Yesss!!! Although there are still some glitches (such as our artwork not showing up yet), the CrossWay Church Sermon Podcast is finally available through the iTunes store. If you have iTunes already on your computer, you can check out the CrossWay podcast by clicking here.
If you don’t have iTunes but would like to, you can download it free here.
The triplecord podcast is still in its infancy, but will be growing in the next few days. You can check it out here.
Lately I’ve had several people ask me what we use to record our worship services at CrossWay Church. The equipment is simple, sounds great, is only a hundred bucks combined, fits easily in a pocket, and plugs right into the computer to upload. If anyone is interested, here are links to the two pieces we use:
The digital voice recorder, which runs on AAA batteries, can be found here.
You can click here to check out the mic.
It’ll probably be a few days before I figure out how to put a link on the CrossWay Church podcast website, so I wanted to let everyone know that the CrossWay podcast is now available through iTunes. If you’ve already got iTunes on your computer, you can find our podcast here. If you don’t have iTunes but want to download it, you can do so here.
Right now we don’t have any artwork to go with the podcast, but once we have our logo, we’ll take care of it.
Yesss…. After trying for a while, I think I’ve finally gotten in a sermon preparation rhythm. Here’s how it goes:
I’ve charted out the sermon schedule for the remainder of 2007 and part of 2008. Every upcoming sermon has a sermon “bucket.” (This is a term I picked up from Rob Bell of Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan.) A sermon bucket is simply a file where I can dump every story, quote, Bible passage, insight, application, object lesson, etc. that pertains to that particular message. It can take months to accumulate a large sermon bucket. Whenever I watch a movie, read a book, read the Bible, listen to people share about their lives, or whatever, I keep my eyes open for anything that might be relevant to upcoming messages.
Sometimes if God shows me something when I’m reading the Bible, or if a really good illustration comes my way, I’ll go ahead and make a sermon bucket for that topic even if it’s not on the preaching schedule yet. But every message that’s already on the calendar already has a sermon bucket. By the way, Rob Bell once said that whenever he preaches a message, he’s had the sermon bucket collecting for at least a year or so!
On Monday morning, I open a fresh document for the coming Sunday’s sermon. At the top I type in bold letters: “The Big Idea,” and write a concise, pointed statement that is the one thing I’m trying to drive home in that sermon.
Then I take the contents of that message’s sermon bucket and organize it, hanging it all on a bare outline that communicates The Big Idea. Once that’s done, I have all the info I need to write up the rough draft of the sermon manuscript.
On Tuesday, I write out a full manuscript using the outline from the sermon bucket.
On Wednesday, I craft that rough draft into a final draft. This means clarifying language, rearranging sentence structure, cutting out ideas that are not essential to The Big Idea, and shortening it as much as possible.
From the final draft, I lift out some highlights that I place in a color-coded preaching outline. This is what I have with me when I preach. An example of what different colored text means in the preaching outline: red = Scripture, orange = story or illustration, green = memorize word-for-word, blue = general notes, etc. I take the Scriptures from this and copy it into PowerPoint for Sunday morning.
Thursday, I don’t even look at the sermon.
Friday, I read the final draft over and over, keeping the preaching outline nearby. I mentally connect everything in the final draft to something on the preaching outline, so that by looking at the preaching outline I can recall everything in the final draft.
On Saturday, I read the final draft once and review the preaching outline once.
Sunday morning, I read the final draft and mentally preach the sermon with the preaching outline. Throughout the week I pray over every step in the process, but I make a special effort to bathe my Sunday morning preparation in prayer. The last thing I do is prayerfully commit the message to God, and ask Him to anoint my preaching and open the hearts of the hearers, toward the purpose of changing lives and glorifying Him.
And then I preach my heart out.
The only three things I take up with me are my Bible, my preaching outline, and an acute awareness of how desperately I need God in order to deliver the message effectively. Obviously, my written final draft and the message I actually deliver are very similar, but not even close to being the same word-for-word (except for the green parts!). My objective is not to say everything in the manuscript; my objective is to clearly communicate The Big Idea.
As I mentioned, I’ve just now gotten to where I can exercise this rhythm week in and week out. Now my next step is to try to get far enough ahead to where I’m able to complete the final drafts about four weeks in advance. I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to do two things: (1) fully internalize the message; and (2) have sufficient time to incorporate other creative elements, such as dramas, videos, banners, music, etc.
I hope this is helpful to someone, and I’d love to hear from some of the other preachers out there about what kind of system you have for developing and delivering sermons. Let’s learn from each other!
Our church will hopefully be podcasting very soon–and for less money than I’d expected. While the ideal scenario would be a Countryman mic with a CD recorder running through the sound board, I’ve discovered an alternative. We ordered a digital voice recorder and inexpensive lapel mic.
The voice recorder arrived yesterday, and it is tiny. It’s about one-fourth the size of my cell phone! It will easily fit in my pocket. I’ll just run the mic cord into it, hit play, and we’re all set. From there I just take the recorder, which comes apart in the middle, and stick it into my laptop to upload it.
If we had our church website up, we could even begin podcasting this Sunday. But that’s probably still a couple weeks away.
During my three years at SonRise, I took off on Fridays. At my new post, I’m considering two changes: taking more of a Sabbath than just a day off, and switching from Fridays to Thursdays.
In the past, Friday simply meant sleeping in, taking my time, not having to hurry my Bible time in order to get ready for work, eating a fattening lunch, listening to a couple sermons on my iPod, reading fiction, and watching movies that Carolyn won’t watch with me (meaning anything that’s not animated and not starring Hilary Duff).
But the Bible talks about us not just taking a day to chill out, but to spend it with God. So here are some of the things I want to start doing on my Sabbath days:
The reason I’m considering moving this Sabbath from Friday to Thursday is mainly because of my preaching and writing rhythm. I want to have the coming Sunday’s sermon written out in manuscript form and put in outline form by the time I leave the office on Wednesdays. That way I have a day to clear my mind, and on Friday I can study the manuscript and memorize the outline. Since Friday is only a couple days before Sunday, it will be fresher in my mind. If I tried to do this on Thursday, I wouldn’t have the advantage of letting my mind rest for a day before internalizing the message; and, of course, it wouldn’t be as fresh in my heart and mind on Sunday. Another benefit is that I can be in the office on Fridays to be part of the little kids’ weekly Bible Story Time.
But I’m still indulging in the fattening lunches.
It seems like every preacher has a story about the time God changed up the sermon at the last minute. I always hoped it would never happen to me. It did–my first Sunday at my new post.
All week long I’d had a stinky attitude. All sorts of little things were going wrong, and the frustation added up. By Saturday night, I knew I couldn’t preach the message on love without feeling like a big hypocrite.
My devotional reading that morning had been in 2 Corinthians 1:8-11, where the apostle Paul writes about some of the troubles he had. He says he despaired to the point that he thought he would die. But then, in verse 9, he concludes that these things happened so he would learn to stop relying on himself and start relying on God.
What a lesson for us! When we reach the end of ourselves and run out of time, money, energy, and all our other resources, the only thing we have left is God. And that’s right where He meets us.
This weekend I learned not to rely on my own preparation for preaching, but to rely instead on God. I had to–I had no choice!
Tomorrow is my first Sunday as the lead pastor of a church. We’re talking about love.
In preparing for my first sermon at this church, I was all ready to talk about planting the Gospel, keeping pure motives, and all that kind of charge-the-hill stuff. But then God really pressed on my heart that the message should be about love, because at the root of all the good things a church is supposed to be about is love.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
In my preaching, I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way: through experience. I keep a running file of mistakes I make in preaching and what I’ve learned from them. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned about crowd interaction while preaching:
(1) Since people’s thoughts are guided by associations, be highly selective in what you say–watch your word choice, examples, and illustrations. This plays out in several ways. One is that some people will always read extra meaning into your illustrations. For example, if you’re telling a story about someone who’s a rough character and you describe them as having tattoos, some people might think you’re associating tattoos with sin, even though you never said that. If you share a hypothetical illustration about a man who’s insensitive or a woman who nags her husband, some people will think you’re making blanket, sexist statements. Another way this association confusion can happen is sexual innuendo. People today have turned everything into a sexual innuendo (see #3 for an example). So be well prepared and think carefully about what you say!
(2) Don’t feel the need to respond to hecklers. I’m not talking about people who answer your questions, laugh at your jokes, or do the “Amen!” thing. I’m talking about people who try to run a Jay Leno-style running commentary on your message. These are the ones who will audibly respond to anything that can be construed as sexual innuendo (see #1 above). Most of these people do not have malicious intent. They just enjoy being the center of attention and don’t tend to think before they speak or act. There are at least three important reasons for ignoring your hecklers: First, even though you hear them easily, most people probably cannot. If you respond, they won’t know what you’re responding to. This is especially true for recordings, since your microphone will probably not pick up comments from the crowd. Second, you’ll allow yourself to get distracted and flustered. Preaching requires enough focus without letting people throw you off course. Third, acknowledging hecklers will only encourage them, and you’ll find their unwanted comments increasing each week.
(3) When you make a blunder, acknowledge it and quickly move on. Avoid both extremes of ignoring it or dwelling on it. One time I was talking about people’s sleep habits, and I said, “Most people don’t get enough.” That seemed to just kind of hang out there, and so after a pause, I added, “…sleep.” Right away I knew that I’d made it worse. Anyone who hadn’t picked up on the innuendo definitely couldn’t miss it after I’d inadvertently emphasized it. Everyone started laughing and I just turned red. I tried helplessly to try and explain it away, but it didn’t work. It seemed like I stumbled and muttered for about five minutes, but when I watched the recording, it turned out to be only a few seconds. What helped me recover from my blunder and move on? A friend of mine was sitting near the front, and when he got my attention, he moved his finger around like a turning wheel, as if to say, “Move on.” So I did. I just moved on. And it worked! But now I know that whenever I have a blunder like that, I can simply acknowledge it (don’t pretend it didn’t happen–that will only make it worse!) and quickly move on.
(4) Remember Jeremiah 23:29. It says: “‘Is not My Word like fire,’ declares the LORD, ‘and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?’”God’s Word will prevail. It’s powerful. Just be faithful! He is more concerned than you are about how people respond to the message He’s given you. He will work through your mistakes and blunders to impress His Word on the hearts of the people listening to you.
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