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, […]
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 […]
In listening to podcast on fables the other day the conversation remade the word. In my language it means “untrue”, “made up.” For those scholars fable became “a way of speaking truth to power.” A safe way for slaves and lower classes to speak against those who oppressed them. As their conversation carried on they […]
My daughter-in-law works for Google (see photo); she’s currently on the team that is testing Google Glass. I tried out this innovative technology – basically a head-mounted computer – when I was in California last year. It’s weird. You can ask a question, make a call, set an appointment, navigate a trip or take a […]
We happen to have a radio announcer in our congregation – Kath Bier, who is one of the two hosts on The Breeze. Discussions with Kath reveal reasonable crossover between the role of a radio host and that of a preacher: Both of us want to be in tune with the issues affecting people in […]
I found myself in a recent encounter with Dawn and Petersen’s “The Unnecessary Pastor” and began to question the “necessariness” of the preacher. As often happens in these fascinating internal monologues, I discovered some resonance with both trajectories – becoming less necessary and more necessary… The strength of the idea that “the pastor as preacher […]
Kiwis are renowned, at least within NZ, for their ingenuity that “makes do” with number eight fencing wire (and a few people rattling their dags) to solve a dizzying array of problems. We are proud of our resourcefulness and enjoy declaring that, “she’ll be right,” when we have jimmied up a solution to what seemed […]
My office gets way too crowded when I write a sermon… I’ve done the study of a text and begin to craft the rough draft of a sermon, when I get the first knock. First, it is my former professor of exegesis. He exclaims, “Have you made sure you have really listened to the […]
In a sermon entitled, “The Real Point of Conflict Between Science and Religion”, Harry Emerson Fosdick said: What areas of human need science has met in my lifetime! When I was born, Edison was thirty-one years old; Sigmund Freud was twenty-two; Henry Ford was fifteen; Charles Steinmetz, thirteen; Madam Curie, eleven; Orville Wright, seven; Marconi, […]
This blog, and the people connected to it, are rightly committed to biblical preaching. My question is what do we mean by ‘biblical preaching’? We all acknowledge that this means engaging seriously with scripture and allowing that engagement to shape the direction and contours of the sermon. However, is that all that constitutes biblical preaching?
