Posted on Jan 11, 2023 in BLOG |
What is the state of preaching in the evangelical church in 2022?
Are we producing disciples of Jesus Christ?
The answers to those questions are both instructive and discouraging. Preaching today largely avoids doctrine and emphasizes felt needs and life apps. Doctrine divides, so we don’t want to teach doctrine. Felt needs and life apps are winning topics. People want to hear these ideas. Much preaching in the evangelical church today is about attracting people to church instead of teaching disciples to know the faith. We are seeing the results in our evangelical churches, as the 2022 State of Theology survey demonstrates. Read more…
Posted on Jun 20, 2022 in BLOG |
CLICKBAIT OR FREEWAY SERMONS: WHAT KIND OF PREACHER ARE YOU?
Preachers often search the Bible to find some text that inspires them – that “will preach!” We want sermons with “pizzaz!” The result is that much preaching is driven by the audience more than the text. We are afraid we will bore people by talking about God and the Bible instead of their questions and needs. We are afraid that God-centered preaching will be old-fashioned and archaic. Text-driven preaching is becoming a dinosaur in the evangelical world.
What kind of preacher are you? Read more…
Posted on Apr 29, 2022 in BLOG |
EXPOSED BY COVID
“We were exposed to COVID, but COVID exposed us,” one Christian leader told me recently. COVID certainly exposed the increasing politicization of the church and the elevation of our rights over the cross. Still, even more significantly, COVID exposed our flawed ecclesiology, as he pointed out. The fissures of a bad ecclesiology were already cutting deep into the western church. COVID merely exposed them.
A Pew Research Center study published on March 22, 2022, revealed that large numbers of people are not coming back to in-person church attendance despite the decline of COVID. Of those who attended in-person church services once or twice a month before the pandemic, only 67% have returned to church, and 36% of those combine in-person and online attendance each month. One in five people (21%) who had attended regularly before the pandemic now appear to substitute virtual church for in-person church. You can read the full study here. You can read James Emery White’s analysis of the study here. White predicts:
They are not coming back.
Read more…
Posted on Mar 17, 2022 in BLOG |
Subtraction: The Key to Powerful Preaching
Why is it harder to preach an effective 15-minute sermon than a 45-minute sermon? Answer: every word and every sentence count much more in 15 minutes than in 45 minutes. There are no wasted minutes. The truth is that many of our 45-minute sermons have distracting, unnecessary and extraneous information in them. We waste minutes because we have minutes to waste.
I watched a YouTube video on landscape photography this past week to learn some tips on composition. Andy Mumford is a professional landscape photographer, and he made a statement in the middle of the video that was so clear and powerful I wrote it down and posted it on my desk. Read more…
Posted on Jan 11, 2022 in BLOG |
A Christian brother launched a volley of convictions about masks and vaccinations at me in our telephone conversation. He did so without knowing my convictions, and he did not care to find out. He assumed that his convictions were right, so he had the right to express them. Last year, a local church advertised that they opposed the government mask mandate “by Christian conviction” as if those on the other side have no convictions. The reality is that many Christians hold opposite convictions about vaccinations and mask-wearing, leading to a divided church in a partisan world. Read more…
Posted on Nov 17, 2021 in BLOG |
“I don’t have the time for sermon preparation with all the other pastoral responsibilities that demand my attention.”
“Other preachers say it better than me, so why not use their messages to reach my people better?”
“The communication experts know how to craft a message that will attract people much better than I do.”
“If we are going to reach more people, we need to be spending more time studying people than we do studying the Bible.” Read more…
Posted on Sep 7, 2021 in BLOG |
A THREE-LEGGED STOOL – All expositional preaching rests on a three-legged theological stool, 1) exegetical theology, 2) biblical theology, and 3) pericopal theology. These three legs are all necessary for expository preaching.
FIRST LEG: EXEGETICAL THEOLOGY
In 1981, Walter Kaiser sounded a grim warning about a growing crisis in evangelical preaching. The crisis has only grown worse since he warned us about it 40 years ago. The crisis in evangelical preaching is the loss of exegetical theology as a foundation for our sermons.[1] Read more…
Posted on Aug 5, 2021 in BLOG |
“No one knows the Bible today, so talking about the Bible is boring to people.”
“The Bible is not relevant to my daily life. Who cares what happened to Hosea?”
“Our world has changed, so we need sermons that relate to our changed world?”
“You have to preach about what people want to hear if you want to help them with what they need to know.”
“Why do you spend all that time in the exegesis of the text? All that work studying the Bible won’t help you understand the needs of people.” Read more…
Posted on Jun 30, 2021 in BLOG |
SHOCKING STAT: Less than 10% of evangelical sermons mentioned the words sin, salvation, heaven, or hell!
The statistic comes from a database of almost 50,000 sermons compiled by the Pew Research Center, which were delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019.[i] Much evangelical preaching today identifies human needs and proclaims Christ as a need-fulfiller. It is a man-centered gospel. Bill Hull nicknamed it “gospel Americana.”[ii] The message is simple. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life!” The result of such a reductionist message is that many people become converts who want no part of the demands of being a disciple.[iii]
Read more…
Posted on May 25, 2021 in BLOG |
C.H. Spurgeon supposedly said that he took his text and made a “beeline to the cross.” The purpose of every sermon, then, should be to preach the cross. There is no evidence that Spurgeon ever said these words, but they represent a common viewpoint used to justify a singular purpose for all preaching.[i] Every sermon has one purpose, in this view, and that purpose is to lead people to Christ on the cross. Every individual Scripture text intends to point us in some way to redemption in Christ.[ii]
Is this what Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:16-4:4? No, not at all. Heralding the word (2 Tim. 4:2) means equipping the saints for “every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). The training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16) starts with the cross but does not end at the cross. Sermons become predictable when every sermon must end at the cross.
[iii] Read more…
