What The Blues Teaches Us About Preaching
If you sell your audio sermons that were recorded by your church or non-profit ministry, you might want to read this article. The article talks about the common practice of …
Selling Sermons – Or Give Them Away Free? Read MorePastor Raleigh Jones discusses the origin and the continued work and progress of the Black Preaching Network.
the Black Preaching Network is a social networking site that allows preachers to meet, greet, and interact on the internet. The site now has over 10,000 members and is growing daily.
You can join now for fee, and I would encourage all preachers to take advantage of this marvelous resource.
Audio 34 – Raliegh Jones Jr from The Black Preaching Network Read MoreThe power of life and death is in the tongue.
Audio 33 – The Wellspring of Life -Zachary Mills Read MoreMarva Dawn, in her work A Royal Waste of Time writes:
If television is causing people to be dissatisfied with the worship of our churches, should we change worship to be more like television — or should the splendor of our worship cause people to ask better questions about television?
Willimon, in The Intrusive Word: Preaching to the Unbaptized writes:
The challenge of being an evangelistic preacher is the precarious willingness to allow God to use us to assemble the church, which is often a church we would not have assembled if assembling a church were only a matter of methods of church growth rather than a matter of God’s grace.
Marva Dawn in her helpful work A Royal “Waste” of Time writes
Many of the bad decisions that are made about worship touch only the surface needs of our society and not the hidden influences or powerful forces that make true worship both difficult and essential.
Surface Needs or Deeper Needs Read More
I was cleaning up another blog and thought this post might be of interest to SoulPreaching.Com readers….
Someone on a blog that has been discontinued asked an interesting question about Jesus, “Who would Jesus be today?” The answer given was a little unsettling to me, you can read it in part here:
One of the most important rules for preachers is to have one major point. Now if you preach the three points and a poem, what this means is that each of your points should be connected in some way to the main point. If you preach a narrative, it means that you have a major point in mind as you preach the sermon. That way, the people can remember the sermon.
I am a planter. This means that I not only extract and re-arrange, but I deposit. We do not leave the soil empty, disturbed, and void. Far from it, we leave the ground altered by adding to it. We plant seeds! We plant seeds of hope, that hope that is in Christ and His gospel. That hope that shows the more excellent way of being and doing. We plant seeds! The seeds of self reliance and mutuality. We plant seeds! The seeds of community, and communal interdependence. We plant seeds!
I am a Planter – Part 3 Planing Seeds Read MoreI am a planter which means that I have the duty of tilling the soil. I literally have to break the soil, and turn what was up, over so that it is down. They reverse things when necessary. Likewise, I have the task of placing what was down and under the earth up and on top. Likewise, I have to take that which is up and put it down.
While reflection on my brief tenure in the pastorate I can say in all honesty that there is no greater joy than to work in the area of one’s passion. For about two months I have been living in a region of the country completely foreign to me, involved in an immense act of service towards individuals who constantly perplex, surprise, and at times even serve as a source of agony. Nonetheless, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing!
I am a Planter – Part 1 Digging Weeds Read MoreI attended a worship service where an associate minister was given an assignment. However, instead of attempting to support the worship service, the associate attempted to shine the light on …
The Associate Should Help – Supporting the Service Read MoreSoulPreaching.Com was launched on September 1, 2006. Since that time we have had a number of articles and audios on preaching. In addition, we have provided a free ebook that taught the reader how to create an effective sermon in the African American tradition. We now have over 400 articles on preaching.
A few months ago we kicked off the newsletter and it has been well received, however some wonder what are the benefits?
Early in the morning I turned on the television to hopefully cure some insomnia. On this day, I found what looked like one of those Psychics. Only upon further reflection, I found some well known Christian personalities supporting the person. Then I found out that although the preacher was using the techniques of psychics he was a Christian minister, a “prophet.”
The prophet told us that if we give him a call, he will tell us our personal prophecy. If we call him, we will be assigned a personal prophet who will help us. The program told us that we should not ever have want for financial resources. God would take care of us if we would only follow the instructions that God had provided in God’s word. Then a well known Christian author supported the “prophet.”
There were two things that really surprised me about this. First was the use of the psychics formula to sell these aleged prophecies from God. We see the prophet asking us to give him a call for his personal “prophecy,” Very much like the personal “reading” that the psychic gives those who call. It was a very disorienting thing to see a prophet using the mechanisms of the demonic to prop up and sell his prophecies.
In addition, what was surprising was the belief that when you are right with God you will be right with your money. These “prophets” are telling us that if you have money problems you are doing something wrong. When you get diseases you have done something incorrect. When everything is not right in your life, then you need to straighten up so that God can “bless” you.
These prophets will always have an audience because no one wants to hear the truth which is that sometimes you can follow all the principles and laws of God that you should, and you still don’t get the new car. Sometimes you can cast out the demon of poverty and find that your bank account is still empty. Certainly we should pray without ceasing, but grandma may still die. That is the simple truth. We know it experientially, but we still hope that the new “prophet” can give us the word that sidesteps the Biblical word that all who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. (2 Timothy 3:12)
Yes there will be those who can guarantee money, fame, and fortune, but one must always be careful, for Satan himself promised fortune and a kingdom to Christ in the temptations in the wilderness. One must be careful of the “prophets” that you listen to for even Satan himself shall be transformed into an angel of light. (2 Corinthians 11:14)
God’s promise is that God will be with us in the pain and heartache. Let’s accept this truth as the Psalmist who said, “yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…thou art with me” (Psalm 23:4). I would rather have the true God with me in the shadow of death, than an empty belief in a flimsy promise by a so-called “prophet.”
Prophet or Psychic Read More