We
went to the cafeteria and I heard a man four up from me in line C he came from another non‑traditional
kind of evangelical group C
I heard him say quite clearly, "You know, I think I'm going to enjoy this
course. This suppository preaching is something that is brand new to me."
When he said the word suppository, I said to myself, there is a man that needs
a lot of preparation!
__________________________
Walter
Kaiser is President of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton,
MA.
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I
really think that the questions people are asking are so different now than
they were when I was growing up. When I was growing up the question people asked
was, "Which church?" Today the question people are asking is, "Why
church? Why go to church at all?" No longer can we afford the luxury of
thinking that the people who are sitting in our pews are going to be there every
Sunday. We have to arrest their attention. We have to use every device possible
to reach them and to teach them and we need not be so apologetic about entertaining
them.
I
mean, they've been entertained all week long, every time they turn around. I
have no apology for putting a good singer in front of them to entertain them
if they're not Christians; you've got to do something to reach them. . . .
If
you're up there speaking about where they live, about failures, about death
and about futility, you're going to connect with some of them.
__________________________
Max
Lucado is Pulpit Minister at Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, TX.
I
generally preach through books of the Bible C
with an emphasis on the New Testament. Early on, I felt that the Lord wanted
me to focus on the New Testament, so I went to college and took four years of
Greek and three more in seminary.
The
goal I set for myself when I entered the ministry was to preach expository messages
through the entire New Testament, which I am still trying to do. With this method,
I always know where I am. I take up a unit of thought C a paragraph C
and I know every week where I'm going to go. Through that process I will be
introduced to themes in my study that will launch me off on a special series
of topics, but they are almost always connected to the text. What I basically
do is spend Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of every week in preparation, and
I still do that. I did it in my early years, and I am still at it three days
a week.
It
takes a day and a half for the morning sermon and a day and a half for the evening
message. I start by reading the text. I know what is coming because I am preaching
contextual messages. I have anticipated its content. I take the text and read
it repeatedly so that I have it clearly in mind, and then I begin to view things
through the text. When I hit Wednesday, I go to the original language and really
dissect the text so I know what I am dealing with. I want to know what it says.
That's really what I am after: What does the text say?