The Fred Craddock Story

CNN has a terrific article on preaching giant, Fred Craddock. Learned several things I did not know about the man. Not only has it increased my already high opinion of Dr. Craddock, it has also blessed my soul. Such a rich story of God's calling and equipping of a preacher.

"A preaching 'genius' faces his toughest convert" by John Blake 

 Here's an audio of Dr. Craddock's sermon, "Learning to Read" from Psalm 19.


Learning to Read from Faithkid Zhang on Vimeo.

Give an Advent devotional new life.

FaithVillage is taking submissions for Advent devotionals, art, etc. for use on their blog throughout the season. If you're like me, you've written a few things about Advent through the years. Why not find your best and give it some new life by sending in it. Submissions are due by November 27.

Seeking Advent Submissions: What Are You Waiting For?

Advent Sermon Series

The Advent season is upon us. I thought it would be a good time to share some past Advent sermon series with each other. No doubt, we should already have this year planned. But, if you're like me, this is a time of year when the number of devotionals, talks, articles one needs to come up with skyrockets. So maybe our sharing with one another will spur some creativity on that front. No doubt it can sow some seeds for future Advent seasons.

I'm going to list all the series I've done here at Southland. I am not strictly a lectionary preacher as you'll see. But some of these have followed the lectionary readings. Please leave a series or two that you've done in the comments. I know I will benefit, and I'm confident others will, as well.

2011 - Finding God in Unexpected Places (a title I borrowed from an old Philip Yancey book)

Advent I - Matthew 1:1-17 - Finding God Among the Screw-ups
Advent II - Matthew 1:18-21 - Finding God in our Disappointments
Advent III - Matthew 2:1-12 - Finding God Above our Heads
Advent IV - Matthew 2:13-23 - Finding God Through the Tears
Christmas I - Matthew 2:22-25 - Finding God in Josh Davidson

2010 - A Light has Dawned

Advent I - Luke 1:11-17 – Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it
Advent II - Luke 1:26-28 – It’s not what you know, but who you know (or maybe even better yet, who knows you!)
Advent III - Luke 1:46-56 – Pride comes before a fall
Advent IV - Luke 2:1-7 – Behind every great man . . .
Christmas I - Luke 2:8-20 – Good things really do come in small packages

2009 - Simply Christmas: How to Maximize the Season by Minimizing the Distractions

Advent I - Luke 21:34-36 - Live Lightly
Advent II - Philippians 1:3-13 - Live Gratefully
Advent III - Luke 3:7-18 - Live Contentedly
Advent IV - Micah 5:2-5a - Live Humbly
Christmas I - Colossians 3:16-17 - Put your new clothes on

2008 - Songs of the Season

Advent I - I was out this year
Advent II - Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 - Turning Towards Joy
Advent III - Psalm 126 - Sowing in Tears, Reaping in Joy
Advent IV - Psalm 98 - Sing a New Song . . . A Christmas Song

2007 - Follow the Star - Finding true wisdom this Christmas season.

Advent I - Romans 13:11-14 - Wake Up! Get Dressed! Learning to pay attention to Christ's work in our world.
Advent II - Matthew 3:1-12 - Make Way! Make Room! Learning to make space for Christ's activity in our homes.
Advent III - James 5:7-10 - Wait! Have Patience! Learning to wait on Christ's provision for our needs.
Advent IV - Matthew 1:18-25 - Enjoy! Rejoice! Learning to celebrate Christ's work in our lives.

2006 - Hope, Peace, Joy, Love

Advent I - Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-26 - The Seedling of Hope
Advent II - Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79 - Pathway of Peace
Advent III - Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:2-6; Philippians 4:4-7 - The Song of Joy
Advent IV - Micah 5:2-5; Psalm 80:1-7; Luke 1:46-55 - The Face of Love
Christmas I - Isaiah 9:2-7 - The Light of Life

Illustration-a-day: If making babies were all the world needed . . .

I know you’ve seen them, those Johnson & Johnson ads – the black and white ones with the cutest of babies and the voiceovers. One has the chubbiest little boy you’ve ever seen sitting in the sink taking a bath grinning a large toothless grin. He splashes around as a voice ponders, “You always went for the tall, dark, handsome types. So who’d have ever thought the love of your life would be short and bald?” And then after a brief pause to build effect, says, “Having a baby changes everything.”

The birth of a baby is one of those sacred moments that takes our concrete, no nonsense world and in a moment transforms it into a place that’s at once mysterious and magical and at the same time perplexing and full of terror. You can’t get over how small his fingers are. You giggle at the recognition that he has that funny little flap on his ears like his mother. You wonder in delighted expectation at what this newest of lives might become.

But along with all the new found joy you can’t help but recognize new fears. You find yourself looking intently at his miniscule lips asking yourself again and again, “Is he still breathing?” You eye every guest who holds him with suspicion, “Have they been sick recently? Did they wash their hands?” He seems so fragile, so helpless, so small. Your can barely watch the evening news with its stories of senseless death, its reports of disease and famine, its images of war without wondering, “What kind of world have I brought this child into?”

Because the greater truth is, while my baby’s birth has changed my world, his birth hasn’t changed the world. It’s really quite remarkable. On the one hand my immediate world pauses for a glimpse at LIFE – new life – life full of promise and possibility – complete strangers pause and wish you congratulations. It seems as if the world is at peace – but then you see the headlines and realize that the world continues to fall apart. Oh, we long for a day when there could be an end to war, or pollution, or rape, or kidnapping, or drug use – we look at our new born child and think – surely for our children we would change – we have to change – and then we don’t. We keep on sinning. I keep on sinning. The world keeps on sinning. We keep on polluting and robbing and hurting one another. And sometimes we even do so to our own families. If making babies was all the world needed to reverse its course then the world would have righted its ship long ago.

Links of the week

Over at the Pangea Blog guest blogger Rachel Blom asks an important question for all preachers: Do you preach to your whole church? How do your sermons and illustrations within those sermons sound to singles, teenagers, etc.? Excellent post to get you thinking about who sits in your congregation.

On Leadershipjournal.net David Slagle shares three irrational beliefs that too many ministers buy into.  He identifies the reasons and provides healthier alternatives.  A good article that might serve as a good discussion for church staff.  One of the better lines, "Expecting messed up human beings to treat us nicely at all times is, well, messed up."

Mark Roberts, director and scholar in residence of Laity Lodge looks at how the web empowers gossipers. He concludes that while the web probably doesn't make us meaner - he thinks we're pretty mean already - the web does allow us to get away with more meanness. Read more.

Warp speed exegesis

Last week I attending the Preaching Practicum at Wilshire Baptist Church. The featured speaker was Dr. Anna Carter Florence, the Peter Marshall Associate Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. I was not familiar with Dr. Carter Florence other than having viewed one or two of her video clips at Workingpreacher.org. She was excellent.

One thing she taught us was what she called "Warp Speed Exegesis."  Her point wasn't how to fast-forward through exegesis. Instead, the purpose was to help the preacher dig into the text on his or her own without turning too quickly to commentaries. The practice was simple. Take the biblical text and work through it verse by verse paying particular attention to the verbs. Who is doing what? And what are they doing? What isn't happening? One also pays particular attention to where things might have gone differently in the text. What could have happened instead? 

We did this with a dificult passage, the rape of Tamar, found in 2 Samuel 13:1-22. I was surprised at how helpful this method proved to be. Part of the effectiveness was no doubt in part because we did this as a group, which was also one of the main points of the practicum. Doing this activity with lay people can add a whole other dimension to sermon preparation. The other reason this method was effective was because it help move you through the passage helping you pick up the key moments when something could have gone differently - Amnon could have confessed his troubles to a better chosen friend than Jonadab (a crafty man). David could have taken off his sin-induced blinders and kept from sending his daughter into a dangerous situation. The servants could have spoken up (though at a high cost). Before the exercise I thought to myself, how would I ever preach this passage. After the exercise, I had at least five legitimate ways I could preach this text.

Since then, I've tried this method on a few passages - Ps. 46, 1 Thess 3:6-13, and Rev 5:11-14. The results have not been as dramatic as they were for the purely narrative text in 2 Samuel. One reason might be that this works best for narratives. Another reason could easily be that I was working on my own and not with a group. Nevertheless, I have benefited from employing this method in each case and I'm grateful for Dr. Carter Florence's time with us.

Below is one of her videos from WorkingPreacher.org. In it she talks about how to involve the church in this process. Enjoy.

God is not just the object of our preaching. He is also the Subject who proclaims

"As we craft our sermons with love and care, we must remember that God is not merely the object of our preaching, a dose of theological content poured into homiletical form, but the Subject who proclaims. As we speak words of scripture, recall promises passed down through Christian communities, God the active subject in Christian proclamation again encounters us as the Word. . . Preaching is nothing less than God risking an encounter with humankind, week after week, in pulpits and on street corners. The Word continually becomes flesh for us" - Scott Black Johnston in Theology for Preaching (Abingdon, 1997)

Quote of the Week

"There is a homiletics so obsessed with form, or what rhetoric called arrangement - points, steps, blocks, moves, illustrations - that it loses touch with the New Testament's rhetoric, which is characterized by astonishment and self-abandonment to God's future." - Richard Lischer, The End of Words, p. 118.

The cure for boring preaching

"The cure for pulpit dullness is not brilliance but reality" - P.T. Forsyth

Added a new blog to the blogroll

I've added This Preaching Thing to the blogroll. It's a blog by Michael Ruffin, pastor of First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald, GA.

Michael's been at this preaching thing for forty years and has some thoughtful insights. You can get a taste for his writing in this post: Preaching to the Dying.

Ministry is sermon preparation

I am an advocate of the study. I think good, wise, biblical sermons require the preacher to spend ample time listening to the text so that they might also hear a fresh word from God. That being said, I was struck by a passage I read recently in Richard Lischer's The End of Words that reminded me, sermons are not the product of study alone. Ministry, especially ministry to the least of these, is also sermon preparation because it is where we encounter the presence of the living Christ.

“Training in preaching begins with training for ministry. ‘When did we see you naked or hungry or in prison?’ the naive sheep ask the Judge. Preachers have ransacked nature, history, and their own emotions for illustrations of the divine. They have scratched into every conceivable experience in search of divinity or its analogues. They have explored every possible site except the very places Jesus promises to be – among those who suffer and seek restoration.

"Preachers have looked for him virtually everywhere save among the ordinary practices of the people of God, who yearn more deeply than they are willing to admit for sermons that credibly portray their lives of faith – not Mother Teresa’s, Gandhi’s, or Gandolf’s, but theirs” (Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (The Lyman Beecher Lectures in Preaching), 39).

What are ways you join the study and day to day ministry in your sermon preparation? How do you get out of the office and into people's lives?

Preaching Hope in the Midst of Tragedy and Evil

Thanks again to the folks at www.workingpreacher.org

The interplay between the altar and the pulpit

The late John Claypool was an Episcopalian priest that started off as a Southern Baptist minister.  This binocular vision provided him with a wonderful insight into many aspects of worship.  I especially like his take on the "interplay between altar and table."

"I have found the interplay between the altar and the pulpit to be mutually supportive and creative. Kneeling at the altar before a mystery I cannot fathom keeps me from being fanatical and arrogant in the pulpit, while attempting to make as much sense as possible of life and the gospel in the pulpit keeps the altar from degenerating into mindless ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ The Church has always known a feeding of both kinds, and I cherish the opportunity to spend the last phase of my ministry in this particular room of God’s Great Church" (Claypool, The Preaching Event, 2).

My particular room of God's Great Church tends to emphasize the practical to the expense of the mysterious. I wonder how a renewal of the table's presence in worship might help balance our experience?  

Lights, Camera, Action: Helping your sermons come to life

In his book, The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching, (Abingdon, 1999), Paul Scott Wilson argues that preachers should envision their sermons as movie scenes in order to help bring their sermons to life.  Wilson's thesis reminded me of an interview I did with Richard Kannwischer, pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian in Newport Beach, California.  Dr. Kannwischer said that one of the books that had most influenced his sermon preparation was The Screenwriter's Bible.  Wilson doesn't directly reference any such work, but he does provide some basic suggestions for how to transform your sentences in ways that help the congregation to visualize what you are saying.

1. Avoid adjectives and and adverbs. Wilson argues that these descriptive words actually diminish description.   Notice the difference in the examples he provides.  The sentences without adjectives or adverbs are easier to visualize.

• "The beautiful road" vs. "The road ran alongside the beach"
• "She ran quickly" vs. "She scrambled" or "Her feet pounded down the trail"

2. Avoid cliches.

3. Concentrate on a few small details to set the scene.  Think about what details you would need to shoot the scripture text or the modern illustration as a movie.  What decisions would you need to make about gestures, clothing, the age of the character, etc.?  By just adding one or two of these details, the preacher can help a scene leap off the pages of the Bible and into a listener's imagination.  

• Clothing - By briefly mentioning a small detail about a person's clothing we can not only help the congregation visualize the scene, but we also are providing information about that person's economic situation, interest, age, profession, etc.  
• Gestures/Facial Expressions - Emotions are difficult to visualize.  Gestures or facial expressions are not.  Instead of saying, "the boy was bored," one could say, "The boy slumped in his chair with boredom."
• Age - A few quick words about the color of one's hair or the state of one's skin can give a wealth of information about a person's age.

4. Stay out of characters' heads - Wilson argues that if we want people to visualize a scene, we must "stay out of the minds of the characters."  The best movies don't narrate a character's thoughts, they show you a character's actions and let you eavesdrop on their conversations.  This leaves many thoughts hidden, but that is what creates interest in the story. The listener or viewer is drawn into into the movie (or sermon) because they want to figure out what a character is thinking.  He notes that the Bible also rarely gives us a person's thoughts, but instead focuses upon their actions and a few brief quotations of dialogue.  To this day we can read, say, the story of Adam and Eve and wonder at motive as we ponder their actions.  The Bible doesn't give us thoughts, but action and dialogue.

5. Keep the camera on people and actions - Wilson doesn't want a sermon devoid of doctrine.  In fact, his  book is an attempt to get preachers to preach more doctrine in their sermons.  But, he argues, this is done best by focusing upon God as the primary actor in the story.  Instead of preaching on the caring nature of God, we ought to preach on God reaching out to those in trouble.  The action keeps us interested and informs us about doctrine.  Just saying "God is caring" is not as interesting, even if it is as accurate.

From around the Web this week

A man in South Africa, thought to be dead by friends and family, woke up after spending 21 hours in a morgue refrigerator. Workers went screaming from the building after hearing his screams thinking he was a ghost. Lots of applications from this one from thoughts on the resurrection to what it's like to mistake a person for being dead.

CNN's Faith Blog listed ten things they learned in their first year of existence.  Included in their findings, Atheist like to comment on religious stories; Americans, though very religious, don't actually know much about religion; and people are still interested in the Bible.

What does your church communicate about its beliefs through its Sunday morning worship service?  Skye Jethani, senior editor of Leadership Journal writes about his 9-year-old daughter's encounter with two different churches: one liturgical and one contemporary.  In one church she notices the cross, the Bible, and communion.  In the other, she notices they have a coffee shop.  Worth your read.

Finally, to brag on my wife, she has written an excellent piece about grief, the church, and learning to worship not only with, but for one another.