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What matters
Fri, 04/30/2010 - 10:58 — Tom Cheatham“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” (Isaiah 55:2a)
“When in our music God is glorified, and adoration leaves no room for pride, it is as though the whole creation cried: ‘Alleluia!’” (Fred Pratt Green, 1972)
Scott Hill is a student at Columbia Theological Seminary, my doctoral alma mater. In a marvelous article in a recent school publication, Mr. Hill, a forest ranger turned pastor, tells about his internship in two rural yoked field churches in South Carolina.
His first Sunday, he stammered and sweated through the liturgy, forgetting a great deal of it. He says he was “painfully bad.”
Besides worrying about how he did in worship, he wondered “what else am I supposed to be doing?” as he worked down the visitation list assigned by the pastor. He came to the important insight that simply being with the folks in the church was “what else he was supposed to be doing.”... READ MORE.
How do women preachers dress on Easter?
Mon, 04/05/2010 - 10:52 — edsundaywintersEarly in the morning she is on her way to the cemetery, to the place where he was laid to rest. What is going through her mind as she makes her way to his grave?
Maybe she is blaming herself. Reliving the last few days or even years to try to figure what she might have done to cause his death or what she might have done to prevent it. Painstakingly, she examines her words, her actions trying to find a clue to help her understand why this has happened. What could she have done that would cause things to turn out differently?
Perhaps she is too scared to be thinking of what she might have done or not done, said or not said. Maybe she is concerned for her own safety. After all, he is dead.... READ MORE.
I'm not sure what the heck I'm saying here, but I gotta say it
Wed, 03/31/2010 - 12:00 — Tripp HudginsThis happens every year without fail. I flail around in the sermon preparation for Easter (but not so much with Christmas) simply because, well, in many ways the story is still new to me. "So what?" you might wonder. Well, it matters. Sometimes I feel like a foreigner within the Christian faith.
This is the connection I'm struggling with today.... READ MORE.
"It's all sermon prep to me"
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 13:32 — Adam CopelandWhen I was in high school and chatting with a teacher about our churches, he said “I don’t think I could ever respect a pastor who didn’t know Greek and Hebrew.” That statement stuck with me. Heck, it probably kept me going through some rather challenging times in both my Greek and Hebrew courses.
For a few years now, however, I’ve been wondering how much credence my teacher’s comment really has. I preached about forty sermons in Scotland two years ago without my Greek or Hebrew resources over there (I opted to take golf clubs, not books ;) ). I didn’t get too many complaints from church members about my lack of declining Greek nouns or parsing Hebrew verbs.
Now, though, I have my Greek and Hebrew books on my new pastor’s study bookshelf, but I haven’t been inclined to pull them out. Sure, I could check out a perplexing phrase in a text if I really wanted to, but I just rarely ever want to. So I wonder, what’s the rub: am I a sermon writing slacker or reality claiming time-manager? .... READ MORE.
The annoyingly artificial application of alliteration
Fri, 07/31/2009 - 14:16 — Wayne StacyI heard a sermon the other day that moved me…to regurgitation, nearly. Ostensibly, the sermon was on the central text of the Gospel of Mark (central both strategically and theologically); namely, Mark 8:27-38. The preacher took as his theme “The Messiah's Mission.” That was okay in that that's a fair assessment of what this story in Mark is about. What bothered me about the sermon was where he went from there. Forcing his subject onto a procrustean bed of alliteration, he launched into a Scriptural scavenger hunt that led him to pillage all four Gospels meaning to mine them for the letter “M” - The Mission of the Messiah; The Method of the Messiah; The Mandate of the Messiah; The Murder of the Messiah; The Mastery of the Messiah. By the time he was through, I was mulling another “M” in my mind - the madness of the minister.
Those who defend this kind of slavish servitude to alliteration in preaching do so because, they insist, it helps the audience to remember what the preacher said. Yeah, right. You really want to ask your congregation what you said in your sermon on a Sunday? How about asking them the following Sunday? No? What about that same Sunday afternoon? No? Well then, what about on the way out the door following your sermon? I didn't think so.... READ MORE.
Rethinking the sermon part 1
Tue, 07/28/2009 - 14:58 — Thom Turner"I wish we could just get rid of the sermon."
That's what one friend said to me at Starbucks recently. For us that view worship as holistic and not as song and sermon, both music and preaching seem to take precedence over other forms of worship: prayer, silence, meditation, Scripture reading. Inlieu of these things we instead sing and preach about them. How many sermons have you heard mention silence as important to worship? How many times has your own church been silent? How many times have pastors preached the necessity of Scripture reading? How many times has your own church read Scripture at any great length (more than a whole chapter)? Preaching far outweighs doing in most Protestant churches.
Using the motto lex orandi, lex credendi (what one prays is what one believes) as our measuring stick, we should look at the worship service as a microcosm of how we want the local church to worship. The goal of every church is to have a congregation that reads Scripture, prays, meditates, spends time in fasting, in silence, in wonder, sings, preaches, teaches, and fellowships with one another. Yet we don't model the right way of worship in our own worship services. We are not modeling what you pray is what you believe. We are really showing our congregations that true worship is active only in song and passive in everything else. We have taught our congregations that beyond singing and talking around a cup of coffee we are to let others do all the heavy lifting of Scripture reading, preaching, prayer, and silence.... READ MORE.
Stolen illustration
Fri, 06/12/2009 - 10:25 — Wayne StacyI’ve been grading papers in my masters degree program classes, and I constantly run up against a recurring problem: students don’t know when and how to document their sources. The academic world insists on honesty and integrity in writing and, therefore, has come up with a system for vouchsafing it. It’s called the footnote. The footnote tells the reader that what follows is not his own, that he’s borrowed an idea from someone else, but in the interest of honesty and fairness, he’s acknowledging that fact.
With the move toward casualness (and irresponsibility) ubiquitous in our society, footnoting has become a lost art. Students now think that if they lift a line from someone else’s work without appropriate attribution, it’s quite all right. But in the academic world, it’s not “quite all right.” It’s plagiarism, which is "education speak" for stealing.
But move that same dishonesty into the pulpit, and it’s no longer deemed plagiarism; it’s just preaching. I’ve actually heard preachers say: “When a better sermon is preached, I’ll steal it!”
I know; it happened to me. It happened when a story I told in a sermon at First Baptist Church in Raleigh got lifted and used by someone else as though it had happened to them.
Years ago, when I was pastor of First Baptist Church of Raleigh, an incident happened to me that shook me to my soles. I came home and told Cheryl about it, it bothered me so. Some weeks later, looking for an illustration for a sermon that drove home the point that everything we do matters, I remembered the incident and told it in a sermon. The incident was this... READ MORE.
More on "I don't do sin"
Wed, 05/20/2009 - 05:44 — James LumsdenThree fascinating comments came my way during worship today after sharing my reflections on "not getting sin and salvation" anymore. (See my sermon notes below...) First, there was a deep resonance among some people who said that they, too, were interested in the nuanced and multi-layered sense of the human experience that the "new paradigm" church is exploring. "All of our sin-talk seems like a hamster on a wheel in a cage going round and round and never getting off!" Some saw the traditional words of sin as a way of letting some into the community while keeping others out; and some told me that our usual sin words are too narrow and don't help us consider things like poverty, race hatred and war. (I love the way Peter Rollins talks about this wrestling together in community...)
Second, there was a sense of "liberation and freedom" among others who said that they felt a little discomfort, too, in letting go of such an historic resting place. They grasped that the time had probably come to speak more creatively about the human condition but they also wanted to make sure that I wasn't claiming the whole idea of sin and salvation were over. And, of course, that was not my point..... READ MORE.
Both and
Mon, 12/29/2008 - 23:20 — AnnMarie Kneebone
I spent my Christmas with my family. I got to talk about some really interesting things. One of those conversations had to do with the artist Escher. Escher is an artist who is most famous for his mathematical drawings. One of his pieces is a Mobius Strip with ants on it.
My brother and I talked about the marvel of Escher's art and especially about the Mobius Strip. We discussed it with his 10 year old daughter. She was intrigued. We explained that although the Mobius Strip appears to have 2 sides, it really only has one side. As you look it, you can see that the inside is the outside and the outside is the inside. Unlike a simple loop, you can trace your finger around both the inside and the outside without lifting your finger.... READ MORE.
