As a congregant you have a significant role to play in helping your preacher preach better. In the last post, we talked a little about time and the effect lack of time can have on sermon preparation. Think about this: After Seinfeld went off television, Jerry Seinfeld decided to retire all his old stand-up material [...]
Archive for the ‘prayer’ Category
Help Your Preacher Preach Better #2
Posted: August 5, 2010 in change, church, family, friends, leadership, life, ministry, Missional Church, prayer, preaching, productivity, speaking1
A Public Word – Part 3 “Reductionist Preaching”
Posted: February 10, 2010 in prayer, preaching, speaking, speech acts, spiritual formation, wordsA few posts ago, I commented, “Preaching naively believes that preaching can help” this troubled world. What I mean by this is that preaching, the act of speaking to an audience who will likely soon forget what was said, on the face, appears to be fairly anemic, but the preacher believes it is not. Jesus [...]
A World Without Nukes #2 – The End of The World and Beyond
Posted: November 12, 2009 in advocacy, church, missional, nuclear disarmament, prayer, Two Futures ProjectAnother reason to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons is that all Christians ultimately believe that a world of unbounded peace and unity will eventually be. This is an eschatological reasoning. Perhaps John Howard Yoder can best articulate this point, but suffice it to say this: There will be a day in the [...]
Arise At Five
Posted: November 3, 2009 in advocacy, Blogroll, blogs, change, family, fatherhood, leadership, life, prayerEvery time I mention to someone that I wake up at either 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. the first question they ask me is “Why?”. Why would anyone who doesn’t HAVE to wake up that early do so? Apparently it’s OK for people who must be at work that early, but why punish yourself? I’m not [...]
Lord, Have Mercy
Posted: March 12, 2009 in Bible, books, C.S. Lewis, church, grace, history, prayer, preaching, speaking, speech acts, spiritual formation, wordsAs I’ve mentioned, I’m teaching a class on spiritual formation and spiritual disciplines. The class is going well, but as is the case whenever a group of people explore spiritual formation, there are points that stretch all of us. The stretching is always both painful and necessary. After all, theses practices are designed to aid [...]
A Powerful Footnote
Posted: March 10, 2009 in C.S. Lewis, history, ministry, prayer, quotes, spiritual formationTomorrow night I continue a series I’ve been teaching called, The Sacred Way. For 8-weeks we are looking at some of the ancient spiritual disciplines. I call them “ancient” for two reasons: (1) They were all conceived a long time ago and (2) Most people in American Evangelical churches don’t practice them (out of ignorance [...]
