Preaching to Everyone In Particular One of the greatest challenges I faced in preaching was to relate to my entire audience, or, as the title of this post describes, “preaching to everyone in particular”. In the last congregation I served, Covenant Life Church in Grand Haven, MI, there were doctors, Phd’s, teachers, businessmen and lawyers. There […]
Mystic and Shepherd I am in a series of posts on the character of the preacher. We’ve seen, in the previous two posts, that congregations expect their pastor to be a person of faith, and they want their pastor to give accurate information. There are two other expectations that I want to explore in […]
The Preacher as Informer, Mystic, and Shepherd In the last post I began the process of what I called “exegeting the preacher”. In other words, how does the character of the preacher impact how people hear what is said? We also saw in the last post that hearers expect the preacher to be a person […]
Look Who’s Talking In this blog I’ve looked at the various components of preaching, including effective introductions, good organization of the body, and impactful conclusions. In other words, we’ve looked at the pragmatic stuff. There is an old saying that to be successful in any endeavor you need three things: knowledge, character and skill. One […]
Stewardship Sermons We’ve been looking at how to talk about money in this series of blog posts. Here’s a link to the first in this series. Today we will look at some ways to approach preaching on this sticky subject of money under the theme of Money Talks for Preachers. Money Talks is the title […]
Positives In Preaching About Money Preaching about money is a challenge, as we’ve seen in the past few posts. We’ve also seen that there are some pitfalls to avoid when you are dealing with this controversial topic. There are positive ways to approach the subject of giving, including using humor, as in this cartoon. In […]
Mistakes to Avoid When Preaching About Money In the last couple of posts I introduced the subject of preaching about money. We’ve seen that people in your congregation probably have some reasons why they don’t like to hear about money from the pulpit. We have also seen that pastors have reasons that they don’t like […]
Money Matters In the last post I introduced this subject of how to preach about money matters in our sermon schedules. I began the subject by looking at why our congregations don’t want us to preach about money, and we saw how people view their use of money as an extremely personal thing. We […]
Preaching About Money I think most pastors cringe just a little bit when the subject of preaching about money comes up. We don’t like to do it. Why? I suspect it is because we believe that people in the congregation don’t want to hear such things. We know, as I said in an earlier post, […]
People of Grace We’ve been discussing in this blog how to preach to the culture around us. In the last post, I reflected on the culture of the United States as an example of how the church can get away from its central message of grace, and instead can equate politics with our faith. In […]