Preach Better Sermons 2013 Highlights

• He plans 4 months out.
• The creative team does a series brief for every series. Meet with Steven and ask questions. What is the theme? Feel? Scripture? Cultural references? etc.
• Gives his creative team a feel for the sources he is getting inspired from, then allows them to do their thing. He previews everything 2 weeks before the sermon.
• He is more inclined to micromanage creative elements rather than business elements of the church. The key is knowing when to weigh in and when to step away.
• It is not about my art. It’s about the vision.
• The whole worship experience is one thing.
• Urban Meyer said about his football teams, “The game is won and lost in transition.” We take the same approach to the worship service.
• The more I shift my intentions from being impressive to being a blessing, the more my nervousness goes away.
• Make it more about the people, less about the performance.
• Has Isaiah 55 ingrained on his pulpit and “It never returns void.” Put your confidence in God’s promise.

• You need to find your own method of communicating and refine it until you become the Michelangelo of you.
• You are you. And you are going to preach the best when you preach like you, and stop trying to preach like somebody else.
• When I prepare a sermon it’s like a birth. There is conception and then a gestation period. In the process of the 9 months going by, God is working on me and forming this message in me. Better than saying, “I need to have a baby today.”

Louie’s 6 Rules of Preaching

1. Have something to say.
2. Be faithful to the text.
3. Lead people to Jesus. “How did your people fall more in love with Jesus because of what you said?”
4. Don’t be boring.
5. Prepare. “Work at it. Do not just go to some preaching website.”
6. Be led by the Holy Spirit. “I am led best hen I have prepared best to be led.”

• The discipline of sitting down to write every single day is critical.
• Sometimes when you force it, your material isn’t that good. You need inspiration from the Holy Spirit.
• You need to show up. If you don’t sit down and write every day there may be inspiration there and if you aren’t there, you won’t catch it.
• I had a series of experiences that led to an epiphany. Then I go and find scripture to justify my epiphany and teach the 3 points of my justification. But that’s not how I experienced it. So why teach it that way?
• Tell the story. Walk them through the experience so they can experience it themselves.
• Ask what story do you want your life to tell. Then live that story.

• Inspire people. It’s not just about information but inspiration. You have to move people.
• The big difference is that great communicators reach transformation. Not everyone gets there.
• Understand your audience. Jim Collins is meticulous about asking questions about the audience even when he has already spoken there multiple times.

• Humor is one of the most powerful things you can do. If they don’t laugh every 7 minutes you will lose them.
• He shows his team his message. They talk it through. Gets feedback on good and bad.
• Present a problem. Solve the problem. Tell them again how to solve the problem.
• Manage your week in such a way that the message is the main things. You need hours to be good. If you don’t study, you are just not going to be good.
• If nobody is griping, you aren’t doing anything.
• Financial Peace University used to be 13 weeks, but after doing research found that there was a 70% drop out rate after the 9th lesson. Attention spans are shorter so they shortened it to 9 weeks.

• Real estate is location, location, location. In communication it is metaphor, metaphor, metaphor.
• I look for the metaphor that everyone will latch on to and will make it memorable. It’s why we remember so much of what Jesus said.
• The most powerful metaphors are Biblical metaphors.
• I’m a last second guy. I don’t care how well prepared it is, I am going to be fine-tuning my message and thinking about it until I preach it.
• I make sure the manuscript is done in time to pray through it.
• Started fasting on Saturdays, because he didn’t feel he had that fire in his bones when preaching. Makes him dependent on God.
• Would you rather be a great preacher or a great prayer? In order to be a great preacher, you have to be a great prayer.
• What are you circling in prayer? What are you holding on to and praying for?

• They rotate preaching by Old Testament, New Testament, and hot button topics. (OT Fall, NT Spring, Topic Summer)
• You win or lose in the summer. Get guest preachers or others in to help so you have time to read. Study up on what you will be preaching on.
• Know the topic. Know the text. Then get specific on how you will preach it with an outline.
• He is always working on 2 sermons. By wednesday a week and a half out has an outline done.
• The person and work of Christ is the center of everything we preach.
• Make Jesus the hero. Would your sermon work if Jesus didn’t rise from death?
• Make mini applications throughout the sermon, it doesn’t just have to be at the end.

• We communicate for two reasons: to be remembered and to be repeated.
• How do I surprise the audience in a smart way?
• Start with the audience. What are they going through? What do they need?
• I used to practice the speech 5-7 times, but it was forced. The best moments are the things that aren’t planned.
• I use multiple layers in my jokes. Had to slow down, because people didn’t catch it.
• Average is easy, because all you have to do is nothing.
• One of the biggest fears of communicators is to be open and honest on stage.
• Ego murders an audience. Don’t be the hero of your own stories.
• The desire for affirmation is the biggest drug in public speaking.
• God isn’t handcuffed by our failures or unleashed by our successes.

Crawford Loritts

• You will never preach any better than who you are.
• Begin with a desire for an intimate relationship with God.
• The more you do something, the more intentional you have to be, because you start to sound canned and shortcut things.
• Preaching is not a transactional gig. Preaching is a word from God to the people in a moment in history. Preaching is vertical. God has something to say.
• Get away with the Lord and ask God, what are you wanting to say to Fellowship Bible Church?
• How to lead is important, but we are neglecting who the leader is. In the Bible God is more concerned with who you are.

• I write week of. If I don’t get a good start at the beginning of the week it dominates my thoughts all week long.
• Monday = prep day (Write 7,000 words)
• Tuesday = don’t touch it
• Wednesday = half day, outline is due at 10am
• Thursday = finishing  touches. (Manuscript down to 1,800 words)
• Emotionally vomit writing. Just get all the thoughts out. Then refine.
• Asks creative team: bring a book you read or a sermon series from another pastor that really affected you.
• Uses books to get ideas and then promotes the book to his people to reinforce the message.
• My goal is not to attach the success or failures of my messages to my identity.
• People forget so much of the message that we use social media to repackage the message throughout the week to reinforce what we preach.

Nancy Duarte

• The enemy of persuasion is obscurity.
• You have to be gutsy and stand out or your ideas will blend in.
• You need contrasts (What Is vs What Could Be)
• Story builds up tension and then releases it. Then builds up tension and releases it.
• You need to like your audience. Take time to walk in their shoes. Obsess over the way they think and live.
• “Murder your darlings.” We are a first draft culture. We don’t cut and craft. The editing process makes all the difference in the world.
• The presenter is not the hero. The audience is the hero. They make or break the idea. (the presenter is Yoda, the mentor)

Andy Stanley

• You have to address two crowds: The Unchurched and the Christians
• The message and application are always the same. The key is the approach
• Let the unchurched people know that you know they are in the room. And that you are happy they are there.
• Acknowledge the odd. The Bible is full of odd things. If you grew up in church you forget how strange it sounds.
• Give them permission not to believe. When you give them an out, they respond by leaning in. If you are a Christian you are obligated, but if not you don’t have to. Just try it and see what happens.
• The foundation of our faith is not the Bible, it is who is Jesus? The scriptures are ancient records leading up to and pointing back to Jesus. (Don’t just assume its true because its in the Bible, explain why? Because Jesus said it was true and I believe him.)
• Don’t say the Bible says. Say the author’s name who wrote the book. Paul said… (by the way he hated Christians, but then wrote this) Give 2-3 sentences about who the author is.
• Bring your energy to the text, not just your great stories. Talk about the scripture in such a way that when people they want to go home and re-read it.

Ed Stetzer

• Preaching is communicating what the Bible has to say. Otherwise, it’s just me giving advice.
• Preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Help people connect how the Bible applies to real life.
• Planted a church on the weekends. Only can dedicate 12-15 hours a week to the church. Only has 5-7 hours to prepare a message. Has a  pastoral apprentice team that he meets with every other Friday.
• Maximizes his study by minimizing his searching. Uses different tools. Have somebody else gather information for him. Save illustrations for later. Always collecting and gathering.
• Take the text, get the theme, and draw the principles you can get out of it.
• Too many pastors wallow in the study. Be a good steward of your time.
• Listen to others. Has the team drop audio messages into an Evernote folder that relates to what he is speaking about. Listens to them in the car or while exercising.
• Knows the next four series he will be doing, so he knows what to look for and hang on to.
• We don’t make the Bible relevant, it is relevant. But we have to make it easy to see how relevant it is to them.
• 87.4% of stats used in a sermon are made up on the spot. Don’t just Google it. Don’t use bad stats to motivate people. Bad stats undermine the message.

Mark Driscoll

• We hit hard texts straight on, because those are the questions and objections people have
• Most of the problems in society can be summed up in 2 words – bad dads
• For the first time ever, the majority of children are being born out of wedlock.
• Preach the Bible. Plant Churches. Train men.
• I would rather try and fail than never aspire at all.
• Be careful that you don’t listen to a preacher so much that you start to become an parrot of them. Find out who you are.
• Don’t re-listen to your sermon over and over and over again.
• The more you preach a sermon the better you get. Preaching multiple sermons allow you to adapt and make it better. (You can listen to the single mom or the person with objections and address it in the next sermon)
• Part of evangelistic preaching is answering the objectives of the hearers. That’s what the puritans did. That’s why their preaching was up to 2 hours. They answered all the objections.
• If you really love your people (they are a flock, not an audience) you want to do the absolute best you can do.