I have just read an essay by a student who ministers in India among the poor. He is involved in a mission which takes the gospel into the villages of India. In these settings, the people are poor, kilometres from any quality healthcare, making a subsistence living off the land. With other believers, this student […]
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 […]
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. […]
They say there are two kinds of preaching… comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. Most preachers will admit that they tend to specialise in one or the other. I like to afflict the comfortable. If I didn’t discipline myself otherwise, I would probably preach this way 90% of the time. I seem to have […]
We just did a series on the End of the World. I was afraid to touch this topic and there are some interesting ideas out there. I was also aware that I will never have read enough to feel ready to preach on this, but we decided to give it a go. Our Youth pastor […]
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 […]
