Sermon Structure
Mark Sermon Structures
By Justin Rossow In 2015 we preached through the Gospel of Mark between January and Easter. And it was *awesome.* Looking back over so many weeks in the same book of the Bible, following the same story line, preaching on the Gospel Lesson week after week after week, I am deeply grateful for the training […]
Avoiding The Lutheran Meat Grinder
By Justin Rossow The proper division of Law and Gospel is one of the essential elements of Lutheran theology, and therefore of Lutheran preaching. But when good theology gets turned into rote practice, the result can be hazardous to your spiritual health. You can get a handle on the definitions of Law and Gospel relatively […]
Paul and Lydia
By Justin Rossow Sometimes you preach a metaphor IN the text. And sometimes you preach a metaphor FOR the text. In Acts 16, Paul meets Lydia at a river. A literal river. Nothing metaphorical about it. But the sermon below takes the image of a river–of tubing and whitewater rafting on a river–as a metaphor […]
Retooling Your Sermon Development
By Justin Rossow Introduction: Retooling Your Preaching, Part 1 This fall I got to spend a couple of days at beautiful Camp Arcadia with deacons in the Michigan District for their annual retreat. We had a great time talking about preaching and exploring different tools that serve faithful proclamation. This blog series on Retooling Your Preaching is […]
A Tale of Two Easters
Preachers sometimes find themselves saying the same thing over and over again. Regardless of the text or day, they feel like they are running the proclamation of the Word through the same theological ringer week after week. Yearly celebrations of the same festival can magnify that feeling: I’ve preached Easter and Resurrection 15 years in […]
Advent Sermon Structures
Variety is one of the many benefits of being intentional about the way you structure the sermon from week to week: even when there is strong unity of theme, the experience of the hearers doesn’t become predictable or rote. Our 2013 Advent series is a case in point. The unifying theme was “Beyond Expectation” and […]
Source and Target, Target, Target Domains
If you know even the basics of contemporary metaphor theory, then you know that in the metaphor “Richard is a gorilla,” what we know (or think we know) about gorillas is the “Source domain.” The metaphor works by taking what we know and expect and how we reason about gorillas and mapping those inferences and […]
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