picture of communion elements

When Communion Goes Badly

When Communion Goes Badly In the last post I began a series of reflections on what to do when things go wrong with your message or in the worship service.  Most pastors today try to have the various elements of a worship service blend together.…

When Something Goes Wrong

When Something Goes Wrong Inevitably, there will come a time in your preaching when something will go very wrong,  either in the worship service or in your message.  What do you do then?  For many years I've had a practice of asking this…

Final Tricks of the Trade

Final Tricks of the Trade We've been looking at the tricks of the trade of television production, and how applying them to preaching can help us improve.  Here's the first in this series of blog posts.  There are many other things that we…

Tricks of the Trade

Tricks of the Trade In the last post I looked at the first two "tricks of the trade" that we can learn from television production that will improve our preaching.  We saw that cross promotion and editing are two of the keys for effectiveness. Evaluating A…

Tricks of the Trade for Preaching

Tricks of the Trade for Preaching We have been looking at what we can learn from television to improve our preaching.  The string of posts begins here, if you want to catch up.  In this post, I will begin looking at some of the tricks of…

How You Talk Makes A Difference

How You Talk Makes A Difference It is a well-known principle in public speaking that how you talk makes a difference in how people listen. We have been exploring, in the past few posts, what we can learn from television productions that…

How You Talk When You Preach

How You Talk When You Preach I remember well my first week in seminary.  I was overwhelmed with a lot of homework on subjects that I had little exposure to up to that point in my life.  There were 3 hour classes, too.  And I realized that…

Grab Their Attention

Grab Their Attention If you are new to this blog, know that we have been looking at what we can learn from television that will improve our preaching.  You can catch up by reading the posts that begin with this one.  We looked at the fact…

Choosing Your Target Audience

Choosing Your Target Audience In the immediately previous posts we've been looking at things we can learn from television that will improve our preaching.   One of the things television does well is to target a certain audience.  So, how…

Who Are You Talking To?

Who Are You Talking To? In the last couple of posts we have been exploring what we can learn from the way people in television produce their programs.  We've seen that television is king in our culture; it is where people get their news, and…