Give me ten minutes, and I'll teach you an approach to writing your messages that might be a game changer. This is an approach that can be used with any preaching archetype, any personality, any length of message, any passage, etc. In seminary, I was taught the "3 point" outline, which I quickly abandoned after about a year of preaching. Then I experimented with Andy … [Read more...]
Are You A LEADER (who has to preach) or A PREACHER (who has to lead)?
I want you to be brutally honest with yourself, because how you answer this simple question should determine the focus of your remaining years in ministry. Are you someone who loves to lead, but has to preach? Or are you someone who loves to preach, but has to lead? There is no right or wrong answer. Are You a Leader or a Preacher? There are Senior Pastors who LOVE … [Read more...]
How To Create Compelling Sermon Titles
Here’s a quick and easy process to follow that will help you generate compelling sermon titles every week: 1. Title Your Message Only After You Preach It. Jesus said there are three sins that are worse than all the rest combined: (1) hurting children (2) the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (3) and Senior Pastors who presume to know what their sermons should be titled before they … [Read more...]
How To Finish Your Sermons By Noon Monday
Everything I was taught about preaching in seminary was backward. Between undergraduate school and seminary, I took eight preaching courses. Each of them was taught by amazing people who loved God and poured themselves into me. For them, I am grateful beyond words. The problem, looking back, is that the classes focused on the wrong thing: their goal was to make me a … [Read more...]
What Is The Best Sermon Topic To Follow Christmas Eve?
A friend recently asked me a great question: “With all of the visitors you gain on Christmas Eve, what would be the best thing to preach at the next worship service (in our case January 1)? I have heard it said that the most important Sunday of the year is the one after Christmas or Easter when some visitors return to see if church is different than the boring thing they … [Read more...]
3 Free Ways To Double Your Christmas Eve Attendance (and why it matters)
Christmas Eve attendance matters because 25% of all your visitors for the entire year will come (or not come) on Christmas Eve. My experience has been that only 1 out of 10 new visitors that attend a church will come back, come to Christ, and grow to full devotion. That means if you want to grow by 100 converts, 1,000 people will need to visit your services in 2016 and 250 … [Read more...]
How To Define Your Preaching Audience
Each Spring I set out a red bird feeder in my backyard. It is a red metal box that stands affixed on a 5’ pole. I always position it so we can see the swarm of birds that come to it through our kitchen window. I’ve always felt that that bird feeder is the simplest metaphor for understanding a preaching audience that I’ve ever witnessed. Here’s why… When The Bird Feeder Has … [Read more...]
A Month By Month Guide To Understanding Your Listener’s Mindsets
All great communicators begin with focusing on their listener's mindset, not their topic. Senior Pastor’s who are great preachers are no exception to this rule. Below is a guide that our Teaching Team created a few years ago to help us when planning upcoming sermon series. Over the years we had found that oftentimes what seemed like a great sermon series in January, wasn’t … [Read more...]
How Should Senior Pastors Dress On Sunday Mornings? (Or “Who Is This Church For?”)
Recently a Senior Pastor emailed me and told me that his governing board requires all staff to wear suits and ties on the stage. He personally likes dressing up, but wonders how doing so affects outreach. He wondered what I thought about that, and how he should go about changing this practice if he felt led to do so. Since the question itself touches on so much more than … [Read more...]
3 Ways To Take Your Preaching To The Next Level
One of my biggest problems in sermon writing is what people call “analysis paralysis” – I get so involved studying for a sermon that, eventually, the more I study, the worse it becomes. 1. Do a Two-Minute Warning. To cure this I started implementing something I call my “two-minute warning.” I stole it from my high school head football coach. Our high school football team went … [Read more...]
Why We Procrastinate On Writing Sermons (And How I’m Trying To Fix It)
I procrastinate on writing my messages. I plan lots of time at the beginning of my week to study and write my message but inevitably something arises leadership-wise that causes me to take the time I planned for sermon development and devote it to some other worthy cause. Why do I keep doing that? Let me pull the lid off this thing and examine it. The Cause of … [Read more...]
What To Do When Your Sermon Bombs
A few weeks ago, my sermon in our first service completely bombed. It was the worst in recent memory. Between first and second service, I re-wrote it and it turned out pretty good for the second and third services. The total time went from 26 minutes to around 21 minutes. Needing to quickly re-write made me ask myself three questions that I am going to end up asking … [Read more...]
5 Steps To Writing Excellent Sermons In 8 Hours Or Less
If you're going to lead your church through the next growth barrier, you can't squander the most precious personal resource you have: time. This includes wasting time on unfocused sermon preparation. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of how long Senior Pastors spend in sermon preparation anyway. The leaders I run in circles with throw around numbers like 15 to 20 hours a … [Read more...]
6 Reasons You SHOULD Preach Other Pastor’s Sermons
The secret to leading a growing church is steal, steal, steal. If you want to lead your church in dynamic spiritual and numerical growth you don’t have time to reinvent the wheel each time you recognize that something original needs to be created in your church. That’s why the most Christ honoring thing you can do is be on the lookout for great ideas that you can take and … [Read more...]
The Difference Between A Good Sermon And A Great Sermon
Recently I spent the better part of a week going through 10 years of sermons – re-labeling, re-organizing, and re-categorizing them so I could share them with my staff on Dropbox. It was enlightening to say the least. I saw larger patterns of things I was proud of, and not so proud of. Here’s a list of things I took note of that I wanted to change, continue, or forever expunge … [Read more...]
3 Practical Ways To Take Your Preaching To The Next Level
Here are a few practical things that you can do to take your preaching to the next level, with minimal effort. 1. Do a two-minute warning. My biggest problem in sermon writing is what people call “analysis paralysis” – I get so involved studying for a sermon that, eventually, the more I study, the worse it becomes. To cure this I started implementing something I call my … [Read more...]
