Categories
Articles

Preaching and Core Human Needs

Every person you know is (for the most part) doing the best they can with their perspective, skills, and experience. How would your preaching change if you believed that?  We usually look at our own struggles with understanding, because we know our own lives. We don’t volunteer in the community because we’re too busy; we […]

Categories
Articles

Sermon Starters: “Start a Fight”

Scripture is full of conflict: between God’s ways and our ways; in interpersonal relationships, and between nations. Sometimes the best way to begin a sermon is to invite our hearers into that conflict… to “start a fight” at the beginning of the sermon that somehow resolves by the end. Here are 3 good uses of […]

Categories
Articles

Sermon Starters

Jesus was a famously good storyteller. On hillsides and shorelines, Jesus held audiences spellbound with his way of sharing in images and narratives that expressed core human needs.

Categories
Articles

Sermon Starters: Ways to Introduce a Sermon: “Ask a Question”

Congregants approach Scripture with all sorts of questions—especially questions about how the Scripture makes claims on our lives. One of our best connection points in sermons, then, is to start with curiosity that invites our congregations to experience the text freshly and stay curious about God’s invitation for their lives.

Categories
Articles

Refreshing Questions

In the New Testament, Christ’s presence is compelling partly because of his curiosity. With his disciples, strangers, Pharisees, and dinner companions alike, Jesus’s first tools in conversation seems to be questions. In showing us what it means to be fully alive, Jesus shows us the importance of remaining generous with our curiosity and our questions. […]

Categories
Articles

Wesley’s Advice to Preachers

Wesley’s Advice to Preachers John Wesley was a trainer of preachers in many ways. His mobilization of new preachers, and his ongoing guidance of them through books and tracts, helped to cement the spirit of the early methodist movement. These preachers when they were just beginning their ministries were called “helpers” and at one point […]

Categories
Articles

Clarify Your Sermons in Three Sentences

“What was that all about?” That is the question we hope one spouse does not ask another on the way home from church. Unfortunately, it is more common than we might think. Sometimes entire discipleship programs are built around helping people try to discern together what the sermon was all about. I listen to a […]

Categories
Articles

5 Tips for Overcoming Sermon Block

Whenever we create something, we are faced with the need to overcome resistance. Preachers face two kinds of creative resistance. Sometimes that resistance is from outside (like emails from parishioners who have mixed feelings about the sermon); but sometimes that resistance is from inside (like procrastination, fear of rejection, avoiding confronting our own sin that […]

Categories
Articles

Roundtable: Preaching, the Gospel, and Young Adults

  Better understanding young adults requires us to listen to them–and to those who serve, pray with, and listen for God’s voice with them. The Wesleyan Church has consistently demonstrated an emphasis on the importance of young adult clergy and laity. Every member of this roundtable is a young adult who also leads others (including […]

Categories
Articles

Preaching Pastorally in Times of Crisis

Karl Barth, the famous 20th century theologian, preached two very different sermons during times of crisis. When he was young, inexperienced, and his theology was not yet fully formed he preached a sermon on the sinking of the Titanic the Sunday after it occurred. You can imagine what a shock to the Western world the […]