Last year I was asked to write a book on pastoral care. What an honour! I’ve written many books, but I had never before been asked to write one. That book has recently been published by Fortress Press, with the title Nurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First Century. As I thought about what […]
I am currently researching the gospel and its proclamation in the New Testament. My enquiry is driven by a sense that many who engage in evangelistic preaching in NZ and more broadly are preaching a gospel that is reduced and formulaic. The proclamation of the gospel is also rather limited, lacking the breadth of approach […]
Opening comments about the sermon I read Tony Scanerlli’s book on emotional health earlier this year and I wanted to do a short series on Emotional Maturity, I started with this sermon which was intended to do two things; to encourage our people to think about their own emotional growth and also to marvel at […]
One of the criticisms I sometimes received during my last stint as a pastor, was that I wasn’t encouraging enough. Ouch! I certainly wanted to be an encourager. I thought I was. I tried to be, but from time to time the criticism came up This criticism often went alongside the more positive observation that […]
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. […]
