Preaching is hard, and learning how to preach can be scary. Very few people are excited by the idea of standing before a crowd of people, with all eyes on them, to deliver a thirty-minute talk. Public speaking was always on the top of my list of greatest fears—just below death, spiders, and talking to…
Being a pastor is such a demanding and challenging job that it’s normal to feel inadequate—like either God made a mistake and called the wrong person for the job or you made a mistake in thinking he called you. You are trying your best, but maybe you aren’t as “naturally gifted” as the pastors you idolize….
If you are on my email list, you got a little inside info into what’s going on with my work last week. I was overwhelmed with hundreds of responses, and I cannot thank you all enough for your help and encouragement. In a nutshell, I’ve been wrestling for months with feeling that God is calling…
A recent Pew Research Center poll titled “Why Americans Go (and Don’t Go) to Religious Services” caught my attention this week. There’s a lot of information, but here’s what I gleaned from it: Among adults who attend church services at least once or twice a month, when asked to rank reasons they attend as very…
I’ll never forget my first funeral sermons. I was a young pastor on the pastoral care rotation at a large church, and I panicked when I got the call that a young mother of three in our church had passed after a long battle with cancer. Over four hundred people would be in attendance, and…
“Will you perform our wedding?” Few questions bring a greater sense of honor and anxiety wrapped into one. As a pastor for ten years, I’ve performed my share of weddings, and I still get a bit nervous. So if you’ve never done it before, it’s incredibly intimidating. So how do you perform a wedding? Here’s…
When I first became a pastor, I knew that performing weddings was part of the job. But nobody ever taught me how to do it in Bible college. You’d think that would be a requirement. So when a young couple asked me to officiant their wedding, I panicked. I’d never done a wedding before! Where…
Jesus was the master teacher. Thousands would gather to hang on his every word. People traveled far and wide just to hear him. The lessons he taught spread like fire and literally changed the world. As pastors, if there is anyone we should emulate in our preaching and teaching it is Jesus! Right? So how…
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