Is Preaching Against Homosexuality a Hate Crime? - Richard Hammer's legal advice

Charles Spurgeon on Church Growth

Justin Taylor has a great excerpt on his Theologica - Between Two Worlds blog from Charles Spurgeon, who built the world's first "megachurch" in London, England over a century ago, giving Spurgeon's recipe for growing a large church. Like all of Spurgeon's writings, the English is a bit antiquated and flowery compared to the way we speak today, but it's worth reading.

Here's a taste (there's more on Justin's site):

My good ministering brother, have you got an empty church? Do you want to fill it? I will give you a good recipe, and if you will follow it, you will, in all probability, have your chapel full to the doors.Burn all your manuscripts, that is No. 1. Give up your notes, that is No. 2. Read your Bible and preach it as you find it in the simplicity of its language. ... Begin to tell the people what you have felt in your own heart, and beseech the Holy Spirit to make your heart as hot as a furnace for zeal. Then go out and talk to the people. Speak to them like their brother. Be a man amongst men. Tell them what you have felt and what you know, and tell it heartily with a good, bold face; and, my dear friend, I do not care who you are, you will get a congregation.But if you say, "Now, to get a congregation, I must buy an organ."That will not serve you a bit."But we must have a good choir."I would not care to have a congregation that comes through a good choir."No," says another," but really I must a little alter my style of preaching."My dear friend, it is not the style of preaching, it is the style of feeling... Preach out of your hearts just what you feel to be true, and the old soul-stirring words of the gospel will soon draw a congregation.

Stuart Briscoe on Preaching Today

Here is a great link to an audio interview with Stuart Briscoe on what preaching means today. If you do not yet have the free ITunes software installed on your computer that makes listening to podcasts easy (whether on your computer or by transferring them to an ipod), you can download it by clicking here.

The Ten Deadly Sins of Preaching

The Out of Ur blog is carrying Skye Jethani's notes from John Ortberg's session at the National Pastor's Convention entitled, The Ten Deadly Sins of Preaching.

Here is the short version:

1. The temptation to be inauthentic.
2. The temptation to live for recognition.
3. The temptation to live in fear.
4. The temptation to compare.
5. The temptation to exaggerate.
6. The temptation to feel chronically inadequate.
7. The temptation of pride
8. The temptation to manipulate.
9. The temptation of envy.
10. The temptation of anger.

Good stuff!

Preaching and personality

In his article entitled, "How Sermon Writing Can Harm Your Soul: Facing up to the preacher's peculiar impurity" on Preachingtoday.com, Lee Eclov refers to Phillip Brook's classic statement, "Preaching is truth passed through personality," then goes on to write,

Anything true and beautiful passing through my personality is liable to become impure. No doubt about that! My sinful attitudes and my foolish pride can stick to God's word like bacteria on fresh fruit.

But there is also something impure about preaching where truth has not passed through personality. I suppose that every sermon inevitably carries the personality of the preacher, but I'm here to tell you that there are sermons where truth has not passed through this preacher's personality. And such sermons were impure. They may be true, but they're not actually sermons.

Recently, I was reminded again of the fact that God deliberately inspired four different Gospels to place in the New Testament canon precisely because different people would be reached by different portrayals of the same Savior. May God help us all to allow the Word to be made flesh again through our unique, individual lives before it comes out of our lips...!

Praise for Billy Graham's preaching from a rabbi who doesn't believe in Jesus...

Thankfully, it is a rainy Labor Day here in Dallas after so much drought. I have finally finished my homework for a course I was taking and am doing a little reading on the Internet. I'll post a few links that I have found interesting. Here is a column by one of the best known rabbis in America who begins by saying, "I'm a rabbi and I like Billy Graham. I don't agree with him about Jesus, but I like him anyway...when he dies, there will never be another preacher like him." Worth reading for all of us who are called to communicate the Gospel: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8147174/site/newsweek/

Expository Preaching

At Hillcrest Church, God is calling our leadership to focus on three specific goals:

1. Getting our people into God's manifest presence.

2. Getting our people into God's Word.

3. Getting our people into God's harvest.

We pursue goal number one through emphasizing prayer and anointed worship. Prayer has long been a part of our corporate DNA, in fact, there was a 24/7 prayer center on our property before there were any church buildings. Recently, the Lord has been taking us into a new dimension of worship and we are experiencing a much greater manifestation of His presence. Lives are being profoundly impacted. We are called to be a word and spirit church so this development is essential to our future.

We are gearing up to pursue goal number three by focusing on a specific neighborhood not far from our church campus. This is the result of what we believe to be specific direction from the Lord. We believe He is leading us to target our individual and corporate Jerusalems and Samarias. We define Jerusalem as a 2 1/2 mile radius around our campus, our homes, and our workplaces. For us, Samaria represents those segments of our city's population that are geographically near to us, but either culturally, racially, socially, ethnically, linguistically, or morally far from us. Our "Samaritans" are those who live in proximity to us but that we will never reach accidentally. We must deliberately cross significant barriers to reach out to them.

I believe an important key to reaching goal number two here at Hillcrest is emphasizing expository preaching and teaching. To that end, I am about to begin my first extended series of sermons of this type, a study of the life of Christ based on the Gospel of Luke, followed by a study of the Book of Acts.

If you are unfamiliar with this type of preaching and would like to know more about it, I encourage you to check out the website, www.wacriswell.org. It is dedicated to the memory of Dr. W.A. Criswell, one of the twentieth century's greatest expositors. Several thousand of his audio and video sermons, along with written transcripts, are available there, free of charge. They include his famous address to the Southern Baptist Convention entitled, "Whether We Live or Die" and his sermon on his favorite text. I particularly enjoyed his series on the life of David.

Dr. Criswell pastored First Baptist Church here in Dallas for some fifty years. Not long after he succeeded the famed Dr. George Truett in that pulpit, Dr. Criswell announced that he was going to preach his way through the Bible, beginning with the Book of Genesis. Some of the deacons came to him telling him that he would destroy the church by preaching through the Bible, that no one was interested in simply hearing God's word, but he persevered. His plan was simple, preach on Sunday mornings out of the text that lay before him, then take up Sunday evening wherever he had left off that morning, then take up Wednesday evening wherever he left off Sunday night, etc.. As I understand, it took him eighteen years to finish the task. During that time, First Baptist Dallas grew to be the largest church in the world, with over eighteen thousand members. Few cities have been so profoundly impacted by a single congregation as Dallas.

That amazing story is certainly a tribute to Dr. Criswell's unusual giftings, but it also underscores an important principle. God's Word is more powerful than any two-edged sword. Nothing else impacts human hearts like it and we must build our lives and ministries upon it. This is particularly incumbent upon those of us who passionately pursue the manifest presence of God and appreciate the powerful, present-day work of the Holy Spirt. The Spirit is not above the Word and the Word is no hinderance to the work of the Spirit. To the contrary, the greatest release of supernatural power comes when God's Word is proclaimed in the power of the Spirit, preparing the hearts of people to personally encounter the God of the Word through the work of the Spirit. We do not have to sacrifice or neglect one in order to have the other, rather, each enhances the other and Christian maturity flows from that balance.

Let's pursue both...!