How to preach badly

I know - I don't need much help on that score! But this is good.

managing the creativity of ministry

This article by Cal Newport is not ministry focussed but has some helpful principles for managing the creative demands of regular ministry

sample chapters on preaching

You might want to check out the samples of these couple of books on preaching - and maybe even then buy the books.

William Willimon - Undone By Easter (Keeping Preaching Fresh)

T. David Gordon - Why Johnny Can't Preach

blending stories and doctrine

This is a really helpful article by Brandon O'Brien, reflecting on the ministry of Walter Wangerin.

elemental preaching

There's a very rewarding, challenging piece over at LeadershipJournal.net by Mark Labberton.

In his search for stability in his Christian life, visiting a variety of churches, he says he was looking for a preacher "with theological gravity at the core." What would that look like? "No escapism, no denial of suffering, no spiritual pretense."

It's an article to ponder slowly.

Try these paragraphs:

In part, the power of the gospel's gravitational pull lies in its totality, the sheer scale, the utter range and depth of God's creation and re-creation. It's all this in joy and in pain, in beauty and in tragedy, in assurance and in struggle. The attraction of personality, humor, intelligence, form, and style of some preachers can no doubt be attractive, even controlling. But there is no true north in these qualities. Our complex and needy lives, individually and collectively, cannot find hope in the preacher. Hope is only found in the grip of God, whose love and power are sufficient for our story and the whole story.

In my travels to different churches, I did find preachers and congregations among whom I sensed the great pull of the gospel defining and clarifying, healing and renewing the core of their lives. It was not evident because of any particular communication skill. These pastors were varied in age and tradition, but there were some things they had in common: they exuded a life that primarily bore witness to Jesus Christ in character and in attitude even more than in word. They simultaneously conveyed both an honest discipleship and an honest humanity; they seemed to know suffering, their own or others. They were not glib about their role; they had discovered in weakness that Christ was the Center who could and did hold them together.

His comments on the light and air of preaching are truly weighty.

an all-round ministry

I was thinking the other day about preaching - about the need to preach full-orbed sermons that don't moralise, even whilst they instruct and call for faith and obedience etc. That seems, at times, like quite a hard call.

But then it struck me (sometimes I'm pretty blind to the obvious) that when we then sit around the Lord's Table (as we do) after the sermon, whatever I may have failed to say well enough, or fully enough, is now being portrayed for all to see. They're tasting - and seeing - that the Lord is good.

And then, yesterday, it also occurred to me that, in fact, the praying and the singing and the reading and the fellowship of God's people are all a part of that same witness to God's grace too. And so I don't need - am not called - to do everything in the preaching. Yes, to preach Christ as well as I can - not moralising but preaching grace. Yet such preaching is not being done in a vacuum; God has many ways of displaying truth.

Those thoughts don't make me feel that sloppy preaching is okay, but they do give me a sense of liberty and security in seeking to minister faithfully.

preacher, it's not about you

A couple of interesting pieces on giving a presentation from Psychology Today.

Worth a quick gander.

How to Give a Presentation Part I: It's Not About You

How to Give a Presentation Part II: Tell A Good Story

walt & wilf in preaching

Chatting to a teacher the other day, we spoke about looking for outcomes from the lesson. One way that is handled is by each lesson having a WALT ('We Are Learning To') and a WILF ('What I'm Looking For') - what is the intended outcome of the lesson (WALT) and what is the evidence it has been achieved (WILF).

It struck me that it might be useful to adapt that approach to the preaching context - having established the lines of meaning and application in the passage, to ask what I hope people will know, feel & do as a result of listening to the sermon and what the evidence of that might consist in.

It's not particularly revolutionary but maybe it helps to focus thinking on the hearer, rather than the deliverer, and on genuine transformation of lives rather than simply transfer of information.

being authentic

This piece wasn't written for pastors but it contains wisdom that is eminently transferable.

Preaching in the real world

demands a lot of thought about who you're speaking to and what their assumptions are - something this short talk illustrates well.

in conclusion

A really helpful quotation on the subject of what a conclusion ought to be and do.

HT: Matt Perman

speaking the gospel

I'm so thankful for both the example and the content of this talk. It's a humbling listen; it's also thrilling.

HT: John Dyer.

hauerwas: on essential liturgy

What do you make of this quote from an interview with Stanley Hauerwas?

It was a bad innovation when the revivalistic structure overtook the church’s primary liturgical form in a way that charismatic preachers replaced the centrality of Eucharist. We’ve suffered from that.

I think he has a point. Sort of.

on using illustrations

Craig Barnes makes a solemn point that all preachers know they need to think about. Writing about the use of illustrations he comments,

few things can be more subversive to the point of the biblical text than our efforts at illustrating it.

Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. Alas.

By way of contrast, he mentions the use of images (noting along the way that "the Bible has very few illustrations, but it is filled with powerful images"). He writes,

Illustrations tell stories that exemplify the point of the text. Images embody the point.

(The Pastor as Minor Poet, pp.129,130)

an important question

On a recent Q&A, someone asked John Piper, "What role do you think your temperament plays in determining your view of God and the kind of Christianity you live out?"

That's a great question. It's one that I need to reflect on (but without getting too stuck inside my own navel).

For Piper's (very helpful) answer, go here - first video, about 6 minutes in.

in praise of written sermons (and more)

My father always preached from notes, and I wrote my sermons out word for word. There are boxes of them in the attic....For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you're only a little fellow now and when you're a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any of a number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth....

...I wrote almost all of [the sermons] in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful. I'm grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally. Your mother walked into church in the middle of a prayer - to get out of the weather, I thought at the time, because it was pouring. And she watched me with eyes so serious I was embarrassed to be preaching to her. As Boughton would say, I felt the poverty of my remarks.

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain. At times like that I might not care particularly whether people are listening to whatever I have to say, because I know what their thoughts are. Then if some stranger comes in, that very same peace can seem like somnolence and like dull habit, because that is how you're afraid it seems to her.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, pp.21-23

vanhoozer: on pastor-theologians

Kevin Vanhoozer on the type of preachers we need:

The preacher is a “man on a wire,” whose sermons must walk the tightrope between Scripture and the contemporary situation...The pastor-theologian, I submit, should be evangelicalism’s default public intellectual, with preaching the preferred public mode of theological interpretation of Scripture.

(HT: Michael Bird)

keller: how to become a preacher

From the pen of Tim Keller

It is only through doing people-work that you become the preacher you need to be - someone who knows sin, how the heart works, what people's struggles are, and so on. Pastoral care and leadership (along with private prayer) are to a great degree sermon preparation. More accurately, it is preparing the preacher, not just the sermon. Through pastoral care and leadership you grow from being a Bible commentator into a flesh and blood preacher.

You can read the whole post here.

(Thanks to The Masked Badger for pointing me to it)

the single-aim sermon

Over at Between Two Worlds, there is this quote for preachers to mull over (non-preachers views also welcome here, as always...):

I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. I find the getting of that sentence is the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labour in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with scrupulous exactness—this is surely one of the most vital and essential factors in the making of a sermon: and I do not think any sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon.”

—J. H. Jowett, The Preacher: His Life and Work (Harper & Bros, 1912), p. 133.

The quotation may be old but the idea is very popular today, too.

I want to ask whether it's a helpful idea. Of course, it is likely to help the preacher (and the hearer) in gaining a sense of coherence and so on. And that's good. But I want to ask the question for this reason: does a commitment to achieving a single-senteced summary of a sermon mean that the text portion must be reduced in size until one dominant thought in present in it? Suppose a couple or more things are going on in a passage - how is that to be handled? Cut it back to one main thought? Is that helpful? Can we not handle two or more big ideas at once? Are listeners so dull? Is the sermon so sacrosanct?

Maybe I'm being pedantic because I don't like the thought of more work on top of the usual sermon graft!

And what if the form of the text also communicates a message or intends an effect, in addition to the message and intent of its words? I'm thinking primarily of psalms but not only. How ought that to be handled in a sermon? Can it be handled at all or is it 'done' through the reading aloud of scripture only?

advice that preachers can learn from?

An economist writes about writing.