Like good cooking, good preaching is local, idiosyncratic, and diverse.
sermons
Radical orthodoxy steps into the pulpit
The movement's plucky proponents have been known for their philosophy more than their preaching. Until now.
My temptation to spurn the evangelical preacher slipped away when I opened this volume.
After I preach, I want to relive the moment over and over, soaring away on an ego-driven high. Beforehand, I hide in the bathroom.
Chicago preachers are wary: we see the potential loss of great sermon material if the Cubs should start winning.
There is a black lab—a student's guide dog—lying on the floor during chapel. As I preach, I wonder what the dog is thinking.
I recently read The Circle, Dave Egger’s dystopian novel about a benevolent Internet company that eerily creeps into every aspect of our lives, taking it over, one smiley emoticon at a time. Think about it like this: a company encompasses Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and then it begins to partner with the government.
Our hunger is for words that evoke our deepest emotions, that name the wilderness in which we live—but not alone.
Many of us love the busyness and energy of a robust church. And yet all of us pastors must summon an uncommon discipline if we are to reflect the priority of preaching.
The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Isabel Best
These sermons, selected and introduced by Isabel Best, range in time from Bonhoeffer's pastoral tenure in Barcelona to a few months after the start of World War II.
At a reception to launch a new collection of Lucille Clifton’s poems (The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010), the editor of the volume, Kevin Young, described coming across a folder in Clifton’s archives at Emory University. The folder had been labeled “Unpublished Poems.” That label had been scratched out and replaced by something like, “Poems that really aren’t that good and should probably just be thrown away someday.” That label too had been scratched out and replaced with “Bad poems.”
Ten years ago, I studied readers of the then popular Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels. If I conducted that study today, I would potentially have access to far more objective data about readers than I did. How quickly do they read? Where do they stop reading? What passages do they mark? Do they write notes in the margins? E-books are providing companies with the opportunity for all of this information and more about people who use e-readers like the Nook and Kindle.
Inspired preachers
I knew my worst sermon was going to be terrible before I preached it. I want to hold myself to a higher standard, and James Howell's book offers the inspiration to get me there.
After a couple of years of sweating over each syllable, I suddenly needed the words. I hungered to write them. On vacations, my family urged me to take a break and I became cranky. What happened? How did the words begin to grow like wildflowers that I no longer had to coddle?
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.