Category Archives: preacher

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A Preacher’s Manifesto: Ten Commitments That Drive Biblical Preaching

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Last week I published my first book. It’s a mini e-book called: A Preacher’s Manifesto: Ten Commitments That Drive Biblical Preaching. I enjoyed distilling my beliefs and practices into this format. Here’s a description of the book:

A Preacher’s Manifesto presents ten commitments that should drive biblical preaching. These ten commitments will guide pastors in creating their preaching calendar, help steer their sermon preparation, and remind them of the vital place preaching occupies in the local church. The commitments include topics ranging from pastoral theology (“preaching as a function of soul-watching”), hermeneutics (“not allow a selected topic to override the meaning of the biblical Text”), and pastoral ministry (“preach as though my spiritual life and the spiritual lives of my parishioners depend on it”). A Preacher’s Manifesto will challenge assumptions, cultivate new commitments, and bring about changes in preaching for the sake of enlarging God’s reputation in the Church.

If you’re interested, you can find the book at Amazon.com and Smashwords.com. Smashwords will give you several more reading options, including a PDF of the book. It will also allow you to download a percentage of the book to preview some content.

I hope the ole saying, You get what you pay for, is not true in this case. The book is $2.99, but I believe it will stimulate your thinking.

Again, thank you for thinking about preaching with me.

Preach well for the sake of God’s reputation in the Church.

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“I must live th…

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“I must live the Christian life as well as, if not better than, I am able to explain it.”

Back on October 8, 1996 I was invited by Haddon Robinson to give a lecture to his preaching students at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary called, Life in the Trenches. I gave six principles (the number six, rather than seven, best portrays the realities of pastoral ministry!). The first principle was that character is greater than competency. The quote presents one implication of that principle.

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Do You Sound Like A Contemporary Preacher?

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I am enjoying reading Barth’s, Homiletics. In the preface, Bromiley previews Barth’s “belief that closeness to life, important though it is in the sermon, must not be at the cost of closeness to the text” (p. 14). That got me thinking about whether or not we preachers sound like our world with respect to our voice and delivery. Closeness to life is another way to speak of relevance; closeness to the text, of course, speaks of preaching with accuracy.

Lately, I have wondered if all TV news anchors and field reporters take a course in how to speak or how to sound while they’re reporting the news. Listen to them and you’ll discover that they all sound the same. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I’m suggesting that there are two dominant preaching styles, the traditional preacher and the conversational preacher. The conversational preacher includes the real relevant, seeker-sensitive approach.

What do you sound like when you preach? Would our listeners say that we sound like a preacher (with respect to how we say what we say)? When we report on what God has said, do we sound like all the other contemporary, seeker-sensitive preachers who evidently took the same class on how to speak or how to sound? We must be constantly aware of the tension between closeness to life (relevance, or, in this case, sounding relevant) and closeness to the text (accurate reporting). I loved Barth’s advice: “For in preaching it is always better to be too close to the text than to be too thematic or too much in keeping with the times” (p. 117).

Sometimes I wished just one TV news reporter would break from that mold, be real, and talk to me about what happened.