Posts By Timothy Merrill
TIMOTHY MERRILL is an ordained minister and has served churches in Oregon, Minnesota and Colorado. His doctoral work at Princeton Theological Seminary focused on the apocalyptic nature of the preaching of the First Crusade in 1096 A.D. His work has been published in the academic press including the Patristica and Byzantine Review and the Westminster Theological Journal. His book, Learning to Fall: A Guide for the Spiritually Clumsy (Chalice Press) appeared in 1998.
The belief that a congregation might sing in a courageous manner was suggested first, as far as I know, by one of the world’s great preachers, John Wesley (thus the interest for pastors). In his “Directions for Singing” in Select Hymns (1761), he advises congregations to “sing lustily and with a good courage.” In point…
I’ve heard plenty of pastors say they’re “not comfortable” preaching from the Old Testament (OT). And some will say they rarely preach from the OT texts, usually with a highbrow tone that implies, “I am one of the enlightened ones; only publicans still preach from that dusty, arcane, irrelevant and hopelessly out-of-touch body of work.”…
I was preaching not long ago and invited people to turn in their Bibles to a certain chapter. Not hearing the familiar rustling of onion skin Bible pages, it occurred to me that my audience was not packing. I asked Bible-toting believers to wave them in the air. Nary a one. I made some smart…
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.—Groucho Marx Summer is the time when many preachers get to read books. Congregational life slows down just a bit. Accrued vacation time is often taken during these months. A good book is always…
Faithful readers of Homiletics will recall that I’ve waxed modestly about trees on several occasions. The archetype of the tree is an important device in both Scripture and literature. Indeed, the Bible begins with “the tree of life” (Genesis 2:9) and ends with the “tree of life” (Revelation 22:19). Adam and Eve were not to…
Several of our longtime writing contributors are avid enthusiasts of different athletic activities. One is a seasoned cyclist who’s ridden back and forth across the entire country and probably pedaled every back road in the state of Ohio. Another is a marathon runner who’s completed both the Boston Marathon and the New York City Marathon….
Tell me we live in a post-Christian era or a post-Christian culture and I will agree with you with one proviso: Let’s not talk about the weeks between Thanksgiving and December 25. During these roughly four weeks, the United States is anything but a post-Christian culture. It’s a decidedly Christian one. How do I know…
How to Help Your Congregation Chew Their Food By Timothy Merrill Everyone except the preacher seems to agree that a good sermon’s most appealing attribute is brevity. Hands down. The late comedian George Burns once said, cigar in hand, that “the secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good…
I ran across a handout that was distributed to participants in a weekend seminar dealing with issues of conflict resolution, group communication dynamics and the like. The two-page handout was an excerpt from a book written by Margaret J. Wheatley called Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (San Francisco:…
We first published this blog during the summer of 2020 as we saw communities struggling to deal with the isolation and boredom of a lengthy quarantine. If you are a card-carrying member of the “sandwich generation,” boredom is the least of your worries. The S-Geners are people who have caregiving responsibilities for their parents and…
