On the cross, Jesus needed actual water. No one gave him any.
sermon
11 adverbs for good preaching
The best preachers, says Russell Mitman, preach liturgically, eschatologically, multi-sensorily, and eight more ways that end in -ly.
The preacher maintains a sacred conversation between God and the congregation.
I can see my dad's manuscript: the title centered in caps, the body double-spaced and marked up by hand. But I can't remember the words.
In 1983, Kenneth Mitchell and Herbert Anderson wrote that "death is only one form of loss." This would have been unthinkable for Christians half a century earlier.
Much of the snickering about boring sermons comes not because we expect so little but because we have hoped for so much. A hunger persists for a word from the Lord—without which we are left to our boring selves.