How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Lis­ten­ing to a bad ser­mon is like eat­ing crab legs. It’s a lot more trou­ble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are dili­gent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I some­times find help­ful, in order of pref­er­ence. I don’t want to make you too excit­ed: noth­ing is going to make a bad ser­mon good. But these might help mit­i­gate your suf­fer­ing.

  1. Be mer­ci­ful. Preach­ing con­sis­tent­ly good ser­mons is a lot hard­er than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your cowork­ers and cus­tomers to respond with com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing. Now extend that same com­pas­sion to the preach­er.
  2. Over­look the stu­pid stuff. Every once in a while even sol­id and reli­able preach­ers will say some­thing that’s com­plete­ly ridicu­lous — usu­al­ly when they ven­ture out­side their area of exper­tise. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when preach­ers begin using sto­ries to illus­trate a point they are try­ing to make. It can real­ly throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at fam­i­ly reunions. Even your favorite book has some bor­ing pas­sages, but you judge the book on its high­lights. Judge ser­mons like­wise.
  3. Be ran­dom­ly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a sem­i­nar: you should bring a note­book to ser­mons not because of how insight­ful and mag­nif­i­cent the preach­er is going to be, but because the Holy Spir­it will spark new and amaz­ing insights in you which are only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to what is in the speak­er’s notes. Few ser­mons are so bad that there is no good­ness in them — even a three-year-old will say some­thing pro­found and/or hilar­i­ous if you lis­ten to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unex­pect­ed Bible ref­er­ence, or a fact that you were hith­er­to unaware of and begin writ­ing furi­ous­ly. Doo­dle as well. Repeat as nec­es­sary.
  4. Pre­tend it’s oppo­sites day. don t look now free down­load

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    had a tra­di­tion in his Chi Alpha min­istry. Once a year he would preach oppo­site: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrust­wor­thy”, etc. He did it dead­pan (well — as dead­pan as Har­low ever gets). The first time he did it he was wor­ried his stu­dents would­n’t catch on that he was mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing and then repeat­ing their own doubts back to them in order to demon­strate how ridicu­lous their doubts were, but it was a huge suc­cess. Even the guests got it. It became an insti­tu­tion. Ever since he told me that sto­ry, I game­ly pre­tend that a real­ly bad ser­mon is mere­ly the results of “oppo­sites day”.

  5. Improve the ser­mon.

    This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be dis­rup­tive if peo­ple around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only pos­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal defense. There are two fun­da­men­tal kinds of bad­ness. There’s bad deliv­ery. That’s the best kind. The preach­er has good things to say, but the inabil­i­ty to say them well. The whole ser­mon can be spent fruit­ful­ly para­phras­ing and improv­ing the sol­id con­tent of the ser­mon. For exam­ple, you might reorder and reword the out­line for greater impact or log­i­cal flow. There’s bad con­tent. The preach­er is dis­tort­ing the text or not think­ing things through. That’s hard­er, but can be even more divert­ing. You can com­pose your own out­line from scratch on the same pas­sage or top­ic that the preach­er is endeav­or­ing to address. One or two of my best ser­mons has come about this way.

Final­ly, my apolo­gies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has hap­pened before and have no doubt it will hap­pen again. It’s my job to be the best speak­er I can be and it is your job to be the best lis­ten­er that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work togeth­er this whole thing will go much more smooth­ly.

And a note to my pas­tor — relax, this was not inspired by your ser­mon this week. You did­n’t even preach. We watched a movie, remem­ber? 🙂

We're Number 10

Just noticed that the Nation­al Coun­cil of Church’s 2009 Year­book was recent­ly pub­lished (found via MMI). Here are the stats on the 10 largest reli­gious groups in Amer­i­ca.

  1. The Roman Catholic Church, 67,117,06 mem­bers, down 0.59 per­cent.
  2. The South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, 16,266,920 mem­bers, down 0.24 per­cent.
  3. The Unit­ed Methodist Church, 7,931,733 mem­bers, down 0.80 per­cent.
  4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, 5,873,408 mem­bers, up 1.63 per­cent.
  5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  6. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  7. Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, 4,709,956 mem­bers, down 1.35 per­cent.
  8. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion of Amer­i­ca, Inc., 3,500,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  9. Pres­by­ter­ian Church (USA), 2,941,412 mem­bers, down 2.79 per­cent
  10. Assem­blies of God, 2,863,265 mem­bers, up 0.96 per­cent. dan­ger­ous beau­ty divx online blue­toes the christ­mas elf movie down­load down­load home­ward bound ii lost in san fran­cis­co online

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So.… yeah. We’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10! Maybe we can chant that at Gen­er­al Coun­cil.

Sad­ly, we’re the only Chris­t­ian group (in the top 10) that is grow­ing. And even sad­der, when you get into our inter­nal num­bers you real­ize that a few parts of our move­ment are grow­ing rapid­ly but that there are huge swaths under­go­ing slow decline. For now, the explo­sive growth is off­set­ting the decay.

I’m grate­ful that I’m on a win­ning team and that our move­ment is grow­ing when so many are stag­nat­ing, but I must con­fess that a 0.96% growth rate is not exact­ly the sort of thing that stirs the pulse.

We need divine­ly-sparked revival to which we must respond with orga­ni­za­tion­al renew­al, or else we’ll soon be cel­e­brat­ing the fact that we shrunk least.

But hey — for now I’ve got a handy fact I can share with peo­ple who say, “The Assem­blies of God? Nev­er heard of it.” I can now shoot back, “Hey — we’re almost as large as the Pres­by­te­ri­ans. Near­ly. We’re only off by like 80,000 peo­ple. That’s the size of a good South Amer­i­can church. We haven’t quite fig­ured out how to do that in North Amer­i­ca, but it can’t be that hard. So we’re basi­cal­ly one mis­si­o­log­i­cal insight and then one good church plant away from being num­ber 9. So there.”

Baptism on Campus

Jan­u­ary 29th I had a great priv­i­lege. I was able to bap­tize my friend Kel­ly in the Claw Foun­tain in between the Book­store and Old Union.

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The water was cold. In fact, I saw Kel­ly’s eyes shoot open when she went under the water and I could prac­ti­cal­ly read the thoughts run­ning through her brain, “I want to gasp. But if I gasp, I’ll drown. Drown­ing is bad at a bap­tism. But I want to gasp so bad­ly.”

For­tu­nate­ly, the warm Cal­i­for­nia sun brought her back from the brink of hypother­mia right after I pulled her up. I’m just glad I told her to bring a change of clothes and a tow­el!

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watch slaugh­ter online If hav­ing a bap­tism out in pub­lic strikes you as a lit­tle odd I’d like to point out that it has ample Bib­li­cal and his­tor­i­cal prece­dent. The most famous Bib­li­cal exam­ple is from Acts 8:36–38:

As they trav­eled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why should­n’t I be bap­tized?” And he gave orders to stop the char­i­ot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip bap­tized him.

Yeah. So we did that.

And I hope we get to do it again soon. 🙂

Digital Discipleship

In one of the first con­ver­sa­tions I remem­ber hav­ing with Scott Aught­mon, he tried to sell me on the advan­tages of using sequen­tial autore­spon­ders down­load evil under the sun

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in min­istry. I had no idea what he was talk­ing about, so I smiled and nod­ded.

Turns out they’re awe­some. I wish I had lis­tened to him soon­er.

Con­sid­er the case of Dick Schroed­er. He speaks at retreats and fre­quent­ly prays with peo­ple to be bap­tized in the Holy Spir­it. Over the years, he has put togeth­er a series of emails that he sends to peo­ple after­wards to coach them from a dis­tance.

One day he asked me if there was a way to auto­mate the process. My mind flashed back to Scot­t’s enthu­si­asm for these autore­spon­der things, so I down­loaded a free PHP script called Infi­nite Respon­der

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and set up http://chialpha.com/resources/holyspirit.

Now if some­one signs up, they begin receiv­ing coach­ing emails from Dick once a week. Since the mes­sages appear to come from his email address, stu­dents can just hit “reply” and ask Dick about any­thing they found con­fus­ing or that they need spe­cial advice about. It’s very low-main­te­nance for him, and Chi Alpha stu­dents nation­wide get a year’s worth of Dick­’s exper­tise.

Since rolling this out at the World Mis­sions Sum­mit (Jan 1st), we’ve had just over 200 peo­ple sub­scribe to these updates. That works out to about 7 signups a day. I have no idea where the total will cap out, but momen­tum is build­ing and I don’t even feel that the resource has been thor­ough­ly pub­li­cized yet.

Things I like about the tool:

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    It’s just email. No one has to install a spe­cial plu­g­in, put head­phones in their com­put­er, or have some insane­ly fast con­nec­tion.

  • Per­son­al. The emails come from an actu­al human being to whom you can respond.
  • Low-main­te­nance. Once the email is in the data­base, it’s just there. Nei­ther Dick nor I need to do any­thing spe­cial to send them out. And Dick only gets replies from peo­ple who have spe­cif­ic ques­tions, which is only a frac­tion of the peo­ple who receive any giv­en email.

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Pret­ty cool, eh?

Late­ly I’ve been won­der­ing what oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties are out there. Some ideas that I’ve had:

  • Emails for new believ­ers
  • A “40 days” type cam­paign for Chi Alpha with dai­ly emails where each cam­pus that choos­es to par­tic­i­pate picks its own start and stop times and the script takes care of all those details.
  • A first two weeks of school devo­tion­al to get stu­dents fired up when they return from sum­mer break
  • Coach­ing emails for peo­ple who are called to min­istry
  • Month­ly emails for Chi Alpha grads to help them make the tran­si­tion out of col­lege grace­ful­ly
  • A ter­m’s worth of week­ly emails for peo­ple pio­neer­ing new Chi Alpha min­istries
  • etc,etc

It’s just a mat­ter of find­ing a per­son with the right exper­tise and hook­ing them up. So if you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear about it. I’d espe­cial­ly love to hear if you’re a Chi Alpha leader who has con­tent ready to go. I can just run it past Den­nis and get that stuff online faster than you can imag­ine. 😉

Thoughts on the Sociology of Religion

I have a stu­dent tak­ing a soci­ol­o­gy of reli­gion course right now, and she asked me for some advice on how to inte­grate what she’s learn­ing in class with her faith.

I thought this might be of inter­est to more stu­dents than just her, so here’s what I had to say (slight­ly mod­i­fied from the email):

We need to meet face-to-face to talk this through, but I have some ini­tial thoughts for you:

1) Many times we con­fuse descrip­tion with expla­na­tion. To explain how some­thing works is not to explain why it is. Clear­ly every­thing must work some way, and so inter­est­ing descrip­tions of every­thing ought to abound — I should be able to describe think­ing, love, humor, and grav­i­ty. But that does not mean that I have under­stood the things I am describ­ing inter­est­ing aspects of. For instance, I can describe the physics of golf in great detail, and then anoth­er schol­ar can come along and describe the rules of golf in great detail, and then a third schol­ar can come along and describe the his­to­ry of golf in great detail. All of these descrip­tions may be accu­rate, but none of these descrip­tions will explain why I play golf. And none will cap­ture what it feels like to play golf. And like­ly none of them, if writ­ten for a schol­ar­ly audi­ence, will be of the slight­est use to golfers desir­ing to hone their craft. Remem­ber that there is a soci­ol­o­gy of mar­riage, but should you become mar­ried one day you will dis­cov­er that there is a lev­el of real­i­ty that the soci­o­log­i­cal descrip­tions nev­er ade­quate­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed.

2) If you assume there is no God at the begin­ning of your analy­sis then your analy­sis will not per­suade me that there is no God, for how could it con­clude any­thing else? It reminds me of a sto­ry Fran­cis Collins told us last year: “A marine biol­o­gist casts a net into the low­est part of the ocean, brings up the catch, and ana­lyzes it. He makes an amaz­ing dis­cov­ery: there is no crea­ture at the bot­tom of the sea less than two inch­es in diam­e­ter! The prob­lem, of course, is that his net has two inch holes. It is inca­pable of dis­cov­er­ing any­thing small­er than its mesh.” In the same way, a method­ol­o­gy that rules out the super­nat­ur­al from the begin­ning will nev­er dis­cov­er evi­dence of the super­nat­ur­al. This should not be sur­pris­ing at all.

3) There are some faith-friend­ly soci­ol­o­gists out there. Three worth
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sea of love dvd , Bradley Wright, and Chris­t­ian Smith. Read some of their writ­ings, par­tic­u­lar­ly Stark’s. You can find him in the library. Maybe even email one of them and explain that you’re an under­grad and you have some ques­tions about how to relate soci­ol­o­gy to your faith (do not be offend­ed if they do not reply — they are busy peo­ple). Also, check out some of the books at http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/vocation/sociology/

Hope that’s use­ful to some of you. Much of it applies to the social sci­ences in gen­er­al. lam­ic­tal orange starter watch bar­bie mer­maid­ia online mak­ing waves divx movie online

How Can There Be Only One Way?

I was recent­ly think­ing about 1st Tim­o­thy 2:5–6: “For there is one God and one inter­me­di­ary between God and human­i­ty, Christ Jesus, him­self human, who gave him­self as a ran­som for all, reveal­ing God’s pur­pose at his appoint­ed time.” (New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion)

These vers­es high­light the aspect of Chris­tian­i­ty that both­ers West­ern­ers most: its exclu­siv­i­ty. The notion that Jesus is the only way to God vex­es many peo­ple.

This morn­ing a thought occurred to me: almost every­one who believes in God believes that there’s only one way. Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize it.

For most peo­ple I know, their “one way” is being nice. Unless you are nice/­good/s­in­cere/al­tru­is­tic/em­pa­thet­ic/en­light­ened/ad­jec­tive-of-choice enough, you fail.

The way of nice­ness is no less lim­it­ing than the way of faith in Christ: it excludes peo­ple just as sure­ly and it is far more arbi­trary.

This is coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some peo­ple, so allow me to explain.

It is exclu­sive in that some peo­ple just aren’t nice enough. More on that lat­er.

It is arbi­trary in that the dev­il is in the details. How do you know if you’ve been nice enough? And what con­sti­tutes the right kind of nice­ness, any­way? After all, there’s no real rea­son to sup­pose that an infi­nite­ly smart Being would mea­sure nice­ness in the way that makes the most sense to you.

The Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ple of exclu­siv­i­ty makes more sense, for it flows from the sim­ple belief that Jesus is God in the flesh.

Think­ing about this for a sec­ond should make the rea­son­ing clear.

If you believe that Jesus is God, then to say you can come to God apart from Jesus is as non­sen­si­cal as say­ing you can go to Los Ange­les with­out going to Cal­i­for­nia.

In oth­er words, all that Chris­tians are insist­ing is that you can’t come to God with­out com­ing to God. This hard­ly seems con­tro­ver­sial. You may reject the premis­es of the argu­ment (that God exists or that Jesus is God), but grant­ed those two the belief can’t be cat­e­go­rized as extreme or bizarre. It’s just con­sis­tent.

The real prob­lem most peo­ple seem to have isn’t that Chris­tian­i­ty is exclu­sive. Their real prob­lem is that Chris­tian­i­ty appears to be unfair­ly exclu­sive. This is most often expressed as fol­lows, “What about those who have nev­er heard of Christ? How can God exclude them sim­ply because they haven’t heard of Jesus?”

There are actu­al­ly some very rea­son­able answers to those ques­tions. Here’s one, here’s anoth­er

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, and here’s yet a third. There are more where those came from — if this ques­tion dis­tress­es you then dig into it. You won’t agree with every­thing you read. I cer­tain­ly don’t agree with every argu­ment in three arti­cles I linked. Fig­ure out what you believe for your­self.

But here’s the impor­tant thing to real­ize: the same prob­lem con­fronts the nice­ness stan­dard. What about those born in the wrong time or the wrong place? Some of your ances­tors owned slaves in accor­dance with the cus­toms of their cul­ture (this is true regard­less of your eth­nic­i­ty) — did they fail a test they did­n’t know they were tak­ing?

Some of them like­ly burned cats to death for fun. Do they fail the nice­ness test mere­ly because they were born in the wrong time or in the wrong place?

For that mat­ter, what of you? Who knows which of our actions our grand­chil­dren will deem immoral? Per­haps you have been born in the wrong time and place to achieve a rea­son­able stan­dard of nice­ness.

You might object that we should judge peo­ple rel­a­tive to the stan­dards of their own cul­ture, so we don’t need to wor­ry about what stan­dards our grand­chil­dren will hold us up against. Per­haps. Believ­ing that would require you to stop judg­ing dic­ta­tor­ships, sweat­shops, mod­ern-day slave traf­fick­ing, and racism in oth­er cul­tures. Also, you will need to let the Church off the hook for things like the Cru­sades and the Inqui­si­tion. This is just one the prob­lems that emerges from the notion that moral stan­dards are com­plete­ly rel­a­tive to cul­ture or per­son­al­i­ty. There are sev­er­al detailed cri­tiques avail­able: here’s one

, here’s anoth­er, and here is a third (that last one is a pdf writ­ten by Car­di­nal Ratzinger before he became Pope).

So if your main beef with Chris­tian­i­ty is that it’s exclu­sive, exam­ine your own beliefs care­ful­ly. You might be sur­prised to dis­cov­er just how exclu­sion­ary they turn out to be.

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I Am Thankful

Today is Thanks­giv­ing, and once again I am remind­ed of all that I have to be grate­ful for.

God loves me. I have a won­der­ful fam­i­ly (both by birth and by mar­riage). I have a faith­ful team of sup­port­ers who part­ner with me in min­istry. I have the coolest call­ing in the world. I have fab­u­lous stu­dents in my min­istry. I live in Amer­i­ca in the 21st cen­tu­ry — one of the great­est, freest, and most pros­per­ous cul­tures of all time. I live in Cal­i­for­nia, which is as awe­some as the rest of you think it is. And, and, and, and…

Today is Thanks­giv­ing, and so such a list springs eas­i­ly to mind. It reminds me that I am to be thank­ful every day. Many pas­sages com­mand us to be grate­ful. Among them are Eph­esians 5:19–20, Colos­sians 2:7, Colos­sians 3:15–16, and 1 Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans 5:18. They’re won­der­ful pas­sages and worth mem­o­riz­ing.

But my favorite pas­sage on grat­i­tude is from Deuteron­o­my 8:17–18:

You may say to your­self, “My pow­er and the strength of my hands have pro­duced this wealth for me.” But remem­ber the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the abil­i­ty to pro­duce wealth…

It is God who gives us the abil­i­ty. Not just the abil­i­ty to pro­duce wealth, but also the abil­i­ty to make jokes, to find love, to enjoy a sun­set, to get good grades, to run quick­ly, to leap in pud­dles, and to sleep sound­ly at night.

Every day is filled with occa­sions for grat­i­tude, but we almost always let them pass unre­marked.

This Thanks­giv­ing, take to heart the ever-quotable G. K. Chester­ton:

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the con­cert and the opera, and grace before the play and pan­tomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketch­ing, paint­ing, swim­ming, fenc­ing, box­ing, walk­ing, play­ing, danc­ing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

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Expecting An Email From Me? Check Your Spam Folder.

If you haven’t heard from me and you’ve been expect­ing to, I apol­o­gize. For some rea­son a lot of my very nor­mal emails (par­tic­u­lar­ly to stu­dents) have been labeled as spam. Here’s an exam­ple of an email that gets labeled as spam:

Stu­den­t’s email to me: “Glen, can I get a ride to church on Sun­day?”
My reply to the stu­dent: “Sure, I’ll pick you up at 10am. See you then!”

Result — auto­mat­i­cal­ly delet­ed as SPAM! The poor girl thought I was ignor­ing her and almost biked to church before we got it straight­ened out.

I had a stu­dent send me a copy of one of the unfor­tu­nate emails, and dig­ging through the head­ers I found this entry from Stan­ford’s spam fil­ter:

X-Spam: Probability=82%, Report='URI_CLASS_ABS_DOMAIN 8

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from with­in movie , BODY_SIZE_6000_6999 0, WEBMAIL_SOURCE 0, __BOUNCE_CHALLENGE_SUBJ 0, __CD 0, __CP_URI_IN_BODY 0, __CT 0, __CTE 0, __CT_TEXT_PLAIN 0, __FRAUD_419_BODY_WEBMAIL 0, __FRAUD_419_WEBMAIL 0, __FRAUD_419_WEBMAIL_FROM 0, __FROM_GMAIL 0, __HAS_MSGID 0, __HELO_GMAIL 0, __MIME_TEXT_ONLY 0, __MIME_VERSION 0, __PHISH_SPEAR_HTTP_RECEIVED 0, __PHISH_SPEAR_STRUCTURE_1 0, __RDNS_GMAIL 0, __SANE_MSGID 0, __URI_CLASS_ANY 0′

I’ve googled for URI_CLASS_ABS_DOMAIN, but I haven’t been able to fig­ure out what it means. I’m send­ing my emails from gmail, so I don’t think there’s any weird­ness there. Some­thing about the con­tent of my email seems fishy to the spam fil­ter. My best guess is that it’s my foot­er (which I intend to dis­able as a test), but any insight is appre­ci­at­ed.

The foot­er, in case you’re curi­ous, is an innocu­ous

Glen Davis: http://glenandpaula.com/
Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship @ Stanford University: http://xastanford.org/

Bot­tom line: if you expect­ed an email from me and you haven’t seen it, check your spam fold­er. A hap­py sur­prise might be wait­ing for you.

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Jesus Wants Friends Not Fans

I was chat­ting with De Wen (a stu­dent in our min­istry) yes­ter­day and he made a com­ment that real­ly res­onat­ed with me: “God wants friends, not fans.”

A lot of us set­tle for being fans. I often set­tle for being a fan. But there’s so much more avail­able — like Abra­ham, we can be friends with God (Isa­iah 41:8, James 2:23). As he did to the dis­ci­ples, Jesus yearns to say to us, “I no longer call you ser­vants but friends” (John 15:15).

But the temp­ta­tion to be a mere fan is strong. In Jim­my Tate’s mem­o­rable phrase, we sub­sti­tute praise for prayer. We allow the life of the church to dis­place our own spir­i­tu­al jour­ney and we live vic­ar­i­ous­ly through the pas­tor’s insights or the wor­ship lead­er’s zeal. Like a duti­ful fan, we turn out for the game (Sun­day morn­ing) and cheer at all the appro­pri­ate places. But we don’t call the coach after the game to con­grat­u­late him or shoot the breeze. We don’t invite him over for a vic­to­ry bbq. That’s the stuff a friend would do.

We’re just fans, so we go home and talk about how great the game was.

And we miss out on some­thing won­der­ful.

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Sermon Templates

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.

  1. What?
  2. So what?
  3. Now what?

Tem­plate #3: How To
One of the sim­plest ways to struc­ture a mes­sage:

  1. Tell them why.
  2. Show them how.

Tem­plate #4: Solve The Prob­lem (Andy Stan­ley)

  1. Cre­ate Atten­tion: “here’s a prob­lem that needs to be resolved
  2. Inte­grate Scrip­ture: “for­tu­nate­ly, we’re not the first ones to wres­tle with this”
  3. Clar­i­fy The Sig­nif­i­cance: “here’s why this answer mat­ters”
  4. Apply The Con­cept: “and here’s how to make it work in real life”

Tem­plate #5: Pro­nouns (Andy Stan­ley)

  1. Me (Ori­en­ta­tion): Intro­duce your­self to the audi­ence and to your per­son­al expe­ri­ence of the prob­lem you’re talk­ing about.
  2. We (Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion): Show how the audi­ence has the same (or a suf­fi­cient­ly sim­i­lar) prob­lem.
  3. God (Illu­mi­na­tion): Tell them what the Bible says about how to respond to this prob­lem.
  4. You (Appli­ca­tion): Call for a per­son­al response
  5. We (Inspi­ra­tion): Explain how things would be change if we all respond­ed in obe­di­ence.

Tem­plate #6: Life Change (Rick War­ren)

  1. Estab­lish a need
  2. Give per­son­al exam­ples
  3. Present a plan
  4. Offer hope
  5. Call for com­mit­ment

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Tem­plate #7: The Sto­ry With a Punch (Induc­tive)

  1. Tell an engag­ing, care­ful­ly-cho­sen sto­ry (usu­al­ly fun­ny).
  2. Bring the sur­prise punch­line from the Bible.

Tem­plate #8: The Ques­tion & Answer Out­line (Thomas Aquinas)

  1. Make a bold claim (or ask a tough ques­tion and give an answer)
  2. Antic­i­pate the objec­tions raised by your claim/answer
  3. Answer the objec­tions
  4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 as long as nec­es­sary to estab­lish your orig­i­nal claim.

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.