David
“In order to maintain attention, avoid being too long. An old preacher used to say to a young man who preached an hour, — “My dear friend, I do not care what else you preach about, but I wish you would always preach about forty minutes.” We ought seldom to go much beyond that — …
Robbed Hell – C.A.S.T. Pearls Presents from Canon Wired on Vimeo.
“Jokes don’t really have a place in sermons. To tell a joke that is obviously set down in a sermon without any relationship to the thrust of the sermon, is to risk trivialization of the sermon. Yet when the gospel, laid next to the human condition, produces humor, then I think it’s fine to let …
“I must make clear in my preaching that I preach what I have been told to preach. I serve the text, not those who listen. I must thereby help my listeners recover the adventure of being those who are baptized to listen to the text, those who bear the burden and the blessing of bending …
Getting to know our neighbors is not always an easy endeavor in today’s society. My good friend Ben Stevens has written an article, “To Love Your Neighbor, You Must Know Your Neighbor,” that can help us in this important aspect of the Christian life. As pastors, we need to encourage our people to get to …
“My colleague, Stanley Hauerwas, was recently asked about the moral confusion of contemporary clergy. Hauerwas said something to the effect that, ‘You have these people who get out of seminary thinking that their job is to ‘help people.’ That’s where the adultery begins.’ What? ‘So you have these clergy,’ he continued, ‘ who have no …
“Pastoral care aids preaching by giving the preacher a respect for listeners in their individual struggles. In counseling troubled parishioners, preachers are with their people in intimate, personal, face-to-face encounters. The preacher who is also a pastor is therefore less likely to make sweeping, generalized, universal judgments about ‘the human condition.’ Before making pronouncements from …
“Informed imitation, that’s our goal. We don’t listen to the preaching of others so that we can be slavish imitators. We listen as fellow artists, as those who have learned enough about preaching to know competence when we hear it, to respect the ways in which more experienced practitioners of our craft can teach us. …
“Unfortunately, we preachers are not always attentive to issues of delivery. Bad habits are often begun in seminary. The professor of homiletics says, ‘You will write three sermons for this class this semester.’ But those manuscripts, undelivered, are not yet ‘sermons.’ Better delivery is learned over a lifetime of preaching. The skills required for good …
“The effective sermon is not simply a report on what the preacher may or may not think. Rather, the engaging sermon engages the hearers, it takes them somewhere they would not go without the power of the sermon. It makes a claim upon the hearers. They understand themselves to be addressed, summoned because it is …