Tag Archives: communication

Cheap Kindle Books 5.11.13

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Here are some cheap kindle books worth picking up that are on sale today for $3.99 and under:

3 Things Make a Sermon Great

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There are a lot of good sermons and good preachers, but there seems to be a level of great. Communicators that thousands listen to, thousands respond to and the Holy Spirit uses in incredible ways. While I would not stick myself in that category, I hope to continue growing to be used by God as much as I can.

Before laying out the difference between a good and great sermon, a quick definition:

To expound Scripture is to open up the inspired text with such faithfulness and sensitivity that God’s voice is heard and his people obey him. -John Stott

A sermon is not a sermon if it doesn’t point people to Jesus. It is just a motivational talk if it simply self-help and not focused on the gospel. So, with that definition, what separates a good from a great sermon?

Three things.

First, stories. 

It isn’t the facts, data or logic laid out in a sermon. People forget those things. Facts and data do not move people. No matter how convincing they are or how much pastors love them. And believe me, pastors love facts and data. They are a warm blanket. If a pastor is communicating a gospel-centered sermon, it is not facts and data or logic that is missing. It is stories.

Now, many pastors stay away from stories because they don’t want to sound shallow, they don’t want to be vulnerable and talk about their moments of failures. The reality is that people respond to stories, they respond when you open up about yourself.

For many pastors, they feel stories are shallow. When going to make a point, many pastors who preach through books of the Bible as we do as at Revolution will use a verse from a different point in the Bible instead of a story. There isn’t anything wrong with this, but when you jump around in the Bible, you create the impression for your church that it is hard to study the Bible (I’ll blog about that another time). This is no way means a pastor has a low view of the Bible, that is a straw man argument. What a pastor is seeking to do is create a human connection with a story. Bringing emotions allows a person to be more open to hearing something. When someone feels connected relationally to a pastor, they are more likely to listen to them.

Second, editing. 

I recently read an interesting thing, most movies that win best picture awards are also in the running for best editing. In some circles of pastors, it is seen as a badge of honor if you preach for an hour. I’ve never listened to a sermon for an hour. I always give up around minute 45, no matter who is preaching. Justin Anderson once told a group of pastors, “You need to know how many minutes you can preach. You may be a 45 minute guy or a 35 minute guy. You need to know and stick to that.”

My sermons tend to be in that 35-40 minute time frame. There have been week’s that it is longer depending on the topic and text and some week’s that are shorter.

When you preach, can you make a sentence that is 15 words down to 10 or 7 words? Can you make your point by taking 5 – 7 minutes off your sermon?

Third, one point. 

This follows closely with the second thing. People listening to a sermon cannot remember multiple things, only one thing. I saw this with a group of younger leaders I meet with. We watched some sermons and 5 weeks after the one sermon we were talking about it. The one guy didn’t like the speaker, thought he was shallow, but he could remember the main point he communicated 5 weeks after the fact.

Make your main point into a simple, memorable statement. And say it again and again in your sermon. Make your church say it with you. Long after your sermon is over, they will remember the stories and that one statement.

Do you agree? Disagree? What 3 things make a great sermon?

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Preaching Workshop with Larry Osborne & Chris Brown [Day 2]

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I’m in California with 20 other guys, getting some intense training on preaching from Larry Osborne and Chris Brown at North Coast Church. Here are my notes from Day 2:

  • When you preach, talk about where and why the text came alive to you personally. 
  • If you give people one “A-ha” every 2-3 weeks, Christians will think you’re deep.

Know Who You are as a Preacher

  • When David went to fight Goliath, he tried to fit into armor and use weapons that he didn’t know or was used to using. 
  • A pastor needs to understand who he isn’t so he can know who he is.
  • The only successful pastor you’ll ever be is the pastor you have inside of you.
  • Look in the rearview mirror of your voice and who you are.
    • What messages or series did you knock it out of the park? What series did you love or were most passionate about? What kind of genres do you like to preach from?
  • God does not want to get rid of you. He wants to get rid of your sin nature, and change who you are, but wants to use who you are for Him.
  • Dress who you are, talk how you are. Don’t be someone else.
  • The further away you can get from who you aren’t, the more God is able to use you because you become who God created you to be.
  • When you preach, you should be able to say, “This was the best I could do under the circumstances.”
  • The most spiritual way to preach is the one that you do that is most closely to who God created you to be.

Organization

  • Write down transition sentences so that you don’t lose people. 
  • Don’t make your most important point your last point in case you run out of time.
  • At North Coast, they call their points “boulders.” Using the idea of boulders you would use to cross a river. The boulders are “jumping off points” in a sermon.
  • What people need for sermon based small groups are sound bites to come back to and jog their memory.

How to Grow a Church

  • Plant the church you would want to go to. That’s the only church you are gifted to lead and understand without checking the manual. 
  • Preach the sermon you want to hear.
    • Leadership is the art of the possible, not the ideal. Take the hill that can be taken.
  • Never confuse your calling with your potential.
    • Potential is a harsh mistress. Your calling is not tied to your potential.
    • Be all you can be is a great slogan, but a horrible way to live your life.

A Better You in Preaching

  • Brainstorming
    • Every Tuesday whoever is preaching runs sermon prep. Any staff member is able to be there. The required people are the people who write the small group questions and the communicator.
    • This is a time for people to throw out ideas and what jumps out to them about the passage.
    • Think through how this passage would be seen from a man, woman, or extrovert, introvert, businessman, reader, plumber, non-reader, new Christian, mature Christian, unchurched guy.
    • Take what works and leave what doesn’t.
    • The brainstorm takes what a communicator has and makes it better.
  • Notesheet
    • In the brainstorming, the notesheet begins to take shape.
    • The notesheet is the points, what people will fill in, take home ideas.
  • Homework
    • This is what people will do based on the message.
    • Sound bites help people with the homework or in sermon based groups. Don’t ask “What did you think of the message?”
    • If people listen, take notes and discuss it with someone else, they will know it more.
    • This makes your message more memorable.
    • Every message needs a soundbite to remember it.
  • Branding
    • This group talks through series, theme, title, and staging.
  • Having a brainstorming time, this is a great way to develop new communicators and show them how to develop a message and create the homework.
  • This is “research.”

Subliminal Messages when we Preach

  • If you put verses up on the screen, you will guarantee that people will stop bringing a Bible to church. 
    • Your brand new believer comes to church and does what everyone does. If no one brings a Bible, the new believer will not bring his.
    • They will also not learn how to read their Bible on their own.
    • If you want people to treat their Bible as a life textbook, you want them to mark their Bible up.
  • Special outreach undercut your outreach.
    • Most evangelism historically has not come because someone was trained on the 4 spiritual laws, people are saved because people say, “Come and see.”
    • If you have a special outreach event, you are telling them there are only certain times to bring friends to church.
    • Special events train your people incorrectly and scare off your guests.
    • The evangelism temperature is high in your congregation, the pastor is doing something to tell them “this is not the place to bring them.” No one has to be told to recommend a great restaurant or movie.
  • Preach to who you want to reach, not who is there.
    • Preach to believers in a way that seekers can understand.
    • Talk as if people are interested.
    • If you talk as if the room is filled with people who don’t know what you’re talking about, your people will start bringing them. Say things like, “I know a lot of you are new at this stuff.”
    • Whenever you use in house lingo, you communicate this is an in-house group.
    • Seekers are seeking, there’s nothing you have to hold back from them.
  • If you preach to men, you get everyone. If you preach to women, you get the women and kids until the kids grow up.

Why Larry Osborne stopped teaching the Bible

  • He discovered the he was faithfully teaching the Bible but he wasn’t discipling people.
  • If preaching is to proclaim the gospel and be obedient to what Jesus taught us (the great commission), something needed to change.
  • He moved towards instruction in Christian living with the Bible as his only authority.
  • Passages that we see as theology (Philippians 2 for example) is really instruction in Christian living.

Creativity

  • Creativity doesn’t happen on the spot, only when a problem needs to be solved. 
  • If you want to be more creative in a message, create a problem. Messages answer questions, not solve problems.
    • Ask, “What does that look like? What do you see?” That creates a problem.
    • Ask, “How do I show people __________ (heaven or something else from Scripture)?”

Other Random Thoughts on Preaching

  • Preaching in a church is about a daily meal, not a feast or banquet.
    • If you present a banquet, it must be memorable long term.
    • The average meal is not memorable, it is healthy.
    • Real life change for your congregation is similar to life change in your life.
  • Team preaching
    • When you take a break from preaching, it helps you lead better because you see things you don’t see when thinking about preaching.
    • The other speaker needs to be 80% as good as you that you pass a week off.
    • It will kill the pride and ego of the leader.
    • Anyone who speaks, has to lead something. Don’t just hire a teacher.
  • As the church grows, the leader gets sucked to the middle. You only see what is great and is terrible.

Yesterday, the narrative peice was a great reminder. Today, the big takeaway for me was the brainstorming part and the subliminal messages.

Preaching Workshop with Larry Osborne & Chris Brown [Day 1]

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I’m in California with 20 other guys, getting some intense training on preaching from Larry Osborne and Chris Brown at North Coast Church. Here are my notes from Day 1:

  •  Because of biblical illiteracy, seekers love deeper bible teaching because they love the idea of digging into something. 
  • Many preachers evaluate sermons based on the wrong things. We base it on did we wow the church or keep their attention. We need to ask if they know it and do it.
  • The things that count and matter, keep saying them. Remind them.
  • When you repeat something that you’ve said before, tell your church that you say this a lot.

Why we preach

  • Too often churches and communicators split up the great commission and make it 2 parts.
  • We’re proclaiming Christ, the path of grace and the path of obedience.
  • We want to be faithful to Scripture, adaptive to the culture (all things to all people), and live out the truth of what we preach.

Two great temptations for preachers

  • Take too much credit or blame for how people respond.
  • To seek to be known as a great preacher, rather, than seeking to make known a great God.

Mars Hill Question

  • Can we be too adapting to the culture in our preaching?
  • You never want to confuse entertainment with teaching or familiarity with knowledge.

Be You

  • When it comes to planning, what a sermon looks like, be you. Have freedom to be you. 
  • You don’t need to be better than someone else, you need to be you.

Storytelling & Storytellers

  • “I have met many a men who tell stories, I have met very few storytellers.” -Mark Twain
  • To know if you are a natural storyteller is if a group yields to you to tell a story.
  • When you think about how to communicate something, do you think of a story or facts?

Putting a sermon together as a narrative (This was the best part of the day)

  • Text: John 5
  • Characters: Jesus and the man
  • Crowd: sick, angels, curious
  • Concerned: the people connected to the people in the story (family and friends, people who hear about what happen), what is the town like? Where is it? What is Jerusalem like? What is laying by the pool waiting to be healed like? What do people feel like who know the man by the pool? What do they feel when they see his disappointment and frustration if he isn’t healed?
  • Areas covered in a story: immediate area, local area, surrounding area (what do we know about the immediate area: the pool of bethseda, the local area is the sheep gate (what’s important about that).
  • Climates of a text: spiritually, politically, economically.
  • Every passage has a story and has a “so what?”
  • If you don’t help people understand the story and what to do with it, they won’t listen to it.

Two common mistakes that make for interesting sermons but bad theology

  • Confusing descriptive with prescriptive. 
  • Preaching the gospels without asking how the epistles and the early church interpreted them.

Links of the Week

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  1. When a pastor loses heart. 
  2. Scott Williams on Leadership lessons from Southwest. 
  3. Get the dad, get the family. 
  4. Ed Stetzer on Surviving unhealthy organizations part 1 and part 2.
  5. 12 communication tips from the world’s best. 
  6. Brian Tracy on Work/Life balance. 
  7. What’s the difference between a good pastor and a great pastor?

Links of the Week

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  1. Harvard Business on 8 ways to communicate your strategy.
  2. Dispelling myths of expositional preaching. I love expositional preaching and these are definitely myths.
  3. Leadership network on Finding and developing a campus pastor.
  4. Shaun King on Stressed out pastors, crazy sins, and the death of pastor Zach Tims. This is a great, and sad look at what it can be like for pastors and how a church can help.
  5. 13 things Perry Noble would tell church planters. Great list here for planters or those thinking about it.
  6. Joe Thorn on Preaching like a man on fire.
  7. Tim Chester on 12 reasons to give up porn.
  8. Glenn Stanton on The link between premarital sex and divorce.
  9. Can parents make faith for their kids last?
  10. Tim Chester on Is your dining room table on mission?
  11. Jen Smidt on A wife’s testing ground.
  12. Great singleness, great marriage & great sex.
  13. Bob Franquiz on Why you have no leaders in your church.

Some Thoughts on Marriage

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Yesterday marked 9 years of marriage for Katie and I. In honor of that, I share some of the things Katie and I have learned, things I love and admire about Katie and some of the answers to the questions we get asked the most. In case you missed them, here they are: