hacks that apply to preaching.
Want to Preach Better? Write Better. (A Guest Post With a Giveaway & a Request)
As a writing instructor, I’ve discovered that preachers struggle with the things all writers struggle with. Purpose and audience, clarity and specificity, development of ideas, organization and structure. Planning their writing process. Generating ideas. Re-visioning their drafts. Polishing their sentences. And out of my experience teaching writers, I’ve created a free guide for preachers to help you generate more ideas and write more effectively.
Two Essential Ingredients to Effective Preaching
Information will help us preach knowledgeably. But to preach authentically—to preach transformationally—we need more than information.
Offer What You Know & Make Your Listeners Work: Lessons from Yo-Yo Ma & Bach
How can we, as preachers, approach our craft with the wisdom of Yo-Yo Ma and the genius of Bach in order to better engage our listeners?
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!
Easter Retreat for Preachers (Free Download)
After you’ve poured yourself out through Holy Week and Easter, here’s our guided retreat for you and the Risen One. You don’t even have to leave home to enjoy it. It’s structured for your choice of ninety minutes, three hours, or six. Enjoy every slow, quiet minute of it.
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?