Honing Your Preaching Skills

How to Preach with Authenticity

The kind of preaching that changes lives is from the heart to the heart, not from the head to the head. Lives are changed as we speak from our deepest pain and suffering.

Socrates was the first to explain communication in 3 dimensions. He talked about ethos as the speaker’s character, pathos as the speaker’s compassion, and logos as the speaker’s content. We tend to think most about the content of a sermon, but the people to whom we are speaking perceive all three, and ethos is really the most vital of all three dimensions. Read more

A Key Sign that You Are Maturing as a Preacher

As a seminary professor (and a pastor) I spend a lot of time helping students grow and develop as preachers. After hearing a student preach, I will often get coffee or lunch with that student and we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the sermon and how it can be improved.

Over the years, I have learned to ask students a key question that can reveal a lot about how they are developing as a preacher.

“What did you leave out?” Read more

How to Write Boring Articles and Preach Dull Sermons

My friends who read the title will think, “Well! Finally something he knows a little about!”

Every preacher, I imagine, knows about dull sermons. Anyone charged with turning out multiple sermons a week over decades will certainly produce his share of messages that are dead on arrival. Read more

7 Tips for Preaching to Teenagers

Preaching to teenagers can be extremely challenging but extremely rewarding.

After spending years working as a Youth Pastor, I have learned a few things about preaching to teenagers.

These lessons were hard-learned through trial and error. Mostly error.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything you need to know. But hopefully these tips will help some of you not have to learn the hard way like I did. Read more