Do you have a fear of preaching? Or maybe you wouldn’t say it’s a fear, but your nerves are on edge. You are not alone. Public speaking is commonly listed as one of the greatest fears that people have. All eyes are…
Like most pastors, I learned to preach through trial by fire. It was either sink or swim—and I mostly sank. Bible college taught me a lot of theory but no practice. I was taught what to preach, but not how…
A split-second decision changed my life. In my early 20’s, I was in the semi-finals of a softball tournament, sprinting towards third base. Someone yelled, “Slide!” So I did. My left foot hit the bag and my ankle shattered with…
Preaching is hard, and learning how to preach can be scary. Very few people are excited by the idea of standing before a crowd of people, with all eyes on them, to deliver a thirty-minute talk. Public speaking was always…
A recent Pew Research Center poll titled “Why Americans Go (and Don’t Go) to Religious Services” caught my attention this week. There’s a lot of information, but here’s what I gleaned from it: Among adults who attend church services at…
I’ll never forget my first funeral sermons. I was a young pastor on the pastoral care rotation at a large church, and I panicked when I got the call that a young mother of three in our church had passed…
When I first became a pastor, I knew that performing weddings was part of the job. But nobody ever taught me how to do it in Bible college. You’d think that would be a requirement. So when a young couple…
There’s a lot of advice floating around today telling pastors how they should preach. Some of it is good, some not so good. But in all this advice, we can easily miss the best preaching tip ever. This is not…
Look, if you are a pastor who preaches nearly every week, your job is hard! You are always under pressure to churn out another good sermon. You will carry that stress like a 50-pound boulder on your chest. That is why…