Featured Articles Archives

• A Battle for Integrity  (October 22, 2007)
  You want to shock the world? Start here--demonstrating the guts to do what's right when no one is looking.
• The Preacher as Lifelong Learner  (January 1, 2007)
  Options for Continuing Education in Ministry
• An Alphabet of Grace  (November 1, 2007)
  A 26-word parade of hope: beginning with God, ending with life, and urging us to do the same. Brief enough to write on a napkin or memorize in a moment, yet solid enough to weather two thousand years of storms and questions.
• Preaching the Psalms as Stories  (November 1, 2007)
  I had an epiphany while listening to Johnny Cash that transformed the way I preached the Psalms.
• What Women Wish Their Preacher Knew  (May 1, 2007)
  Many Christian women today view the sermon?the proclamation of the gospel?as the centerpiece of the worship experience. They yearn for the serious pastor to stand with integrity in the pulpit, open his Bible to a particular text, and preach deep, accurate, biblical theology.
• Preaching Dangerously  (September 1, 2007)
  An Interview with Mark Labberton, Sr. Pastor of First Presbyertian Church of Berkley, Califonia.
• 4 Types of Friends Every Pastor Needs  (April 25, 2007)
  "If you are a typical pastor without close friendships, I urge you to seek them out."
• The pain in being a pastor  (November 11, 2007)
  I've had some interesting conversations about this topic this week - there can be a lot of pain in ministry. The highs are really high but sometimes the lows can be really low. I heard one person suggest that being a pastor sometimes means you have a target on your back. Friends, being in the ministry is so worth it. Is it difficult? Yup. Will it test you in ways you don't want to be tested? Oh yeah.
• Choosing to Preach  (January 1, 2007)
  Choosing to Preach is a call to preach biblical sermons and, at the same time, to recognize that there are many ways to carry out that mandate.
• Your Pastor's Pain: Whose Fault Is It?  (August 10, 2007)
  Cruel, ungodly behavior toward your pastor is a mark of shame on the church of Jesus Christ.
• The Theology of Sermon Design  (September 1, 2007)
  Current homiletic approaches did not materialize in a vacuum. Their ascendancy to popularity did not just happen. Today at least three winds of influence swirl around contemporary homiletic discussion: theology, literary criticism and culture. Pastors who would think deeply about the form of their sermons and who care about faithfulness to the gospel must wrestle with the issues raised by each of these areas of thought.
• How I Study the Bible for a Sermon  (October 2, 2007)
  As I'm training guys in my church to preach, I quickly wrote out a very brief outline of how I prepare a sermon...
• Why Pentecostals Don?t Preach Expository Sermons  (May 1, 2007)
  I am an expository preacher, and I am also a Pentecostal. Admittedly, these two categories are not often used in the same sentence, much less to describe the same person. But why is that, when so many of the convictions that shape each view are similar?a high view of biblical authority, a relian
• What are the biblical qualifications for being a pastor of a church?  (June 20, 2007)
• Why Do We Preach?  (July 23, 2007)
• Why don't Pastors Preach from the Old Testament?  (March 12, 2007)
  A pulpit committee had interviewed their top tier of pastoral candidates, only to discover a disconcerting fact: "None of them preach from the Old Testament."
• Pastor, Before You Quit...  (July 11, 2007)
  Joe Mckeever gives counsel to pastors in stressful, high-pressure situations who are thinking of throwing in the towel.