I’m having a conversation with a friend who I will call Ben. I’m telling him about my heritage of hearing and giving sermons. The church where I worked as an associate minister for seven years, and where I preached a total of about 50 sermons, has a strong tradition of expositional preaching. Sermons there were […]
I read an interesting book recently called Preaching With Cultural Intelligence: Understanding the People Who Hear Our Sermons. Written by Matthew Kim, it’s a helpful guide to reflecting on how well our preaching is connecting with those who don’t share our cultural context—not only in terms of ethnicity but also gender, socio-economic context, religious background, […]
Sermon: Staying Motivated in Caring for Creation Scriptures: Genesis 1:26-31 and 2:15 (read earlier in the service) Psalm 104:1-13 Comments from Lynne about this sermon: My husband and I attend Bethany Presbyterian Church in Seattle. (We lived in New Zealand from 2007 to 2017, so that’s why I write for the Kiwimade Preaching blog.) The […]
Preaching demands that you “reprove, rebuke, and exhort.” 2 Tim 4:2. Scrutinising these three imperatives more carefully, it will mean that preachers are to reprove (admonish, repudiate); rebuke (denounce, reprimand); and exhort (appeal, implore). This is a tall order. It demands that we do more than merely exegete the text. We will have to expound […]
An Interview with Viv Coleman about using History in preaching: What made you decide to focus on characters from Christian history this summer? I was slated to preach twice at a small parish near where we holiday. For the first one I repackaged my Why Luther Matters sermon from October; we had been on a […]
Not for the first time, I recently had a conversation with a preacher in which that person spoke of their practice of avoiding difficult texts and questions in their preaching. So for example, this person avoids questions of sexuality, marriage, eternal destruction, and difficult controversial moral issues. I pushed back, but with little effect. […]
I have now done 9 months “cold turkey” without preaching. I didn’t expect it to be this long. It is officially the longest I have gone without preaching since I began as a pastor in 2000. Anyway, it has been good for me to be a listener instead. On top of sermons at my local […]
John is a Scottish minister with whom I worked for three months when he was visiting Auckland about twenty years ago. He was acting as my “assistant,” even though he was a lot more experienced than me, and he handled the situation with grace and wisdom. I learned a lot from John, and we have […]
I don’t like the bible, oh no . . . Let’s preach the Bible, big, mouthfuls of body building, stamina inducing, breath taking chunks. Let’s climb steep heights of dizzying proportions and challenging ascents of tricky terrain. Let’s take whole books and whole testaments and even the whole thing in single bite sermons. Let’s preach […]
In a New Testament Introductory course, we recently looked at Phil 1:3-11 – Paul’s prayer for the ekklesia. As we considered Paul’s language and ideas we noticed him shift the believer’s eyes beyond their present challenges to the eschaton where they will stand complete (v.6), and be pure and blameless (v.10), having produced a harvest […]
