disciple, husband, father, college minister
I mentioned I’d be adding more writings to my list of essays and Bible studies. I’ve just uploaded an essay called Why Jesus?
I wrote it to give away to guests who come to our worship meetings. It’s relatively short (about 3,600 words). In it I highlight three simple reasons to believe in God and then show the reader how to decide whether Jesus is indeed the way to God that he claimed to be.
I have some more stuff on my hard drive I’ll put up here eventually.
I’ve finally put up a collection of essays and Bible studies that I’ve written. I’ve been composing them off and on for years, usually in response to questions I receive from students.
I have more hidden away in the recesses of my hard drive. I’ll add them to the list as I have time.
I hope you find them helpful. Feel free to share them with others or use them for any noncommercial purposes.
For a few years, Facebook was one of the best ways to connect with college students. Not any more. It’s still useful, but not nearly as useful as it used to be. The novelty has worn off and so students aren’t as responsive on it.
So like Steve Lutz I’ve been thinking about text messaging lately. My younger students (frosh and sophomores) seem to be much more likely to have unlimited texting plans than my upperclassmen and grad students.
In the past I’ve just texted people individually, but now I’m experimenting with group text messaging services.
I considered using Twitter and telling people to subscribe via text. A few problems:
a) College students don’t use twitter.
b) It centralizes the communication too much.
c) I don’t feel confident in twitter’s reliability.
d) The verb “tweet”.
So I’ve been looking into other services. So far I’m drawn to txtBlaster. The thing I like best is that I can deputize as many of the subscribers as I want and allow them to text the entire group, so I can make this a student-driven thing. It’s a free (ad-supported) service. They claim to screen their ads carefully and to target them based on the type of group you set up. So far so good on that front.
Do you have
a) any thoughts on using text messaging effectively as a ministry tool?
b) another service to recommend (such as TextMarks or txtSignal or even the maligned Twitter)?
P.S. If you want to see txtBlaster in action, feel free to text xastanford to 25278. I’ll be playing around with it for the next few days.
I evaluate a lot of sermons. I don’t just mean that I listen to sermons and decide whether I like them or not — everyone who goes to church does that. I mean that I professionally evaluate sermons and give formal feedback to the preacher. Some I evaluate in my role as a ministry trainer and others I evaluate in my role on a preaching team (before one of us preaches we preach the sermon to each other and get feedback on how to strengthen it).
So I’ve thought about this a lot. Most sermon evaluation forms you find on the internet and at seminaries are not very helpful because they measure too many things.
These were the top hits when I googled for “sermon evaluation forms”
Calvin Seminary’s (30 questions)
The Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s Form for Ministry Interns (41 questions)
Reformed Baptist Seminary’s (35 questions).
Do all the things these long forms ask about matter? A little. But using that to evaluate a sermon is like evaluating your church’s statement of faith based on its grammar. It sort of misses the point. Of course you want a statement of faith that is grammatical, but if its content is sketchy then every moment spent improving its grammar is wasted time. Sinfully wasted time.
In the same way, focusing on the superficials of a sermon when the underlying content is bogus is ridiculous. I realize that’s not the intent of these forms, but that is what they encourage.
So this is the form I use:
Pointers (what should I change?)
Keepers (what was so good I should be sure not to take it out)?
That’s it — two questions. I sometimes do it on a 3x5 index card. Keepers on the front, pointers on the back (a tip I got from Earl Creps).
And this is the grid I’m putting it through:
1) Was Christ proclaimed clearly?
2) Was the sermon Biblically sound?
3) Was it interesting?
4) Did it ask me to do something appropriate in response?
I try to never give them more than three pointers and three keepers, and I try to be as specific as possible.
There are lots of other aspects of a sermon I could nitpick, but if the person is preaching an interesting, Biblically sound sermon that exalts Christ and challenges me to obey Him then they’re doing fabulous. Why would I nitpick them at that point? To demoralize them? To clone my habits (“at this point I would have told a joke — you should tell a joke”)?
Anyway, this post probably wasn’t relevant to most of you. But for those of you who have to evaluate preaching on a regular basis, I hope I’ve given you some food for thought.
And to those in my ministry, now you know what I’m trying to do when I prepare a sermon: proclaim the good news of Jesus in a way that is faithful to the Biblical text I’m working with in an interesting way that challenges you to wholeheartedly respond. From time to time, be sure to let me know how I’m doing. 🙂
I recently updated the Recommended Reading Google Shared Items plugin for WordPress to the latest version and it stopped working.
I contacted Jacob Goldman, the plugin developer, who went above and beyond the call of duty to help me fix the problem. The issue was all on my end, and he helped me straighten it out quickly.
The man deserves a shout-out.
To Jacob: consider yourself shouted out. Or shout outed. Or something.
To the rest of the world: if you need a web developer check out the company he works for C. Murray Consulting. I can attest that they’ve got excellent customer-service skills and know what they’re doing.
For Paula’s birthday I bought her a little device called the Roku Digital Video Player. Basically, it takes Netflix streaming videos and displays them on your television.
This is very good for us since we don’t have any television service. When we moved into our new place a year ago we decided that our cable bill was 90% waste, so we cancelled it and we watch television series on DVD through Netflix or on the computer now.
So I bought this Roku device which takes the 12,000 or so streaming videos available on Netflix (and the 40,000 or so available on Amazon as pay-per-view) and lets you watch them on your normal television.
The Roku box is amazing. It only does one thing and it does it well. The images are crisp, the audio is clear, and the interface is very easy to use. In my opinion, the videos display much better than they ever did on my laptop or our desktop computer.
If you use Netflix and ever watch streaming videos, you should seriously consider the Roku. It rocks.
And it costs less than a few months of cable — even when you combine it with your monthly Netflix bill.
I was just reading an essay by D. A. Carson, “Worship Under The Word”.
Carson is, in my estimation, one of the greatest biblical scholars in the world today. And I don’t just say that because he loves university ministry. 🙂 Approximately one gazillion (rounding up from three hundred and forty-four) of his writings are available for free online. They’re worth reading. Or at least saving to your hard drive so you can find them when you search your computer using Google Desktop…
Anyway, in footnote 39 on page 47 of this essay, he makes a rather pointed observation. I have bolded my favorite line.
Perhaps this is the place to reflect on the fact that many contemporary “worship leaders” have training in music but none in Bible, theology, history, or the like. When pressed as to the criteria by which they choose their music, many of these leaders finally admit that their criteria oscillate between personal preference and keeping the congregation reasonably happy—scarcely the most profound criteria in the world. They give little or no thought to covering the great themes of Scripture, or the great events of Scripture, or the range of personal response to God found in the Psalms (as opposed to covering the narrow themes of being upbeat and in the midst of “worship”), or the nature of biblical locutions (in one chorus the congregation manages to sing “holy” thirty-six times, while three are enough for Isaiah and John of the Apocalypse), or the central historical traditions of the church, or anything else of weight. If such leaders operate on their own with little guidance or training or input from senior pastors, the situation commonly degenerates from the painful to the pitiful.
Heh. Heh. Heh.
I would “heh” more, but apparently three times is enough. 🙂
One of my favorite MP3s is Tim Keller’s Preaching to Believers and Unbelievers. I desperately want to preach in such a way that I nourish believers while simultaneously engaging nonbelievers.
I don’t know of any comparable resource that talks about musical worship. Does anyone know of a good MP3, article or book along these lines?
I’m not just looking for something that says, “We should do this.” I’m looking for something that says, “We should do this, and here is how.”
You can leave a comment the hurt locker dvd or send me an email/Facebook message.
The Freakonomics blog tipped me off to a fascinating interview with the author of a recent book on marriage in America. Two of the author’s responses stood out to me (emphasis added):
Fifty years ago you had to be married to be a respectable adult in the United States. Today, marriage is optional—you can get most of your emotional and economic needs by living with partner—and single parents can also get by. But oddly enough, marriage is, if anything, more important than ever to people as a symbol of having made it in life—of having a successful personal life. Most young Americans still want to get married, but they do it only when all the other steps to adulthood are in place—when they have completed their education, when they and their partners have jobs, when they have saved up enough for a down payment on a house, or even have had children together. Marriage used to be the first step into adulthood, but now it is the last. It’s the capstone of personal life—the final brick put in after all the others are in place.
So marriage is still important, but in a different way than in the past. It’s a symbol of personal achievement—the ultimate merit badge, the marriage badge.
And
One statistic that stunned me: take two children, one growing up with married parents in the United States, and one growing up with unmarried parents in Sweden—which child has the higher likelihood of seeing his parents’ relationship break up? Answer: the American kid, because children living with married parents in the United States have a higher probability of experiencing a break-up than do children living with unmarried parents in Sweden. That’s how high our break-up rates are.
So… yeah. If it sounds interesting to you, check out The Marriage-Go-Round. Interestingly, the Google Books page is very sparse right now. How long does it take for new books to get a full listing?
One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years has been Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s chock-full of well-researched goodness. One of the most intriguing studies they cite is The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads. If you read the article (or just the summary in Made to Stick), you learn that if you make an ad using one of a handful of templates, it will be much better (and perceived to be more creative) than if you put a group of people in a room and tell them to be as creative as they can.
Ever since I stumbled upon that study, I’ve been thinking about how it applies to sermons. There are lots of ways to structure sermons, but only a few seem to work really well.
As a result, I’ve compiled a list of sermon templates. When I’m preaching, I try to think through these templates to see if one naturally matches my subject, and I use as that the framework that I build the message around.
Template #1: Classic Expository Preaching
Simply use the outline/plot of the text as your preaching outline. This template is transcendent when done well, and painful when done poorly. It’s probably the most common template out there.
Template #2: Practical
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In Acts 2 Peter structures his sermon around the answers to three questions.
Template #3: How To
One of the simplest ways to structure a message:
Template #4: Solve The Problem (Andy Stanley)
Template #5: Pronouns (Andy Stanley)
Template #6: Life Change (Rick Warren)
Template #7: The Story With a Punch (Inductive)
Template #8: The Question & Answer Outline (Thomas Aquinas)
I hope these serve you well. I should hasten to add that these aren’t based on research — they’re the byproduct of observation and of what I learned at a few conferences. In other words, you can take what the article said about advertisements to the bank. You should only take my advice to the lemonade stand.