Advent quotes and inspiration for your Advent sermons
Download your copy of this year's Advent Quotes to inspire you and your sermons: "Advent: The Season of Longing."
Sermon Themes for Advent & Christmas
This guide to potential Advent and Christmas sermon themes will jump-start your sermon prep inspiration for the Advent season.
Adaptive Leadership for Preachers (Part 4): 10 Steps to Lead Creatively, Effectively, and Pastorally (A Guest Post)
To preach is to lead. Preachers lead by proclaiming how, where, when, and why the gospel influences and guides our hearts, decisions, and actions, individually and corporately. The need for preachers to lead their congregations through change is always difficult, but perhaps it has never been more difficult than it is now. Today’s guest post by Backstory Preaching Mentor and Leadership Coach, the Rev’d Dale Matherly, offers ten steps we can apply to lead faithfully, authentically, and skillfully.
A Preacher's Twelve Favorite Questions
A Nobel-winning physicist told a student that the secret to his genius was keeping a list of his twelve favorite problems top of mind as he carried on about his days. As he encountered new ideas, people, or tools, he applied them to his problems, and occasionally, an unanticipated connection solved a problem. Voila. Genius! I think preachers could benefit from a similar practice, and I share how inside.
Every Second Counts: The Power of the Pause in Preaching & Life (A Guest Post)
12-step recovery communities value the practice of pausing because they acknowledge sometimes our first thoughts aren’t necessarily our healthiest thoughts. That’s true for anyone, including preachers. Read on to see how the power of the pause can help preachers in sermon preparation and life.
Grounded Confidence, Meaningful Connections, and Preachers
The practice of grounded confidence helps us face our insecurities and develop meaningful connections to build the body of Christ. And we preachers need a sacred space to practice grounded confidence so we can proclaim the good news we’ve been called to preach as only we can preach it.
How do you avoid the pitfalls of assumptions in a new call? Good questions.
We've probably all stepped on a congregational preaching "no-no" without realizing it. We thought we were just doing our jobs and didn't realize we didn't know what we didn't know until we fielded angry reactions to our sermon. A little knowledge can go a long way, and today's blog offers questions every preacher can ask to unearth the unspoken expectations of a congregation, particularly when discerning a new call.
Three Homiletical Insights Preachers Can Learn from Howard Thurman (A Guest Post)
Dr. Edgar “Trey” Clark III, Assistant Professor of Preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, offers three practical preaching insights we can learn from Howard Thurman. “While the goal is not to imitate Thurman, I’m convinced he embodies wisdom that can be applied in relevant ways in diverse ministry contexts today.”
Adaptive Leadership (Part 3): Raise the Heat (A Guest Post)
Engaging in Adaptive Leadership involves managing the “thermostat” of your congregation. If it’s too cold in your system, people get stuck in work avoidance. If it’s too hot in your system, people respond with a “fight, flight, freeze, or appease” response. To make progress toward transformation, we must set the system’s temperature above a threshold of learning, and then keep the temperature below the limit of tolerance. Here’s how.
Adaptive Leadership (Part 2): Navigating the Gap to Find Solutions to Complex Challenges (A Guest Post)
Unlike technical challenges with clear, go-to solutions, adaptive challenges are about changing priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties for a compelling purpose. Solving these challenges requires deep learning to develop new tools, relationships, methods, and practices. “Adaptive leadership” is necessary for these challenges involving significant culture shifts or organizational changes that don’t come with a blueprint.