One of my favoring TED Talks featured James Geary, author of The Secret Life of Metaphors. Geary’s presentation, titled Metaphorically Speaking is required viewing for preachers, as far as I’m concerned.

For Ge...

One of my students offered an excellent metaphor for preaching yesterday. He asked that we imagine an old-style record player with the vinyl record and its grooves serving as the message that we preach from God’s Word. As preachers we are the needle that fit...

I discovered an older source on the subject of comedy and preaching by Joseph Webb. I’ve increasingly noticed a tendency toward humor in preaching, and decidedly so among the biggest and most successful preachers in North America. As I’ve observed R...

Allow me a word or two of personal testimony. There are times in our lives when God makes himself known in profound and evident ways. Those times are incredibly encouraging. I’ve had about four of those just in the last week.

I have been praying for a...

I just spent some time working through Haddon Robinson’s excellent article, The Heresy of Application with a group of students. Robinson contends that there is more heresy preached in application than through exegesis. It is when we try to concretize the lis...

One of my students made an excellent suggestion. I like to encourage preachers to “think like a film-maker” when it comes to thinking about texts (narrative texts particularly) and when it comes to thinking about how to tell stories in a sermon. Consid...

There probably isn’t anyone left out there who doesn’t know about sermonspice.com anymore, but in case there are a few of you out there that are unfamiliar with its wonders, let me suggest you have a look.

Sermon Spice is a source for sermon ill...

My friend and mentor, Grant Lovejoy, sent me a link this morning to the new website for Chronological Bible Storying. The website offers the methodology, research, and reports from the field into this powerful way of preaching to oral and indigenous cultures.

Yesterday my wife participated in our pastor’s sermon by illustrating his sermon with a simultaneous sermon painting. What’s that, you ask? Let me try to explain.

Brian Stewart was preaching from Philippians 2:15 about how we are to shine as lig...

I had a fantastic opportunity today to sit in on a class taught by Tony Alcantar at the Vancouver Academy of the Dramatic Arts (VADA). Tony is a veteran Christian actor and comedian out of the Second City environment who is tired of liste...

There are times when the sermon comes easily. Everything flows and you know exactly what it is that God would have you say. At other times, however, the ideas come as slow as molasses (“in January” as a friend of mine used to say). I had one of those m...

Bruce Seymour has written a helpful little book on story-telling for pastors. The book is simple and easy to read. It is chock-full of examples that flesh out what the author is talking about.

As many have observed, stories are the currency of our culture, ...

It’s good to be back from my journeys, though things are going to be very intense for a few days yet as it is regional convention time for my denomination.

I thought I would share some hi-lights from Calvin Miller’s theme address as the Internat...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing my good friend, Dr. John Auxier preach. John is Dean of Trinity Western University and an expert in marriage and family counseling. He is also a very fine preacher.

His sermon was taken from John 11 and 12, focusing o...

Have you ever noticed how we sometimes use stories and illustrations as a way of redeeming ourselves through our preaching? I’m not just a preacher. I’m a human and as such, I find myself messing up in life. Most times these things are relatively minor...

Some excerpts from N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress Press, 1992).

“This runs contrary to the popular belief that a story is there to ‘illustrate’ some point or orther which can in principle be stated without rec...

A few days ago, while visiting a town fair, I saw a woman reading poetry to a solitary listener in the middle of a crowd. The sight was striking given that large numbers of people, myself included, were finding their way past and around these two who were taking t...

Traditionally, sermon illustration has been understood as adding raisins to one’s oatmeal. The theory is that the oatmeal is the nutritious part of the meal, but it isn’t all that tasty. If we want people to be able to choke it down we need to add some...