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...

Recently, Erwin Stutzman (Eastern Mennonite Seminary) led a group of us homiletics professors in a discussion of vocal coaching in the classroom. Frankly, this has never been a primary focus for me, given the priority of helping students get the biblical text righ...

As I have been working with my students at the end of the semester, I’ve been thinking about the Japanese concept of kaizen – the principle of constant incremental improvement. One of the things that have made companies like Sony so ubiquitous is that ...

I’ve begun to teach my students the concept of mapping their sermons. Following Dave McLellan’s advice, in his preach by ear, I’ve been showing the students how to chart the flow of their sermon with a kind of mind-map using stick figures, simple...

Much has been written about the practice of preaching. Little has been written about the teaching of preaching. Tom Long, Lenora Tubbs Tisdale, and many of their colleagues at the Academy of Homiletics, have sought to do something about this with the publication o...

A variation to powerpoint that I used to good effect this past Sunday was a title slide. I was having difficulty finding just the right pictures to match my taglines for my sermon on 1 Samuel 17. The problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough ways to ima...

One of my students made an interesting statement to me recently about the value of editing one’s sermon. “I want to make sure that there is no wasted energy in the sermons I present.”

I appreciated that particular turn of phrase. ...

One of the more interesting books I’ve read on preaching recently is Chris Erdman’s Countdown to Sunday. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject. Not always do I find myself so consistently intrigued and interested. I found myself talkin...

Here’s a quick note regarding the release of a second and revised edition of fellow Canadian Paul Scott Wilson’s excellent The Practice of Preaching. I’ll be reviewing the book for the Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society and th...

We have a new lead pastor at our church and we couldn’t be happier. Yesterday, Brian Stewart offered us a dramatic recitation
of the entire book of Philippians, from memory! I had memorized the book of Philippians some years ago, but I had never had t...

Don Sunukjian, a key figure in evangelical homiletics, has just released his magnum opus, Invitation to Biblical Preaching. Sunukjian, professor of preaching and chair of the Christian Ministry and Leadership department at Talbot School of Theology, has c...

This week I have been engaged in wall-to-wall faculty meetings here at ACTS Seminaries. It is annual review week, which is both grueling and encouraging as we get a sense of what we have been doing (well and poorly) and what we could see ...

Yesterday, I preached the same sermon at two consecutive services. In between the first and second services I took some heat from an older man who suggested that “if anyone came into the service confused, I left them more confused.” I tried to offer a ...

Last week I was part of the examination committee for a Doctor of Ministry dissertation written by Pastor David Acree from Lethbridge, Alberta. David’s dissertation examined the matter of the preacher’s sense of readiness to preach. I’m pleased t...

I ran into the same problem with two of my students yesterday. Both of them submitted sermon plans that required a little help. When I suggested alternate and more appropriate ways of approaching the text, they both agreed with me. The problem, they said, was that...

Last week I was talking to my students about the challenge of helping listeners overcome their objections to the sermon’s big idea. I likened the challenge to fishing. I’m not much of a fisherman, but I know that once you’ve got the fish on the h...

Two months ago, I commented on some statistics from Thom Rainer about the very small amount of time that many pastors are taking to prepare their sermons (two hours per sermon?). In response, James Fair posted the following question. I thought it worth bringing ou...

One of my students told me about a recent experience preaching through a series of cell phone interruptions. A listener’s phone rang at least six times during the service, eventually causing the preacher to stop the sermon. As it turned out, the telephone ca...

I just finished reading Thom Rainer’s Surprising Insights from the Unchurched and I will admit that I’m a little shocked to read that “90 percent of pastors in America spend only two hours per week in sermon preparation for each message ...

Another interesting paper presented at this year’s meeting of the Evangelical Homiletics Society was Joseph Webb’s “The Unusual Role of Long-Term Memory in Preaching the Contemporary Sermon.” Webb, who teaches preaching at Palm Beach Atlant...

I had a recent conversation with one of my mentors who challenged me to consider what he called “Feedback Intensive Practice Embedded Programming,” in my training of preachers. His concerns was that in most seminary contexts, we have students present f...

Preparing for Sunday is more complicated than it used to be. Now, on top of the eight to twelve hours needed to prepare a serious biblical sermon, we have to add two or three more to prepare the PowerPoint presentation.
I was discussing this with a pastor re...

Student preachers often want to know how to choose what text they will preach from. I confess that I am not usually a whole lot of help on the question. “Is it in the Bible,” I ask? “Then go ahead and preach it.”

My answer is based o...

Homileticians have long complained about “Saturday Night Specials,” sermons conceived at the last minute of a hurried week in ministry. Clearly, such an approach is not congenial to effective sermon-making, yet what can a busy preacher do? We all know ...

I recently heard a preacher apply his teaching of the ten commandments, particularly the prohibition against stealing. He did a good job with his explanation of the text. His presentation was engaging. The piece that got my attention, however, was his application....

Mnemonics are methods for remembering information that is otherwise quite difficult to recall. A very simple example is the ‘30 days hath September’ rhyme. The basic principle of mnemonics is to use as many of the best functions of your brain as possib...