I’ve been trying to keep the Sermons page of the site updated whenever I preach, but there are a couple of sermons lately that I wanted to note, but hadn’t had the chance to work into the site yet, and won’t until I’m back in Arkansas after the holiday.
One is the Project 4:4 launch sermon, which is pretty unique in that it’s purposes were both textual and programmatic. It was important for us to have a preaching moment that formally announced and promoted the upcoming project, but at the same time I wanted that time to still function as a legit sermon, (which I think of as a word of Gospel from the scriptures, for the gathered church and her guests). To that end, I saved the programmatic stuff for the near end, and front-loaded the sermon with some time in Ephesians 5. I felt good about the way that mix worked out, but I’d be curious to hear what you thought about it as well.
Here’s the link for that sermon:
The second sermon is more straightforward, and comes out of the transfiguration stories, which I think are so bizarre and compelling. As a preacher, I’m still working out my preaching voice (not literally), and I think this sermon is pretty typical about my style of preaching right now.
I haven’t posted many thoughts here on the nature of preaching, because I don’t want it to be weird for Chuck, since he’s our primary preaching voice at PV. I have been thinking a lot though about the idea of preaching voice, and also the thorny issue of sermon evaluation. I’m going to think about it a bit more, and might post some thoughts in the near future.
