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Tag Archive - preaching

Why I Love & Use Logos Bible Software…

March 26, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 4 Comments

As I continue to use and get more acquainted with Logos Bible Software, I will post and bring some of these things to your attention, as I hope you too may find them useful. I’m currently using the Scholar’s Library and I’m amazed at how convenient and fast it has been to access and gather material for teaching and preaching, as well as how it has enhanced my study time.

There are many ways one puts together a sermon or teaching time, as well as how they use material in their personal study or devotion time.

Let me just share briefly how I have found this software useful for my own preparation time (i.e. teaching, writing, blogging, researching, etc). Let me walk you through some steps.

First of all, location is key to me. I like to study at coffee shops. Not everyone likes this method and prefers the quietness of an office, or a mixture of both. But I love studying in a busy environment and I feel like it keeps me from isolating myself from the realities of life, as I get to watch, listen and observe others.

Do You Have A Feedback Loop When You Speak/Preach?

February 24, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 11 Comments

I hate being captive in an audience when the people on stage don’t have a feedback loop going with the audience. We’re used to living a two-way life online and expect it when in an audience too. Our expectations of speakers and people on stage have changed, for better or for worse. Robert Scoble

I just finished reading the article by Olivia Mitchell, How to Present While People are Twittering, which can be found over at Laura Fitton’s blog. THIS IS A MUST READ IF YOU SPEAK!

And now I’m asking that question, “Do you have a feedback loop when you speak?”

It’s a question I have been wondering about for a while…and not just in conference speaking, but in preaching. The conference speaker and the preacher are essentially the same…not in content of message…one is evangelizing the gospel of Jesus Christ and the other is evangelizing a product or idea. BUT, they both come into the engagement with the expectation of a one-way conversation. Though honestly it can’t be a conversation if it’s one way…CORRECT?

Whatever the scenario, the pulpit or the podium, those who stand behind it expect the audience to sit, listen and be attentive.

I think those days are over, or at least coming to an end. Both the audience and the congregation want more engagement and interaction with those who speak from up front. They want more of a conversation…more of a dialogue.

The reality is this. I think some conference speakers will get it and some preachers will get it. They will seek methods and tools to engage the audience and provide more of a real time experience through the use of a feedback loop such as Twitter that is mentioned in the article above. And others will not get it. They will continue to speak to an audience and congregation, demanding one way conversation.

Why is that? Their theology? Fear of losing power and authority? Difficulty in doing it? Tradition? Training?

I’m not saying this needs to be mastered now, but it’s something to be thinking about. It will take a very different kind of leader and speaker to engage audiences in the future whether you are evangelizing ideas or the gospel.

What do you think?

Becoming A Heretic on Church Ministry: The Sermon

October 28, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

The Context
Last week I posted a blog, Becoming A Heretic on Church Ministry. I was playing off what Seth Godin says in his new book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us. You can find my review of the book at Leadership Network.

Godin says:

Challenging the status quo requires a committment, both public and private. It involves reaching out to others and putting yourideas on the line. (Or pinning your Ninety-five Theses to the church door). (pp. 49)

and later in the book, Godin says:

Religion and faith are often confused. Someone who opposes faith is called an atheist and widely reviled. But we don’t have a common word for someone who opposes a particular religion.

Heretic will have to do.

If faith is the foundation of a belief system, then religion is the facade and the landscaping. It’s easy to get caught up in the foibles of a corporate culture and the systems that have been built over time, but they have nothing at all to do with the faith that built the system in the first place.

Change is made by people, by leaders who are proud to be called heretics because their faith is never in question. (pp. 84)

My Thought
I wrote in that post that,

In the next several posts I would like to challenge, raise questions, debate some areas of Church ministry that need some unorthodox thinking in them. Maybe we need more heretics in our midst to help us re-think/re-imagine how the Church could be.

These are areas that I have struggled with a long time as I know many of you have, many of you are beginning to, and others will just think, well, that’s heretical thinking. I’m simply bringing them up to raise discussion and conversation, not because I have all the answers to these. That’s why I want your input.

The Sermon
And so I want to begin with The Sermon. At the time I was especially thinking about the sermon as it has traditionally taken form…a man on stage, engaged in a one way dialogue, speaking at an audience for about 30-45 minutes, without much or any participation or involvement of those in the pew.

My issue with the sermon does not lie in the sermon itself. We see very well known passages of Scripture were sermons are preached (i.e. Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount, or Peter at Pentecost, etc.). Nor are my issues just with the pastor…this is the way we were taught to preach and teach. But as a body of Christ we have also pressed upon it certain expectations–entertainment, education, passive observation, charisma, etc. We have essentially become theater goers that sit in our chair, expecting to be entertained, then afterwards giving our praise or criticism based upon the “performance.” Continue Reading…

Tim Keller’s Preaching Notes: How Do You Prepare Your Notes?

October 6, 2008 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 3 Comments

I found this link to Tim Keller’s preaching notes here, thanks to a link from DJ Chuang’s site who compared them to something belonging to Jason Bourne.

It’s just fascinating to me to see the many different ways preachers, speakers, teachers, etc. prepare speaking notes. Everyone has their own method that works for them. More recently I have been getting into arranging my talks and teaching ideas around a mind map. I have been using tools like Mind Meister to help me with the process. Thanks to Tony Steward for helping me with this stuff. He is great at mind maps.

It’s amazing for me the connection between therapy, ministry and social media when using mind mapping. Therapy often involves genograms and family systems thinking that is helped by maps and symbols; social media and technology often flows out of ideas that are represented in charts, symbols, graphs….think white boards everywhere. Only makes sense to me that I should carry this creativity over into ministry and move away a bit from the number, bullet point, bullet point, number, bullet point, bullet point method. Know what I mean?

What types of notes do you prepare for preaching, speaking, teaching, etc.? Does it work well for you? Any suggestions for us?

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry: Part 3-Why You Should Be Blogging

May 31, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 12 Comments

Of all the topics I’m going to address in this series, this seems to be the no-brainer to me. I started blogging about 4 years ago at the encouragement of one of my students at the time, Jared Kleier. He set up a blog for me on our college website and away we went, though it wasn’t quite that easy. I remember writing and deleting one post after another because I had never experienced writing something for immediate consumption by the public.

All it took was some encouragement from others, and a few links from other bloggers, and then the blogging bug just seemed to take over.

Lots of people have various reasons for why those in ministry should blog. Mark Roberts has 18 Thesis’ for why pastors should blog. You can view his Powerpoint Presentation, Pastors as Blogger, at GodblogCon 2007.

Mark is just one good resource.

There are a lot of reasons why I think those involved in college ministry should blog, so let me give you just 11 (yeah 11) that come to mind and that I have found helpful reasons for blogging:

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: A blog is simply in many ways about communication. When you blog, you communicate to others on a variety of topics.
Reiterate the Mission: When you blog, you can continually communicate, and therefore, one of the important pieces of communication is to continually reiterate and blog about the mission of the ministry. It’s a good way to remind students and keep everyone accountable, focused, and on task.
Encouragement: A blog is a great way to encourage those in your ministry, whether it be other staff, leaders or the congregants. Devotionals, posts of encouragement, thank yous, and recognizing others are just some forms. Continue Reading…

How Much Time Do You Spend In Sermon Preparation?

February 20, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

Jon Sampson has a good post on what he is learning from other pastors. This particular topic is about what David Fitch says he wish he had done over the last several years of church planting. It’s a good read. I’m curious what you all think of David’s #1.

1. Spend less time writing sermons, more time listening and speaking truth relationally lovingly into people’s lives. My goal, when I am preaching, is to never spend more than twelve hours a week writing sermons. Preaching the Word is important. It takes skill and practice. Yet the sermon is for speaking truth over people’s lives, not for entertainment. Sometimes the “entertainment” piece takes too much extra work. The sermon proclaims the true reality as it is under the Lordship of Christ and calls people into Him. It is my opinion the reason why sermon prep takes so much time is that often pastors place too much self-importance into it. How many hours a week do you spend on sermon prep?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue recently. Let me outline it this way.

To be honest…I don’t think I’m a great preacher. But I do my best.
I spend less time on sermon prep now than when I used to, especially right out of seminary.
I don’t spend less time because of laziness, but because of the demands of work.
Either I spend 20-40 hours of prep on a sermon, or I actually do other things like hang out with students, counsel people, etc.
Who ever came up with that rule that I have heard about 1 hour of sermon prep for every minute of sermon?
And who are these pastors that have 20-40 hours a week to prepare a sermon?
Most pastors I know have lots of responsibility, and don’t have the luxury of everyone doing the work for them while they sit in their office or library all week buried in books.
How relevant (and I mean this in the best of terms), or grounded in the community can the sermon be if the pastor is holed up in his/her study all week?
When it comes down to it, ministry places lots of demands on us, and we have to choose ultimately between very important things. In doing this, I always try and keep people first. If someone needs to meet and it will interrupt my sermon prep, then that person is first, not my sermon prep.
Sermons sometimes seem to be an avenue for the pastor to put on a show or display their prowess. Not all, and hopefully not many, but I often feel like a pastor sometimes spends all that time in prep to impress with their knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.

Full Disclosure: I should probably spend more time on sermon prep myself. But I don’t have a rule of thumb. Some weeks require more, and others require very little. Some weeks I am alone, looking through the Bible, commentaries and the language tools. Other weeks I’m just in prayer. And some weeks I have laid out my whole sermon in my head from my morning commute from Pasadena into work. We all have our methods and I think that is great. But to place a rule that every pastor should do this or that for a sermon is quite unrealistic.

There is a big difference between the pastor at a smaller church who preaches, counsels, does adminstrative tasks, vistis with people, etc., and the pastor at a large church whose only job is to preach. Sometimes I wonder that the large size of a church actually keeps us from putting our hand to the task of things that should be important and that keep us grounded in the daily realities of those we minister to.

Thoughts?

I Can’t Listen To Another Sermon!

January 28, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 11 Comments

I believe that the time of long lectures, when someone spoke for an hour and the audience was condemned to sit and listen to whatever they were given, is…perhaps over–not just for me but for everyone. What we need in theology and in the church is–Oh, I don’t want to use that wretched word again–”conversations”. What I mean is simply that we should talk together and try to arrive at answers together, instead of someone trying to present something to other people as though the Holy Spirit has dictated it to him in person.

I posted that quote by Karl Barth back in August of 2006 when I was really wrestling over the topic of preaching. And I’m still wrestling over this topic.

You can see some of my thoughts on this topic below:

But it just seems like I can hardly sit through a sermon these days. This is probably more a statement of my own heart and disposition right now than it is anything about a sermon. But maybe also, I’m just tired of the way we have been preaching sermons for years and years. My students are probably pretty sick of the way that I go about preaching sermons as well, that’s why I have been wrestling over the topic for years.

But what you have is a vicious cycle that continually reinforces itself. You have the tradition of the typical expository sermon, presented in three steps or points, coupled with the expectation from the audience to hear that same method of presentation. But while this cycle continues, I often get the sense, and often hear the conversation, that both the preacher and the congregation are wanting something different. We just don’t know how to get out of the cycle. Or maybe we do, but we just don’t have the courage to try something different, take some risks, fail at some things. So what you have instead, is people literally bored out of their minds every Sunday while someone up front speaks at them in a very non-engaging style. And what you probably have as well is speakers and pastors up front bored out of their minds as well.

As I mentioned before, my former student, Brian Kiley, who is now a college pastor, has been posting some fascinating stuff on the topic of preaching. Read his posts Am I a Speacher? and Implication vs. Application. In these posts, Brian is reflecting on Doug Pagitt’s book, Preaching Re-Imagined.

Drew Sams is trying to figure this out as well, as he is in the midst of a blogging series on the use of story in youth ministry.

I’m obviously a firm believer in preaching….I’m just wondering if we need to change some of our methods. I know I need to. So let me leave you with another quote from Barth about the power of preaching.

This is why the movement of the Word as preaching was so crucial to his interpretation of the Word as threefold event. By the logic of his doctrine of the Word, it was only as Christian preaching that the Word remains ongoing. The Word becomes present as preaching in the same way that the Holy Spirit makes God present to us. That is, just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Word as preaching proceeds from revelation and scripture. Barth’s point was not that the revelatory and scriptural forms of the Word cannot be made present. Rather, just as the Father and Son are made present only through the movement of the Spirit, the Word as revelation and scripture are made present “in, with, and under” preaching and only through preaching.

By “preaching” Barth meant more than Sunday sermonizing or even the general ministerial work of pastors. Preaching included all forms of genuine Christian witness, including, “whatever we all ‘preach’ to ourselves in the quiet or our own rooms.” It included even the work of theologians, insofar as they understood and practiced theology in a ministry of the Word of God and therefore a form of preaching, he argued. (The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons, pp.78)

I would love to hear your thoughts on preaching? What do you think? Is it just me, or are you feeling the same thing?