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Crowdsourcing the Message

April 25, 2012 in Church, Preaching, Reading with 4 Comments

It’s been a few weeks now since my book officially released and I wanted to take a moment and explain who it is written for and what it’s about. If you follow my blog you probably are aware of it—but you might not have an adequate understanding of the book itself.

I wrote the book with a healthy dose of humor—so hopefully it is an enjoyable read for just about anyone—but there are three groups of people in particular that I believe would benefit from it.

  1. Preachers—it doesn’t just have to be senior pastors. Anybody who teaches regularly in the Church can benefit from a team approach like this book discusses. Student pastors or volunteer teachers can all benefit from the process.
  2. Teaching-minded Church attendees—the collaborative preaching approach invites non-staff members of the Church into the preaching development process. If you have a love for what is said during the weekend messages, this could be you. Even if you aren’t a preacher or never plan to get on stage yourself. This is the group I hope gets the most out of the book.
  3. Central attendees—even if you wouldn’t consider yourself in groups 1 or 2 you may be interested in this discussion if you have a love for what God is doing through Central. This book offers a unique, behind-the-scenes look at our process and much of it would be things that the typical person at Central is unaware of.

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How To Create the Ultimate Presentation

October 19, 2011 in Preaching with 4 Comments

As my longtime blog readers will already know, I am a big fan of TED.com. It is an incredible website filled with videos of brilliant short presentations on all topics imaginable. This should be a regularly visited site for all preachers in America.

A friend recently sent me the following presentation where someone has gone through all of the previous TED talks and figured out the analysis of what the best rated ones have in common (and how that affects the creation of the perfect presentation).

Here is an example of the physical attributes needed to have a highly rated talk:

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The Disgust of Holiness

October 14, 2011 in Church, Preaching with 0 Comments

Recently I preached a message at Central called “The Disgust of Holiness,” based on Richard Beck’s book Unclean. This was one of those messages that I could not wait to preach and I was excited to see how much conversation came out of it. I decided to email a link of the video to Richard as I thought he might enjoy seeing how his ideas had morphed into a weekend message. I was surprised when he emailed me back with encouraging feedback. Then, this week he posted the video on his blog called Experimental Theology. This is a phenomenal blog that I have been reading for awhile and I’m in awe of how often he posts and with such incredible depth.

You can click here to check it out.

How I Use My iPad for Public Speaking

July 21, 2011 in Preaching, Product Reviews, Software with 5 Comments

I use my iPad when I preach instead of paper notes and I often get asked what software I use.

I was using a program called iAnnotate PDF, but I’ve sinced moved to a program called PDF Expert. I like this one more because it is far more user friendly without sacrificing the features that I need it for.

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Walking With the Giants

June 6, 2011 in Preaching, Reading with 2 Comments

I recently finished Warren Wiersbe’s book, Walking With the Giants, from the 1970′s. It is an out of print book that has been updated and morphed into this book that is sold today. It was given to me by the senior pastor of the church that I did a preaching internship at when I was in college (no, that wasn’t in the 70′s). I had only skimmed the book when it was given to me since I was slammed with school work but I felt it was time to give the book its due.

This old version is focused on preaching and features short biographies of famous preachers as well as a handful of topics and recommended books for preachers on those topics. It definitely has an old school feel to it which makes much of the perspective seem dated but also has a timeless feel for the things that never change.

I loved hearing some of the stories of how the different preachers lived and approached the ministry. I learned fascinating details like the fact that “C Spurgeon once preached a sermon in his sleep. His wife wrote down the main points and gave the outline to him the next morning–and he went to the tabernacle and preached it!”

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