I would love to see a video like this used to show the “then & now” in a church to celebrate the changes throughout their years of ministry.
[This post is a part of the Creating a Sermon Series series]
How do you decide what to preach? Is it based on a moment of creative inspiration or is there a more methodological way of going about preaching calendar? Whatever way you come up with ideas for what to preach, it is critical that are being intentional with what we are going to say over the next several weeks or months. I believe there are two main categories that our preaching falls into: sermons that people want to hear and sermons that people need to hear. The “want to hear” sermons are the ones that speak to felt needs, topics like friendships, families, stage of life issues. The “need to hear” sermons are the ones that speak to the docrine of a specific belief or even teaching through an entire book of the Bible.
As more and more people have flocked to facebook, it has also become common for more and more people to post things as their statuses that would be better left unposted. For some reason, we feel as though every tidbit of information going on in our head should be shared; especially if we are upset with someone or something. For that reason, I decided to put together a post of some things that I think are better left off of facebook.
[This post is a part of the Creating a Sermon Series series]
One of the most difficult, yet also most rewarding parts of building a sermon series is getting ideas. Anybody can come up with great ideas for a teaching series; the reason that oftentimes people don’t is because it takes a level of discipline and practice to do so. It can be very hard work, but when you work through planning a series and know that the the theme will connect with the students, it is well worth it.
This week we began a new mini-series in our Middle School Ministry called “2 Big Words.” Every now and then we come across big words that are difficult to say or understand. In Christianity, there are a couple of words that are not only central to our faith, but because the words are uncommon we might not realize how important these concepts are. In the two weeks of this mini-series we will be talking about justification and sanctification.
I have just recently started using the website Youth Leader Stash. If you are looking for a place with tons of games to use in your youth ministry, this blog, which was created by Chad and Cat Swanzy, is a great resource. This morning in our youth group, we just utilized the game called Ninja Feet.
This performance by Gungor off of their album Ghosts Upon the Earth is absolutely incredible. I just saw them live last weekend performing this song; they have an unbelievable amount of talent in their group.
I never knew that there would be a day when I thought to myself, I need to buy a thermostat. I had assumed that the next time I would buy a thermostat would be when something caused my current thermostat to fail. And at that point, I would drive to the local hardware store and look for something cheap to solve my problem. I like my house to be the proper temperature, but I don’t get excited about temperature control devices. That was until the Nest Learning Thermostat. This week former Apple engineers, who helped create the iPod, unveiled their latest technological creation. Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers announced a thermostat called “Nest” that magically learn your habits.
[This post is a part of the Creating a Sermon Series series]
In churches all over the world, it is common for the preaching to be organized in groups of sermons called a sermon series. Youth pastors, senior pastors, and children pastors often will look for common threads to organize how they teach the scriptures in a memorable way. As I’ve worked through putting together several sermon series for weekly programs and retreats, I have found using a sermon series to very helpful for both myself and those listening to me.
