The Unashamed Workman teaches truth by quoting John Stott’s new book entitled The Living Church. Stott says in part:
But authentic Christian preaching is a bridge-building operation. It relates the text to the context in such a way as to be faithful to the biblical text and sensitive to the modern context. We must not sacrifice either to the other.
Well sometimes I feel like I am beating a dead horse. But this time, I am quoting someone else. Peter Mead over at Biblical Preaching is beginning a discussion of why he doesn’t use notes.
Mead echoes just about everyone else who talks about this subject when he begins the post by saying that whether you use notes or not is less important than other concerns, namely is it Biblical, does it have a clear idea and purpose, and is it relevant. I would definitely agree with all of these points.
Perhaps one of the most common errors in sermonic structure is to have too many competing points. Sometimes preachers exhibit this error when they go on tangents or on asides that are only marginally related to the main point.
Xavier Pickett over at Reformed Blacks of America has done it again. He has presented a concise attack on the status-quo from the perspective of the Black Preaching Tradition.
He states:
The goal of preaching is not expositional preaching, but rather to present and proclaim Christ as resurrected.
The Brand New Biblical Preaching blog has an interesting post up on How to preach a text with a list in it. This is actually a helpful post. I encourage you to go over and read it. I especially like this point:
Secondly, within the list, notice the places of emphasis. These are almost always the start and end, as well as the middle on some occasions (especially if the structure is clearly chiastic). Notice any repetition of terms, or clustering of concepts.
The Biblical Preaching blog has a post up entitled “After you preach, then what happens?” In it the importance of a sermonic purpose is discussed. The author states: “we should be preaching for response.”
Kirk Byron Jones introduces the concept of “playing words” in his helpful book The Jazz of Preaching.
The other day someone emailed me about turning one of my websites into a internet TV show on his website. I visited the site and saw that it looked very impressive. I also searched and found 4 other sites that do the exact same thing. They charge you to put your feed up on their site.
That is the question that is being answered on the Unashamed Workman Blog. I would encourage all preachers to go on over and look at this 6 part series that looks at 6 Biblical images of the preacher. The first 3 have already been posted. The Hard Working Farmer, The Law Abiding Athlete, and the Good Soldier.
Barry Davis provides hints on how to preach with a manuscript. Davis provides examples and rules for creating a manuscript that will make your people think that you are preaching without notes.
This is a very good article on a subject that very little people write on. Namely, how do you format a manuscript for preaching.
Over at the Withering Fig there is a post up on the top 5 Bible Technlogies. Great post, so head on over. Points 2 and 3 which introduced me to Zhubert for original language study and the Bible study Blog link.
This post is a part of the ProBlogger.Com Group writing project. If you have a Blog I would encourage you to join in. In This post I have the Top 5 techniques for SErmon Idea Generation. I assume that you already have a text.
Head on over to the Theocentric Blog to download the author’s DMin Thesis. This is the material behind his Theocentric preaching seminars.
