Too often sermons are like treadmills: Lots of work that takes us nowhere. Better for your sermon to be like an escalator: Move your people onward and upward in faith.

Preachers, just because there is a placeholder carved out right there in the liturgy which says SERMON, that does not give us license to blather.

The gathered pilgrims benefit from having a competent, compassionate preacher as a tour guide who can lead them through the wonders of God’s Word.

More often than not, God’s people in your pews will benefit from having an inkling of where your Lord’s Day journey will take them.

When we celebrate ceremonies like the Palm Sunday procession, faith makes its way more deeply into our bones.

Underlying the particular strategies of these missionaries was a more fundamental approach to proclamation, one contemporary preachers need to reclaim.

For all his theological and literary works, Giertz was always a preacher at heart. He recognized the pulpit was the perpetual fount of the Church’s faith.

Just as shoddy builders can get by at times with subpar work, so also shoddy preachers can occasionally offer up half-baked homiletic hash.

Preachers can more deliberately make time to meditate deeply and quiet the clatter which keeps us from hearing the still, small voice of the Spirit.

Time devoted to planning, to say nothing of prayer, pays-off in the long run many times over. If ever there was a vocation that need not be in a hurry, it is the cure of souls.

Regardless of why they happen, sermon flops do happen to all of us. So, what should you do next?

Augustine makes plain that the overarching aim of style is not to be showy; it’s to be an instrument of Spirit-led persuasion.