
When Communion Goes Badly
Top Preaching TipsWhen 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
Top Preaching TipsWhen 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
Top Preaching TipsPreaching 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
Top Preaching TipsPreaching 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
preaching about money, Top Preaching TipsStewardship 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
Top Preaching TipsHow 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
Top Preaching TipsTry 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
Top Preaching TipsListening 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
Top Preaching Tips
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…

Create a Map
Top Preaching Tips
Creating a map
In the last post we saw that one of the most effective ways of creating a sermon is to pick one point, one major idea that you are going to bring to people in a memorable way. …