Preaching at First Baptist Church Kuching, Sarawak

Here is a post about my preaching at First Baptist Church Kuching (reposted with permission). It is a privilege to share with them and it was wonderful to be received so warmly into their fellowship. Met some Facebook friends and also some old friends there. Thank you, First Baptist Church Kuching. Love the photos!

Monday, August 30, 2010

Run with Horses

Last Sunday, our church had the honour of Dr.Alex Tang, medical doctor, author, famous blogger to share with us the above titled sermon.

Dr.Alex Tang worship at Holy Light Church, Johore. He is also a pediatrician working in Johore Specialist Centre.

His sermon referred mainly to Jeremiah 12:5

"If you have raced with men on foot and they worn you out how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?"

Basically, his message was to encourage us even as we stumbled. Do not give up, at least if we ran with men on foot we have started running. Do not give up easily. God will help us in our struggles if we turn to Him.

More about my sermon here

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Does Powerpoint have Power? A Response

My dear friend Rev Dr Tan Soo Inn recently asked this question in his weekly GRACEWORKSMAIL 29/10. Please read the whole ecommentary here. He mentions that he does not use powerpoint in his presentations but uses handouts. In support of his not using powerpoint, he mentions two heavy weights like Christopher Witt and John P. Kotter who allegedly do not use powerpoint and have their reasons for not doing so.

According to Witt, powerpoint is good in conveying information not in persuading, hog the audience's attention and takes time preparing. All these three reasons are true. But is that a strong enough defense against powerpoint usage? Preaching and teaching are forms of communication. In any form of communication, there must be some information exchange. Communication must engage the audience and the speaker's face (no matter how handsome) should not be limited to as the only area of focus, and while it is true that power point take time to prepare, it seems to me strange to be given as a reason against using it. In preparing a sermon or a talk, if we begrudge the amount of time preparing powerpoint compared to research and data collection, then we have missed the whole point of the process of successful communication.

Saying that, I agree with Soo Inn that it is the messenger, not the powerpoint. I will also hasten to add that it is also the message and the audience. Personally I do not differentiate Christian preaching and teaching into two categories. To me, all Christian preaching and teaching are evangelistic and for edification. There can be no separation between the two. It is the work of the communicator to distill the huge amount of raw data from his/her research to the core of the message to be delivered. Personally I have to rework all my sermons or teachings 3-4 times to par down the amount of information to the core or essential sermon or teaching statement I want to convey. Who I am, my communication skills and my powerpoint are the means to convey this core or essential statement.

As communicators, we need to study our audience. Gone are the days when they are able to sit through hours of sermons or lectures. It may still work with the older folks but the younger folks have a different way of communication, hence the new social media. In a post modern audience used to two seconds sound bites, visual and musical ques and multimedia presentations, instant response and feedback (via texting, twitter, MMS, mobile video), the challenge is for communicators to connect with them in an effective manner.

Thank you for this stimulating ecommentary. An addendum: as we learn homiletics to communicate, communicators especially Christian pastors must learn how to design appropriate and effective powerpoint slides!

picture source

Interview with Rob Bell on Preaching

This is a good interview on preaching. Rob Bells also touches on good pastoring and preventing burnt out in pastors. We will all do well to heel his advice.

PREACHING
Tying the Clouds Together
Rob Bell's metaphors and references make his listeners stretch, but his wisdom for preachers is down to earth.
A Leadership interview with Rob Bell

He once planted a church by teaching through Leviticus. He can use a rabbit carved from a bar of soap to illustrate the nature of suffering. Google his name and the term "Sex God" will appear among the top entries.

| Finish this article |

Preaching is Soul on Display

From Leadership Journal online, a wonderful article by Gordon MacDonald about preaching and spiritual friends.

Soul on Display

Eventually your preaching turns you inside out.

Gordon MacDonald | posted 1/25/2010

He's not well known today, but in his time—the 14th century—John Tauler was the premier preacher in all of Europe. Each time he stood in the pulpit at the Strasburg Cathedral, large crowds gathered anticipating a great sermon. Rarely were they disappointed.

Tauler was described as "a learned and eloquent man [with] a loving and tender heart. He spoke from his heart, not from his head only." Who wouldn't be pleased to be described that way?

Nevertheless, there must have been a time when something—not easily discerned by a crowd—was lacking in the popular preacher. Humility, perhaps? Perhaps there was too much Tauler and too little Jesus in his preaching.

The only person who cared to speak into Tauler's life was a mysterious Christian layman known as Nicholas of Basle who, many years later, would be burned to death in Vienna as a heretic. Apparently Nicholas and Tauler often visited.

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Who are You Preaching For?

A valuable lesson I always caution myself about...

Preaching for the Nod

It's easy it is to “speak prophetically” when you know it's what people want to hear.

by Bob Hyatt

Every once in a while I find myself preaching for the nod. That’s when we try to hard wire a bit of ego-stroke into a Sunday morning message. We do it a lot, and it’s so easy—insert that small comment, that little aside, or even that main point that we know will appeal to the sensibilities of certain listeners. You know, the left-leaning (or right leaning) political comment. The doctrinal aside that scratches the itch of that person so prone to give up the "Amen" or the vigorous head nod.

Preaching for the nod has less to do with what we see in the biblical text and more to do with what we want people to see in us. And there lies the danger.

The most God-centered, John Piper-esque sermon or community-centered dialogical discussion can be completely me-centered if my intention is to get certain people to tell me, “Good words today, Pastor!” If my intention is to get certain people to see me as sufficiently hip and relevant (or standing against the tide of culture), or progressive (or appropriately conservative), or doctrinally adventurous (or steadfastly orthodox), then I have traded the proclamation of God's Word for the proclamation of myself, regardless of how I dress it up.

And all for that little nod.

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Myths about Preaching in Post Christian Culture

From Out of Ur, blog.christianitytoday.com


September 16, 2009

3 Myths about Preaching Today
Why a new kind of preaching is needed for our post-Christian culture.
by David Fitch.

David Fitch is a pastor at Life on the Vine in Long Grove, IL, and teaches as the B.R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary in Lombard, IL.


MYTH 1: If You Preach a Good Sermon the Church Will Grow

MYTH 2: Who You Preach To is Who You Will Reach

MYTH 3: The Goal of Preaching is to Make the Bible Relevant

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There is a lot of good stuff in this article. I wonder what will he advise in preaching in a non-Christian culture?

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Mediating Prophetic Preaching

This is a powerful article about prophetic preaching. I like what John Koessler has pointed out and I see the same faults in my own preaching.



The Mediating Prophet
Learning to be an advocate in the pulpit.
by John Koessler

Whenever we step into the pulpit, we are the advocate of the people who listen to us. We are a mediator of the text for them. Our role is to help them understand God's Word.

Unfortunately, we can sometimes adopt an adversarial relationship with our hearers in our preaching. It's not intentional, and it may come from a desire to preach prophetically, but some of us are more comfortable pronouncing woes than the gospel.

| Finish this article |

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Eugene Peterson Tell it Slant

Eugene Peterson Discusses His Book "Tell It Slant"On the importance of paying attention to language. An interview from PreachingToday.com

PreachingToday.com: What does Tell It Slant say to preachers about their lives outside of the pulpit—about their soul and their relationships—and how that complements their preaching?

Eugene Peterson: The book tells preachers they've got to learn the language of their congregation. They've got to be as comfortable talking to people in the parking lot or in a diner with a cup of coffee as they are from the pulpit. This is a big overgeneralization, but pastors tend to want to talk about what they want to talk about. We're not good listeners. If somebody asks us a question about theology, we can do that. If they ask us a question about Scripture, we can do that. But many of us are always trying to get a foothold so we can make a witness, make a point, make a conversion. Jesus didn't do that, and I don't think we should. We are trying to enter into the life of a congregation, listen to them, pay attention to them. Pastors by and large aren't good at being silent.

The book looks at the nature of language as it comes through in Jesus' stories and prayers. It pays attention to something that's basic and large in Jesus' life but isn't given much credence in ours. We pastors are not conversational people. We know too much, and we're too impatient to get that knowledge to others.


How does Tell it Slant speak to preachers about their lives in the pulpit, when they actually are doing the talking?

It encourages us to use imaginative language. There's an overload of explanatory speech, doctrinal speech, apologetic speech in the pulpit. Much of our Christian language is dominated by proclamation and explanation, information and definition. When we read the Scriptures, it's astonishing how little of that kind of talk there is. The writers are poets, they're singers, they're pray-ers. They use metaphor extravagantly. They use stories, these parabolic or off-the-target stories. I always had a few people in my congregation who wanted me to tell them in the sermons what they should do, and I would sometimes say to them, "Well, I just did. Didn't you get it? I want you to participate in the story, in the metaphor." But they want explanations, they want directions. Jesus did very little of that.

Should preaching resemble everyday conversation more?

I think so, yes, although I don't want to dismiss the importance of the kerygma and the didache. Those have prominent places in our tradition, but I do think things should be much more conversational. Part of this has to do with the culture in which we live, this so-called postmodern culture. Conversation is for people who are disaffected from formal, institutional religion. They are also disaffected from kerygmatic and didactic speech—but not from conversation. They love talking, and they love having somebody listen to them. And so there's a cultural appropriateness to this now.

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Blind Spot of the Spiritual Formation Movement

The Blind Spot of the Spiritual Formation Movement
Listening to a sermon is a spiritual discipline that needs to be learned.
Craig Brian Larson

Craig Brian Larson is editor of PreachingToday.com and pastor of Lake Shore Church in Chicago. He is co-author and co-general editor of The Art & Craft of Biblical Preaching (Zondervan, 2006).

Craig Larson identifies the spiritual discipline of listening to sermons as a blind spot of the spiritual formation movement. Read more

I want to say that sound biblical preaching does the following nine things that individual Bible reading, memorization, and meditation does not:

(1)Good preaching rescues us from our self-deceptions and blind spots, for left to ourselves we tend to ignore the very things in God's Word that we most need to see. Preaching is done in community, covering texts and topics outside of our control.

(2)Preaching brings us before God's Word in the special presence of the Holy Spirit, who indwells the gathered church.

(3)Good preaching challenges us to do things we otherwise would not and gives us the will to do them. God has put within human nature a remarkable power to spur others to take action.

(4)Good preaching brings us into the place of corporate obedience rather than merely individual obedience. This is a uniquely corporate discipline that the church does together as a community, building up individuals and the community at the same time. We are not just an individual follower of Christ; we are a member of his church and are called to obey the call of God together with others hearing the same Word.

(5)Good preaching contributes to spiritual humility by disciplining us to sit under the teaching, correction, and exhortation of another human. Relying on ourselves alone for food from the Word can lead to a spirit of arrogance and spiritual independence.

(6)Good preaching gives a place for a spiritually qualified person to protect believers from dangerous error. The apostles repeatedly warned that untrained and unstable Christians—as well as mature believers—are frequently led astray by false doctrines. Christians are sheep; false teachers are wolves; preachers are guardian shepherds. A preacher is a person called and gifted by God with spiritual authority for the care of souls in the context of God's church.

(7)Preaching and listening is a uniquely embodied, physical act. It literally puts us into the habit of having "ears that hear." There is something to be said for this physical act of listening and heeding. Good preaching is truth incarnated, truth mediated through a person from its ancient setting to today, truth we can feel through another person's heart, truth conveyed through an embodied person, truth we receive sitting shoulder to shoulder with other embodied Christians.

(8)Good preaching does what most Christians are not gifted, trained, or time-endowed to do: interpret a text in context, distill the theological truths that are universally true, and apply those truths in a particular time and place to particular people in a particular church—all this with the help of resources informed by 2,000 years of the Church's study that average Christians do not own. This is a challenging task for well-trained preachers; how much more so for those untrained?

(9)Listening to preaching has a much lower threshold of difficulty for almost all people. While many spiritual disciplines sound like exercises for the spiritually elite, both young and old, educated and uneducated, disciplined and undisciplined can at least listen to a sermon. It is God's equal-opportunity discipline. Preaching and listening is everywhere in the Bible because it is doable by the masses.


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What if Your Pastor is a Rapper?

The Current Preaching Emergency

Brueggemann (2007) Minneapolis, Fortress Press


Walter Brueggemann is Professor of Old Testament Emeritus in the William Marcellus McPheeters chair at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Finally, another book by Brueggemann on preaching. Brueggemann is one of my favourite OT scholars. Knowledgeable, precise, incisive with a deadly wit, he does not suffer fools gladly. However, he is a prophet crying in the wilderness on a number of topics. One of them is preaching and he is declaring for a state of emergency on preaching.

He writes,

On all counts, the act of preaching is:

• foolish because in the congregation some know more and because in every congregation there are those ideologically committed in ways that preclude serious listening...
• dangerous if it is fruitful, because the powers of retrenchment are every-where among us, a passion to keep things as they were before utterance. Ideological resistance is readily evoked in most congregations...
• a risky self-exposure of the preacher, who at best is vulnerable in the precariousness of the utterance. Every preacher knows with some regularity that what is said and what must be said inescapably expose the preacher as something of a fraud, for good preaching must speak truth to which the preacher's own life does not always attest...

N.T.Wright on Resurection

This is an interesting interview from PreachingToday blog

March 19, 2008
N. T. Wright on Resurrection

At the National Pastors Conference in San Diego, PreachingToday.com's Brian Lowery got to interview N. T. Wright about his latest book—Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church—and how it relates to preaching. Since we are all in the midst of the Easter journey, his words are timely, challenging, and above all else, hopeful.

Preaching Today: In your book Surprised by Hope, you talk about a deeper understanding of hope "that provides a coherent and energizing basis for work in today's world." How has that deeper understanding influenced your preaching through the years?

Bishop N. T. Wright: [Studying] the Resurrection for an earlier book, Resurrection of the Son of God … ended up rubbing my nose in the New Testament theology of new creation, and the fact that the new creation has begun with Easter. I discovered that when we do new creation—when we encourage one another in the church to be active in projects of new creation, of healing, of hope for communities—we are standing on the ground that Jesus has won in his resurrection.

New creation is not just "whistling in the dark." It's not a kind of social Pelagianism, where we try to improve things by pulling ourselves up from our own bootstraps. Because Jesus is raised from the dead, God's new world has begun. We are not only the beneficiaries of new creation; we are the agents of it. I just can't stop preaching about that, because that is where we're going with Easter.

For me, therefore, there's no disjunction between preaching about the salvation which is ours in God's new age—the new heavens and new earth—and preaching about what that means for the present. The two go very closely together. If you have an eschatology that is nonmaterial, why bother with this present world? But if God intends to renew the world, then what we do in the present matters. That's 1 Corinthians 15:58! This understanding has made my preaching more challenging to me, and hopefully to my hearers, to actually get off our backsides and do something in the local community—things that are signs of new creation.

What themes emerged in your preaching after having been surprised by hope?

I've found myself addressing current issues—what you might call "God in public life"—and I've been doing so from a wide variety of points of view. If you start taking hope seriously, you begin to ask, "What does this mean for our public life?" You begin to wrestle with how this actually impacts education policy or what we do with those who seek asylum. These themes have crept into my preaching.

At this last year's Christmas Eve service, I talked about the problems the hill farmers in my diocese were facing because of foot-and-mouth disease. I noted how the government's attitude toward that issue was like the government's attitude toward those who seek asylum. It's the church's responsibility to stand up for those who have nobody to stand up for them. Somebody approached me on the way out the door and said, "You should stick to the Scriptures. There's nothing in Christmas about those who seek asylum!" I was so astonished, that the person had gone before I could say, "What about Matthew 2? What was Jesus doing in Egypt? Weren't they seeking asylum?"

I have found that my preaching is touching on some of the key issues of the times, presenting a Christian response and not just a political response for the sake of political response. I keep asking myself, How is one to think Christianly about these big things?

Many people still cling to older or limited versions of hope, resurrection, and heaven. How can today's preacher contend with some of those limited viewpoints in such a way that the listener is pleasantly surprised, but not offended?

Some people are always going to be offended when you actually teach them what's in the Bible as opposed to what they assume is in the Bible. The preacher can try to say it a number of ways, and sometimes people just won't get it. They will continue to hear what they want to hear. But if you soft-pedal matters, they will think, Oh, he's taking us down the old familiar paths. There is a time for walking in and just saying what needs to be said. Sometimes you just need to find a good line. The line I often use—which makes people laugh—is: "Heaven is important, but it's not the end of the world." In other words, resurrection means the new earth continues after people have gone to heaven.

I put it this way for my audiences: "there is life after life after death." People are very puzzled by that, so I begin to explain it to them. There's life after death. That was Jesus between Good Friday and Easter. He was dead, but he was in whatever life after death is—in paradise without his resurrected body. But that wasn't his final destination. Here I introduce the idea of a two-stage postmortem reality. Most Western Christians have only heard about a two-stage postmortem reality in the Catholic idea of purgatory. That's wrong! A person goes to heaven first and then to the new heavens and new earth. People stare at you like you've just invented some odd heresy, but sorry—this is what the New Testament teaches. The New Testament doesn't have much to say about what happens to people immediately after they die. It's much more interested in the anticipation of the ultimate new world within this one. If you concentrate on preaching life after death, you devalue the present world. Life after life after death, however, reaffirms the value of this present world.

Early in the book, you write: "Our task…is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and the foretaste of the second." What role does the preacher play in that good work? In other words, what does it look like to live as resurrection preachers?

So many people think preaching the Resurrection means doing a little bit of apologetics in the pulpit to prove it really is true. Others simply say, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death." This isn't the point! Those types of sermons may be necessary, but there's more to it than that. To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that "different-ness." The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.

To take preaching seriously, you need a high theology of the Word of God. When your preaching announces that Jesus is the crucified and risen Lord of the world, things happen. The principalities and powers are called into account. Human beings who once thought the message of someone rising from the dead is ridiculous, actually find that the message of resurrection can transform their lives.

Finally, there must be a relationship between what you say and who you are. Preaching is the personality, infused by the Spirit, communicating the Word of God to people. If there's a mismatch—if you're not being a resurrection person—you may say the right words, but something radical is missing.

At the end of Surprised by Hope, you offer a short but potent appendix entitled "Two Easter Sermons." Both sermons, to each their own degree, miss the point of the Resurrection. Thousands of preachers are climbing into studies, libraries, and offices to put together a message for Easter morning. If you were to give them a word of encouragement and a word of exhortation as they prepare, what would you share with them?

I would tell them to take very seriously the connection between what happens on Easter Day in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and what happened before Good Friday. In other words, the Gospel writers seemed to think that the resurrection of Jesus is somehow the fulfillment of his announcement of the Kingdom of God. We have tended to read the Gospels in such a way that the death and resurrection fall off one end, and then there's all that neat stuff about Jesus healing people and telling parables. But what on earth do they have to do with each other? Preachers must think and pray about how that message of the kingdom is the thing which resurrection is really all about—and, conversely, how resurrection is what the message of the kingdom is all about. When we put the Gospels together like that, then we are really in business! But that's tough. We're not trained to often think like that.

N. T. Wright is Bishop of Durham for the Church of England, and author of Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

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How to Preach a Narrative Sermon

Is it difficult to preach a narrative sermon? Some pastors seem to think so while others think it is a breeze. Recently I read a book that teaches narrative preaching. What is interesting is that the author has been preaching it for 50 years!

Calvin Miller (2006), Preaching: The Art of Narrative Preaching (Grand Rapids. MI: Baker Books) is an excellent book by a preacher, pastor and teacher of homiletics (preaching).

Miller takes us through ‘birthing’ a sermon from exegesis, writing, and preaching a sermon. One of his points is to be yourself in the pulpit and not try to imitate another preacher. He has written a poem about being himself.

“I-Ness”
I’m me, and my “I-ness” is special to me.
Minus my “I-ness” I’d just be like you,
And you’d be like me and that’s nothing new.
“You-ness” looks good, but only on you.
‘Cause “you-ness” wouldn’t fit where “I-ness” should be.
My “I-ness” looks great, but only on me.

The gem of the book is in the appendix where he names and pays tribute to the great preachers and their specific strengths in building a sermon:

Meat and Potatoes (expository base of the sermon): Haddon W. Robinson
The Mind of the Sermon: Ian Pitt-Watson
The Subject of the Sermon: Bryan Chapell [subject is always Christ]
The Soul of the Sermon: Barbara Brown Taylor
The Witness of Preaching: Thomas Long
The Philosophy of Preaching; John Stott
The Narrative Base: Eugene Lowry
The Movement of the Sermon: David Buttrick
The Spirit and Life of the Sermon: Donald Coggan
The Sermon and Altar: Calvin Miller

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Preaching for all Seasons of Life

Leadership Journal, Summer 2007 featured a really excellent article by Gordon MacDonald

Incarnate Preaching
It's not just living your words, it's knowing the lives of those you're speaking to.

MacDonald, drawing on his long experience as a preacher and pastor shares his wisdom on how to make his sermons relevant. What struck me most are his

Questions of the Decade

When I preach to people in their twenties, I am aware that they are asking questions such as:

What makes me different from my family of origin or the people around me?
In what direction am I going to point my life in order to pay my way through life?
Am I lovable and am I capable of loving?
Around what will I center my life?

Those in their thirties tend to have accumulated serious long-range responsibilities: spouses, babies, home mortgages, and serious income needs. Suddenly life becomes overrun with responsibilities. Time and priorities become important. Fatigue and stress levels rise. The questions shift to:

How can I get done all of these things for which I am responsible?
Why do I have so many self-doubts?
Why is my spiritual center so confused?
What happened to all the fun I used to have?
Why haven't I resolved all my sin problems?
Why is there so little time for friendships?

For people in their forties, the questions do not get any easier. Now they are asking:

Why are some of my peers doing better than me?
Why am I so often disappointed in myself, in others?
Why isn't my faith deeper?
Why is my marriage less than dazzling?
Why do I yearn to go back to the carefree days of my youth?
Should I scale back some of my dreams?
Why do I no longer feel attractive?

People in their fifties are asking:

Do these young people think I'm obsolete?
Why is my body becoming increasingly unreliable?
Why are so few of my friendships nourishing?
What do my spouse and I have in common now that the children are leaving?
Does this marriage of mine offer any intimacy at all?
Why is my job no longer a satisfying experience?
Are the best years of life over?
Do I have anything of value to give any longer?

Those in their sixties ask:

How long can I keep on doing the things that define me?
Why do my peers look so much older than me?
What does it mean to grow old?
How do I deal with angers and resentments that I've never resolved?
Why do my friends and I talk so much about death and dying?

Those in their seventies and above have questions such as:

Does anyone around here know who I once was?
How do I cope with all this increasing weakness around me?
How many years do I have left?
How long can I maintain my independence and my dignity?
When I die, how will it happen?
What about all these things I intended to do (and be) and never got around to?

Can a sermon speak to these issues? For many listeners, sermons that ignore these questions will not be credible.

It is around matters like these, which change through the years, that the preacher can speak into the fears, the failures and regrets, the longings and opportunities, and bring words of hope and clarity, touching a life with Christ's presence

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High Tech Preaching

Leadership Journal, Summer 2007

The Tech Effect Technology is changing the way we preach.

Is this a good thing?

A Leadership Interview

Shane Hipps is pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church in Phoenix, Arizona. Prior to pastoral ministry, Shane had a career in advertising.

John Palmieri is a pastor of multi-cultural, multi-site, New Life Community Church in Chicago. Prior to pastoral ministry, he was involved in the food business.

Jarrett Stevens is director of the college and singles ministry, and teacher for 722 at North Point Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. Previously he served as a teaching pastor for Axis at Willow Creek Community Church.

Twenty-five years ago, the film Tron told the story of video game maker Kevin Flynn who was transplanted into the virtual universe within a computer. Flynn battled sinister digital forces to survive and partnered with friendly programs to discover a way back to the real world. Today, Tron's story appears prophetic. We find ourselves in a digital universe. Technology is more than merely a tool. It permeates every part of our existence—family, work, recreation, even worship.

Initially, churches used video technology to put lyrics and images onto screens while singing. Pastors now are using these tools while preaching. PowerPoint, film clips, photos, and video are augmenting the spoken word, and in some cases replacing it. With the growth of video preaching, will the pastor, like Flynn from Tron, enter the machine and become part of a digital projection?

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E.P.I.C. Preaching

Read an interesting sermon by Leonard Sweet on wikiletics on E.P.I.C. Preaching.

E.P.I.C.

The word "epic" carries a double meaning of both timeless and timely. The gospel is both. But even more, EPIC is my acronym for preaching that sounds the death-knell for pulpitcentric Christianity and rings the doorbell for preaching that is:

experiential,

participatory,

image-rich, and

connective.

In the once-dominant culture of the printing press, preaching was uniformly accepted as pulpit presentations that were rational, representative, word-based, and individualistic. However, that pulp-and-ink approach is rapidly losing whatever effectiveness it had. For postmodern culture, EPIC preaching leaves the pulpit behind while taking with it the contributions of modernity to the preaching enterprise. EPIC preaching is less a repudiation than an expansion of modernity: rationality expanded to embrace experience, performance expanded to embrace participation, exegesis of the Word expanded to embrace exegesis of the image, and the joining of the "me" and the "we" that's the essence of connectivity. EPIC preaching is a communal experience of the Word created by participation in an image-rich narrative or sequence of stories...

My favorite way of EPIC preaching? I don't always get to do it (and don't make an issue if I can't), but when I'm invited to preach somewhere one of my first questions is: "Do you have a live Web-feed?" If the answer is "yes," I then ask the second question: "Can you find me a dancing partner?"

In this type of EPICtivity, I stand in the middle of the congregation, with my Bible open to a text that is also featured on one of the two screens up front. Together the congregation and I exegete the leading image(s) of the text. The second screen, however, is totally under the creative promptings of my dancing partner. Preferably, this is a person who's grown up on Google, and not the word search function. While the people and I are more and more immersing ourselves in the Word, my dancing partner is Googling the Web for images that are tossed up by our interactions. And these images are flashed up on that second screen as contributions to and animations of our conversation. The energy that flows from these multilayered connections can only be described as "divine."

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Bill Hybers on Preaching

I have great respect for Bill Hybers both as a preacher and a communicator. Here is where he talks about his preaching.

The Accompanying Presence
His voice is still small, but you'll preach better if you hear first from the Holy Spirit.
An Interview with Bill Hybels

Pastors talk about preaching in the power of the Holy Spirit. Bill Hybels, who preaches to about 20,000 people most weekends, says he senses the Lord's presence when he's in the pulpit, but even more so in the study (or on the boat) when he's preparing the message. Do you recall a time when you felt you preached in the power of the Spirit?

Bill Hybels: For me, being moved by the Holy Spirit in preaching is often more dramatic when I'm preparing a sermon than when I'm in the pulpit delivering it.
When I'm in the flow of the Spirit, I have an awareness of the Spirit saying, "You're doing it just right, Bill."

I can think of a time recently when I was anchored out on a boat and I had been praying and studying a text, and the ideas began to flow. I grabbed pen and paper, and I wrote as fast as my hand would allow me to write for probably an hour and a half.

In one setting I put an entire message together, got down on my knees on the deck of the boat, and said, The greatest miracle of this sermon has already taken place. This was a gift I didn't deserve—the spiritual gift of preaching and teaching deposited in my life—and the Holy Spirit energized that gift that afternoon. That it worked as mysteriously and supernaturally as it did still overwhelms me.

What suggests to you that you are preaching in the power of the Spirit?

Thoughts come into my mind that I know were deposited there by a power other than my own. Sometimes I'll be reading a text, and I'll be prompted by the Holy Spirit: Hang with this text, Bill. Read it again. Read it slower. And while I'm ruminating on it, reading and rereading it, it's like something comes off the page or drops from heaven and intersects in my mind. A thought comes that I quickly try to put on paper, and then that leads to a next thought and a next.

When additional thoughts begin to flow, I know that's not just the work of the flesh. I'm not that good. That's a supernatural thing.

One way to know you have the preaching and teaching gift is that this supernatural dynamic occurs, and you learn how to go with the flow. You learn how to prepare your heart for that flow to occur and to capture it when it does.

What have you had to unlearn about preaching and the power of the Spirit?

A lot of men and women can read a text, formulate a few thoughts, and speak sort of off the top of their heads, but in 30 years I've never been able to do that. Certainly I've had to unlearn the idea that preparation is always going to be easy, as though you're going to sit down and God's going to appear and it's always going to flow and be mysterious.

Like your experience on the boat.

Yes. Probably the reason that came to mind as vividly as it did is because of how unusual that is. Usually I have to invest a lot more in research and preparation of my spirit. I make progress in 30-minute increments. My administrative assistant would assure you that my study sounds more like a dentist's office than some great artistic revelation happening.

This is a factory not the symphony center.

Most certainly. My average weekly preparation is taxing and requires more discipline than I thought was going to be required when I started many decades ago. Once you get accustomed to that, you settle into the routine. That becomes the norm, and you thank God like crazy when it goes easier or flows more dynamically than that.

Regarding the Holy Spirit, do the terms presence or manifest presence describe what you experience when you preach?

I refer to an accompanying presence. When I'm in the flow of the Spirit as best I can yield myself to be so, it's as though I have an awareness of the accompanying presence of the Spirit saying, You're doing it just right, Bill. You're saying it just the way I gave it to you. You're being true to yourself, true to the Word, true to my promptings. Just keep going. Way to go.
And when I feel that, it's like time stands still, and you go, This is a great thing to be doing right now.

Of course, there are other times when, for whatever reasons, I don't feel that accompanying presence as strongly. I've laid awake nights wondering about that. It's greatly appreciated when it's there.

Would you describe that sense of God's accompanying presence as rare, or frequent?

I would say it's frequent. Again, if you're living a yielded life, and if you have the preaching and teaching gift, and you're yielding that to God on a continual basis, that's one of the signs that you're in the right place doing the right thing for the right reasons.

If you're doing something in the kingdom, and you rarely feel that, that's a red flag. Something needs to be looked at. Are you using the right gift? Are you using it in the right way? For the right reasons? At the right time? In the right context? If I didn't feel it consistently, that would be quite troubling to me.

Scripture portrays two sides to our experience of the Spirit. Ephesians says, "Be filled with the Spirit" and "Pray in the Spirit," suggesting there are things we can do that put us in a place where God's Spirit can be manifest in us. Then again, Jesus says, "The wind blows wherever it pleases." Which is your experience?

Every great communicator I know could tell you how they "get in the zone." Michael Jordan had a strict regimen before every big game to get himself in a prepared state to do his best.
I've been fascinated by this. When I'm with other speakers, I ask them, "What do you do to get in the preparation zone? How do you pray? When do you prepare? Do you prepare in the same place? Do you listen to music? How do you prepare yourself just before you deliver your message?" Great communicators can say precisely how they up the probability that the Spirit will be strong in their life.

Having done all of that, then, the wind blows where it will. Sometimes it blows stronger than others. I can only do the part that depends on me. I can fast and pray and kneel before God and invite others to pray with me.

Sometimes the messages get lifted to fifteen thousand feet. Sometimes they get lifted to twenty thousand, sometimes to twenty-five thousand. Why there are those altitude differences, I don't know.

What have you learned from Scripture about preaching in the power of the Spirit?

It has a lot to do with courage. Look at the great messages delivered in Scripture. Joshua stands before the people and says, "Choose this day what you're going to do. Here's what I'm going to do." Peter stands up in and says, "Here's what you did to the One who was sent from God."
Preaching involves an inordinate amount of courage. You have to be willing to take heat and backlash if you're going to say the words God gave you to say in the spirit he gave you to deliver it.

In my own experience, the messages that turned certain corners at Willow and the messages that were greatly used in conference settings were ones that I walked toward the lectern with knees knocking, thinking, There is no way I'm going to be able to say these words to these people.

God says, Here we go, and you say them.

You feel alone in the moment, and you have to die to audience response, realizing they are probably not going to carry your picture in their wallet anymore. But you know, This is precisely what God wants me to say. That's a refining, character-building, intensely spiritual process.

Paul speaks in about the power of Christ resting on him when he was weak. How have you experienced that?

Some of the best preaching I've done came out of times when I was desperately needy.

One message I've probably given five hundred times around the world came to me in the slums outside of Soweto in South Africa when I was supposed to speak to several thousand illiterate people about the nature of the Church of Jesus Christ. I realized this was an impossible task. How could I communicate such theology to people who have probably never seen what I'm trying to describe?

I woke up at four o'clock in the morning and prayed, "God, I'm going to stay humbly in this kneeling position until you give me a way to talk about your church in a fashion that these folks can understand." I put together a unique message in which I brought people up on the stage and posed them in certain stances to give listeners pictures of the church. When I delivered the message that day, I knew I had that Accompanying Presence.

People got it. It changed their understanding of what a church could be. That message came out of a desperate situation where unless God had moved, I was done for.

Bill Hybels is pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal

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Recently, I tried something different in our worship service. Instead of preaching at the end, I did it first, with music, the offering, and Scripture reading afterward. As I stood behind the pulpit,

I could see people getting ready for the offering, until they realized I was starting my message.

Caitlyn, a first grader in the congregation, was perplexed by this change of routine, and whispered frantically to her mom, "Doesn't he know we haven't paid him to talk yet?"

—Gordon Wood, Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, "Kids of the Kingdom," Christian Reader (July/August 2000)

from Preaching Today.com