When Perceived Disaster Strikes

When Perceived Disaster Strikes In these last couple of posts I've been using stories from preachers to illustrate what to do when things go wrong. We've looked at what to do with a major mistake in your sermon, as well as what to do if communion…
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…

Preaching to Everyone in the Congregation

Preaching to Everyone in the Congregation In the last post we began looking at the challenge of preaching to everyone in the congregation that is varied by education, by ethnicity, by age, by financial situation, etc.  How do you do that?…

Preaching to Everyone In Particular

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,…

Money Talks For Preachers

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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…

How to Conclude Your Sermon

How to conclude your sermon We've looked for several posts now at how to conclude your sermon well.   This is the last post in the series, a conclusion to conclusions.  We've seen a variety of ways to end a message effectively, from going…

Try This Kind of Conclusion

Try This Kind of Conclusion In this post I'm going to continue reflecting on conclusions, a subject we started a couple of posts ago.  I'm going to give you some examples and encourage you to try this kind of conclusion in each case. End…

Listening To The Listeners

Listening to Listeners Haddon Robinson taught preaching for many years at Denver Theological Seminary.  The title for this post is the title of  one of the chapters in his book, Making a Difference in Preaching.  Listening to listeners…

Notes or No Notes Preaching

Notes or No Notes? Are you a notes or no notes preacher?  That’s the question for today’s post.  In the last post we saw that it is helpful to have a map, or outline for your message. Now the question is how you lead people…