Preaching Advice Roundup: 16 Backstory Preaching mentors share strategies to make preaching easier, more effective, and more fun!
Sometimes, one small tip is powerful enough to unlock a new competency or significantly improve a skill or process. That’s why today's blog is all tips, tips, and nothing but preaching tips. As the 2023-2024 Mentorship class wraps up their program and celebrates graduation, I asked current Backstory Preaching mentors to offer some of their favorite preaching strategies to help you craft more effective sermons in less time—while loving the process!
How to make your learning "stick": Ensuring your professional development isn't wasted
What have you done to improve your preaching?
If you’re like most of us, you have:
- bought books
- read some of them
- discovered a couple tips you incorporated in your next sermon
Mostly, though, you got fired up about preaching your next few sermons, and then the books started to gather dust.
The Power of Comparison: How to bring abstract concepts to life with effective metaphors & similes
Crafting effective comparisons is one of the life-bloods of preaching that engages listeners and holds their attention. These comparisons do the heavy lifting of explanation so listeners grasp the strange, unfamiliar, otherworldly reality of God within the reality we know.
Pentecost Quote Collection for Your Preaching and Reflections
We tune our awareness to God our Creator. We speak often about Jesus our Redeemer. But we give short shrift to the Spirit our Sanctifier, even though she offers what we most long for on a given day. Perhaps these quotations will help us pay more attention to the gifts the Spirit offers each day so we reflect her fruit.
Sacred Imagination: Preaching a Picture of God's Vision
Even though Jesus gave us these and many more concrete examples of what the reign of God is in real life, as preachers we often struggle to imagine God’s reign as concretely, today or in the future. I want to raise up an exercise and offer an example to help us imagine the concrete manifestation of God’s hopes for us so we can easily preach God’s vision revealed in a text.
See Yourself as Beloved—and Change the World
I learned a journaling practice that has changed my life. I think it could change yours, too.
"The Earth Shall Yield its Increase": The Cost of Severing Work from Worship (A Guest Post)
Scripture offers us a vision of human life grounded in three deeply intertwined covenantal relationships: God, humanity, and the earth. But these three vital relationships have been broken by sin, leading to a distorted theology of worship, work, and rest.
Free Easter Retreat for Preachers: "While It Was Still Dark"
Download your free Easter retreat to refresh and prepare your spirit.
Easter Quotes for Preaching & Inspiration (2024)
Download your free collection of Easter quotes for preaching inspiration and personal devotion.
The Case for Preaching the Passion on Palm Sunday & Good Friday
Some preachers feel it is not necessary to preach on Palm Sunday or Good Friday. The Passion speaks for itself, the thinking goes. The story is so rich, so full of awe, so packed with meaning—there is simply nothing we could say to add to its profundity.
I appreciate the humility in that perspective, because it can feel that anything we add to the story is anti-climactic at best. However, I encourage preachers to offer a homily on Palm Sunday and Good Friday for three important reasons.