How you begin your sermon is vital. It can mean the difference between your listeners checking out or deciding to pay close attention. The things you say at the beginning of a sermon are what your listeners subconsciously use to build a framework for your whole message. If your thoughts are murky and unclear, you’re laying an unstable foundation.

But the way you end a sermon is just as important. If the closing of your message is disorganized and unclear, then your listeners will walk away feeling the same way about your message – that it was disorganized and unclear.

When I first began preaching I would prepare relentlessly for the first five minutes of my sermon. I wanted my opening thoughts to be perfect. I would prepare the opening remarks and the body of the sermon with careful detail. But when it came to the end of my message I would just let the sermon kind of close itself. I didn’t have a plan for ending my sermons most of the time.

The result was a lot of...

When it comes to sermon length, how long is too long? How short is too short? Do people care how long the sermon is? Someone should look into this! Well, they did. By "they" I'm talking about a recent survey conducted by Grey Matter.

They discovered what congregants think about a variety of factors affecting preachers from the length of sermons, to asking for tithes and offerings, to dealing with social issues.

There is much in this study for us to discover as preachers. We dive into all of it in this episode of the podcast!

Just as important as outlining is in the sermon prep process, so too is building out that outline with the right content.

A skeleton with no muscles and skin is not very useful. An outline by itself is left lacking as well.

This is why in this episode we will spend some time looking at how to build out the content in your sermon specifically around your bottom line and points.

The ministry landscape is always changing and we must be prepared for those changes. What we relied on to work yesterday might not work tomorrow.

This is why I love Carey Nieuwhof's blog post on five preaching trends that will shape the future. In this episode, we'll examine each of the five trends and see what we can discover and apply to our preaching and leadership.

The ministry landscape is always changing and we must be prepared for those changes. What we relied on to work yesterday might not work tomorrow.

This is why I love Carey Nieuwhof's blog post on five preaching trends that will shape the future. In this episode, we'll examine each of the five trends and see what we can discover and apply to our preaching and leadership.

Michael Todd, Lead Pastor of Transformation Church in Tulsa, OK, gave a sermon last Sunday in which he illustrated a point in a super creative, memorable way. In this video, I'll show you what he did and draw out some principles and lessons we can learn from it as pastors who want to capture and maintain the attention of our listeners when we preach.

Sometimes a direct approach to application is needed, but in other cases an invitational approach might be more effective.

Tim Keller’s Book, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, has been instrumental in my development as a preacher.

I've always been fascinated with stand-up comedy, and I've always wanted to try it. I finally did recently and I wanted to share with you what I am learning from the experience and what the take always are for us as preachers.

Five years ago this week I launched Preaching Donkey! Preaching Donkey was born out of a desire to discover the most effective ways to create and deliver messages that captivate and inspire listeners toward life-change.

Discovering what works in preaching was, and still is, a passion of mine because of the disconnect between best-practices in communication and what is so often the norm in preaching.

I first noticed this disconnect while I was completing my undergraduate program. I majored in communication and learned how to connect and communicate with people. Then, in my graduate work in seminary, I learned how to bore everyone with the Bible.

The way preaching was taught, at least how it was taught to me and so many pastors I’ve helped over the years, was so stilted and technical that it would satisfy the rubric of a seminary professor, but it would put everyone else to sleep. I knew there had to be a better way to preach biblically sound sermons that were, at the same...