Senior Writer’s Block

Give ’til You Giggle

Donation Received 940x705

Fall is part of that time on the church calendar known as ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ time, but if your church is like a lot of others, there’s a good chance you’re also getting ready to celebrate the most important unofficial season of the church year. I’m referring, of course, to stewardship season — the roll-out…

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NASCAR Ministry

NASCAR Ministry 940x705

One of my guilty pleasures this time of year is to go home on Sunday afternoon after a long morning of services, plop down on the couch and turn on — oh, how I hate to admit this — the NASCAR race of the week. That’s right, I really do enjoy watching 30-some cars do…

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How to Hear a Sermon

Pastor Worshipping

With summer finally here, a lot of us preachers will be heading out on vacation … or at least we should be! That means you may have an opportunity to sit in someone else’s church and hear them preach during your time away. It’s not always an easy thing to do for those of us…

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Wood sign hanging off of a door knob that says "welcome, we are open"

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:…

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Could Jesus Be A 21st Century Pastor

I recently had one of those days that invariably happen to those of us in ministry. You know, the kind of day that makes you wonder whether working in a salt mine would be a much more pleasant profession. It was filled with contentious meetings, building issues, a renegade committee leader, a nasty e-mail, the…

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An Alternative Source Of Information 940 X 627

“Stem-cell research is always immoral.” “The invasion of Iraq was illegal.” Ouch. Whenever I hear such pronouncements from the pulpit, I can’t help but recoil. It’s not that I always disagree with the positions that are taken, or that I don’t think preachers should weigh in on public issues of moral concern. It’s the language…

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The Impatient Pastor

The Impatient Pastor

One of the most important spiritual truths I’ve discovered over the course of a life of ministry is that a prayer for “patience” is the one prayer God almost always answers, usually in the form of offering me an immediate opportunity to exercise it. Patience, it turns out, isn’t something that God simply grants to…

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Heaven Can Wait

Heaven Can Wait by Bob Kaylor Featured Image

If you’re like me and grew up in the church, you probably had some really great Sunday school teachers who helped you on the path toward ministry — people who, week after week, gave up their time and sanity to lock themselves in a room with some socially inept yet theologically inquisitive young minds. My…

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Homiletics | 8 Sermon Writing Tops

“SlamBall Jesus” seemed like such an awesome sermon. A new extreme sport had been introduced in the U.S., one in which basketball was played with trampolines on the court and wild leaping, hitting and slam-dunking. I connected the SlamBall game to Jesus clearing the moneychangers out of the temple and said that he was angry,…

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THE P-WORD

The P-WORD

I was recently cruising the buffet at a neighborhood gathering with a lot of “unchurched” (or de-churched, or non-churched, or whatever we’re calling “them” these days) and got into one of those typical conversations that we clergy types tend to stumble into. After some winsome discussion of our golf games and how the baseball season…

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