10 Ways to Half-Bake Your Sermon

Healthy things grow, and a church needs good preaching in order to be healthy.

By "good preaching" I mean more than just a lot of yelling and calling everyone a sinner. While we certainly do not backpeddle the sin message (not at all) it doesn't have to be hammered away week after week. Plenty of other stuff in the Bible (all of it!) to preach and it all relates to the Gospel if done properly.

My first sermon in the church I've just taken will be topical -- a New Year's Day sermon, where I lay out the year to come, plus talk about new beginnings. Of course, I will find text to exegete, but in this particular case, I am not so worried about that as the primary goal of the sermon. I am following that sermon with a series in 1 Peter. Good book to get a new pastorate off to a good start as Peter touches on a lot of subjects and the book is not too lengthy to deal with.

Church is VERY excited to know that they will get a series where they know what the next message will be, have a study guide, and can invite others to hear. They have been living with topical sermons for a couple years and they are sick of everything seeming thrown together for that day with no continuity.