It is good to offer the sermon we are capable of crafting—loaves and fishes style—within the limits of our skills, available time, competing demands, and lack of feedback. We can trust God to multiply our efforts so that listeners receive the nourishment they need.
Your call is to offer the sermon you are able to offer. And forgive yourself for not meeting your expectations.
Whether we preach weekly or less often, there’s always another Sunday, another funeral, another wedding, another Holy Week circling back around that needs a sermon.
If we’re not careful, the things that bring us joy—our loved ones, our fascination with Scripture, and our connection to God—are in constant danger of being taken for granted.
Left untended, they wither.
How do we want to feel when we look back on our preaching careers? How do we want our loved ones to feel looking back on them?
Here are ten rules to keep us healthy, wealthy in spirit, and wise—for the long haul.
Stewardship preaching can be full of angst because it seems so much is at stake. However, the focus on outcome moves our sermons away from the true needs of our congregations. This stewardship guide will help you reframe your stewardship preaching with a process you can complete in an hour, dozens of scriptures verses, and an example of how the process can be applied. May it encourage you in this stewardship season.
During stewardship season we preach to our parishioners about the need to offer their time, talent, and treasure.
But we preachers need a different conversation.
We need a frank, "backstory" conversation about our personal dependence on parishioners' donations, and the ways money affects our relationships with parishioners and colleagues and our capacity to preach with our whole selves.
“As people of faith, we believe God is present and active and has a word to offer to us in all times and seasons of our individual and corporate lives.” In their book, For Every Matter under Heaven: Preaching on Special Occasions, Donna Givers-Johnston and Beverly Zink-Sawyer address specific preaching occasions that arise from calendars, celebrations, or circumstances—leading preachers through a process of preparing sermons that seek and then speak God’s word for the occasion. They introduce us to their approach in this guest post.
Our sermons about stewardship can feel heavy with the burden of making ends meet.
Given these stakes, it’s tempting to preach from scarcity rather than abundance, to exert pressure rather than issue an invitation, to emphasize monetary bottom lines rather than spiritual transformation.
There's another way to preach, however. Learn to recognize these ten mistakes preachers make in their stewardship sermons so you can craft sermons that invite your congregation to participate in God's abundance instead.
When parishioners gain some general knowledge about sermon crafting and understand a bit about our preaching training and bios, their appreciation for preaching can shift. They will realize that just because we make it look easy doesn’t mean it is easy. They’ll know, in fact, it takes a lot of effort.
To make it easier to initiate a conversation about what you need to preach well so you get the support you need, we’ve created this conversation starter to be shared with your parishioners or leadership team. Download your free copy for distribution today.
