Walter Brueggemann on Preaching

Watch it all HERE

Some VERY important lessons!!

A Radical (and demanding) Homiletics Course….

I got hold of this book the other day: Explosive Preaching: Letters on Detonating the Gospel in the 21st Century: Letters on Transformative Preaching for the 21st Century . It’s hard to get hold of in the States and so I ordered from the UK.

In it, the author shares about a preaching course he help set up for the church in China:

66 – Each student, by the end of the year, has to be ready to preach (without notes) a one-hour sermon on each of the 66 books of the Bible.  This sermon is to include an outline of the content of the book, and contemporary application to the individual, the church and the nation of China.  At the end of the year, 3 books would be selected at random, then the student has five seconds to launch into their message.

33 – Each student had to prepare 33 one-hour sermons on the life and work of Christ, each based on a single verse (only 10 allowed from outside the gospels).  His whole ministry must be covered, from pre-existence to second coming (although I’d suggest His ministry extends beyond the second coming!)  Interestingly, students are allowed one page of notes per sermon in this category!

1 – Each student has to prepare an “end-of time” sermon – any length (since time constraints are irrelevant in eternity).  The goal is to help the student consider the whole salvation story from God’s point of view.

Now THAT’S a biblical homiletic curriculum!

Tim Keller on Sermon Preparation

“So, two weeks ahead I sit down with the text of the passage of the Bible I’m going to preach on and I spent about four hours figuring out what I think the outline of that text is, the meaning of the text, I need to look up what the commentators think about, maybe problematic verses, and I come up with an outline and a basic, you might say an exegesis or an exposition of the passage itself.  I write this up and I send it to my musicians, we’re going to be putting it in a bulletin and then they’re going to be choosing music for it.  I send it to other preachers who some of them are going to be preaching sermons on the same text.  Then, three days before, I sit down with this outline and I spend another four hours turning the bible study into a sermon and they’re not the same thing.  Bible study is more abstract, what does the text say.  The sermon is more life related, what does this mean to me.  So I spend four hours two weeks ahead on the text.  I spend four hours turning it into a life-related sermon and that’s usually on the Friday before.  And then on Saturday, I spend another six hours on it just trying to make it shorter, because it’s always too long and so I make it shorter, make it shorter, make it shorter, make it shorter.  So I spend about 14 to 16 hours a week writing a sermon and I spend all day preaching it because I speak four times on a Sunday.  And so I actually put in about 25 hours a week into producing and delivering one public speaking presentation before I do anything else in my job.”

Great stuff – huh! You can check out more HERE.

Of course, the great awakening of the 18th century would NEVER have happened under this system – because Whitefield, Welsey and Edwards had NO time to prepare their 15 / 20 or more messages a week that they preached. For Whitefield, his preparation were the hours of quiet devotional study in the early mornings pouring over the Bible and reading Matthew Henry’s Commentary.

Reggie McNeal – Leadership Forum

I spent Monday and Tuesday at a leadership conference our diocese ran just up the road from us at Litchfield Beach and Golf resort – a stunning place!!

Reggie McNeal was keynote (Missional Renaissance, Practicing Greatness: 7 Disciplines of Extraordinary Spiritual Leaders , The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church ).

Reggie was an entertaining speaker – but in terms of content it was (I thought anyway) shallow. It was also very old material – probably 5 years old in terms of what has been said and written about. For me the issue is ‘Yes, we know that the way we do church is kinda broken – how many more ways can we say it.’ 

The seminars were OK – again shallow but probably useful for some. Not sure it was worth the $125 registration fee though.

Where For Art Thou Computer…

Sunday was Kitty’s birthday. After church I went home only to find my computer not working. Kitty and I were going out to the cinema to watch the new Star Trek – but when I discovered my computer was not working I started to get a little too focused on trying to fix it!! I managed to put down the computer and saw Star trek – an awesome movie!! Came home – called Apple support – and discovered my harddrive was completely gone! So, they order a box to be sent to me so I can return the laptop. Now, get this – I get it Tuesday – I post the computer back Tuesday and I get my laptop BACk on Thursday morning, 10:30am, completely fixed, some new upgrades and even having some of the wear and tear taken care off.

Hence – the lack of posts recently.