Posts Tagged ‘sermons’
The wild difference between a Mother’s Day sermon and a Father’s Day sermon.
Jun 22nd by Jon- Tagged in:
- sermons
Last week, I told my wife that it would be appropriate, dare I say “loving” of her to get me an iPad for Father’s Day. Her response? She laughed. It wasn’t a mean laugh, it was more of a giggle that seemed to say, “An iPad? That is adorable. Should I buy it with one of our offshore Cayman Islands bank accounts Lord Featherton?”
I can’t stop looking at this photo of the Guatemalan sinkhole.
Taking notes during sermons.
Dec 3rd by JonThat I am aware of, my wife has never taken notes when she’s come to see me speak. Although she would argue that she’s heard whatever I’m saying a million times because I usually try to just speak what we’re living, I think her gathering a binder full of notes might be in order.
When I was a kid, I remember one pastor’s wife who used to do that. My mom kind of held her up as the gold standard pastor’s wife. She sat in the front row every Sunday morning with an open notebook and a scribbling hand. And my mother, although rapt with attention to hear what my dad was preaching, rarely took notes and I think may have secretly compared herself to that other pastor’s wife down the street.
The challenge is that there’s really not a good system to compare sermon note taking skills. You would think that by this point, Christianity Today would have released some sort of scorecard we could all universally use to grade the quality of our note taking but like so many other things within Christian culture I fear that burden has fallen upon our shoulders. And thus, I give you …
“Ripped from the headlines” sermon illustrations.
Oct 19th by Jon- Tagged in:
- church,
- pastors,
- sermon illustrations,
- sermons
I don’t want to lie, if I was a pastor I would have used the balloon boy incident in my sermon yesterday. (If you missed it, a few days ago folks were gripped for hours by watching a homemade weather balloon float 7,000 feet in the air because we all thought there was a 6-year old boy named Falcon accidentally inside. Turns out he was at home in the attic the whole time and never in danger.) Given the pressure of coming up with a new sermon weekend after weekend after weekend, I would have totally ridden that kid’s helium coattails to fantastical sermon illustration awesomeness.
And I don’t think I’m the only one who sees national news events as potential sermon fodder. From the sermon success of Michael Phelps during the Olympics to recent celebrity deaths, it’s tempting to create a sermon illustration that is “ripped from the headlines.” If your pastor does, I hope they will use one of the three following techniques …
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