Here’s another lesson I learned about preaching from my brief stint as a guest speaker in multiple churches: Surrender control of the outcomes. One of the freedoms I enjoyed most as an interim preacher was that my sermons were usually not generated by a specific situation at the church where I was speaking. I found […]
Archives for 2012
Being Wrong
I spent the past two months preaching through selected stories from Acts. Sometimes I don’t know what a sermon is about until I’ve preached it. Same goes with a sermon series. I wish I could say I’m able to think so far ahead that I know why I’m preaching a particular series, but sometimes I’m […]
December 10, 2012 by 4 Comments
Salvation By Port-a-Potty (An Advent Reflection)
(For those on the email list for this blog, sorry for the repost. My database was reset yesterday and I lost this post. So I had to load it again.) My favorite scene from the movie “Castaway” furnishes a great metaphor for Advent reflection. It’s the pivotal scene after Tom Hanks’s character has acclimated to […]
December 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Preaching To Those Who Don’t Know The Bible
Several weeks ago I preached a sermon from Acts 2. I mentioned Pentecost, but didn’t take the time to explain the background of the Pentecost Festival because I was trying keep my sermon from going too long. (From what I can tell, at the church where I preach, anything over thirty minutes starts to feel […]
November 26, 2012 by 1 Comment
How to Preach Better Sermons: The Shorter The Better
From March 2009 to September 2012, I didn’t write very many sermons from scratch. During this three year period, I did plenty of preaching, but it was almost exclusively sermons I had already written and preached before. Being a guest speaker in a church, even when doing four or five Sundays in a row, is […]
November 14, 2012 by 11 Comments
The Biggest Miracle of All
Conversion, the reorientation of a life round the good news of the risen Jesus, is a mystery to me. More so now than it used to be. How do we explain how someone’s life can be changed in such a radical way? I say we explain it by calling conversion what it is: the biggest […]
November 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The View From The Floor
The following is an excerpt from Train For Something Greater: An Athlete’s Guide to Spiritual Fitness available at Amazon.com. The View From The Floor CrossFitters have much in common: language (WOD, AMRAP, Pukie), diet (Paleo-Zone-Primal), apparel (Lulu, Vibram, Inov-8), and philosophy (pain is weakness leaving the body). Before we started talking, eating, dressing, and thinking alike, we shared […]
August 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment
My Coffee Shop Nemesis (The Real Reason We Moved From Tulsa to Austin)
I’m about to share something I’ve never told anyone before: the real reason we moved from Tulsa to Austin just over three years ago. But first, I have to give you some context by explaining why I ended up working from a particular Starbucks in Tulsa almost everyday. It wasn’t until I moved to Tulsa […]
August 15, 2012 by 3 Comments
Five Lessons I’ve Learned From Working in Coffee Houses
As promised in a previous post, here’s a rundown of some of the lessons I’ve learned from past coffee shop experiences. The first place from which I tried to work was the Café at the Barnes & Noble near my office in Bellingham, Washington. Going there was a rookie mistake. Something only someone who had […]
August 2, 2012 by 8 Comments
In Search of a Good Coffee Shop
We’ve been in Dallas for a couple of weeks. One of the pressing issues I currently face is locating an acceptable coffee shop in which I can do some serious writing. This is one of the most important things to do when moving to a new community, ranking just above finding a safe place to […]
July 18, 2012 by 8 Comments
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons