The Sermon Crafting Blog

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Last week, we looked at the value of planning your preaching. Over the next several blog posts, we will look at a logical sequence of actions for crafting a sermon. For some, this may simply be a reminder [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence   If you haven’t listened to the classic Good Friday meditation by Shadrach Meshach Lockridge, it’s certainly worth your time. “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming” is a masterful example of the use of language, repetition, and cadence in [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence   Two weeks ago, we considered four approaches to facing the problem of preaching Christmas sermons to people who have heard the same texts preached year after year. Before we make another post to the Sermon Crafting Blog, [...]

By Chuck Sackett Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL “Is this sermon serving God’s intent, or merely my routine?” The inaugural entry in the Sermon Crafting Blog (December 6, 2024) set the tone for what I would call Homiletical Integrity (sermons appropriate to the culture, faithful to the text, [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Well, here we are at Christmastide again. If you follow a liturgical calendar, we are already past the first Sunday in Advent. If you are from a less-liturgical tradition, the first Sunday in December is upon us, and [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence With Thanksgiving being this week and reminders everywhere you look of the pilgrims establishing Plymouth Colony, it prompted me to wonder, “What was the first sermon preached in what is now the United States?” That wasn’t as easy [...]

by Thomas G. Long Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology Here’s a classic issue that still divides the homiletical house: is it appropriate to tell personal stories and experiences in sermons? David Buttrick said no. Personal stories were always a pale imitation of the gospel, a distraction really, [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence What do you think of the first-person narrative sermon? The late Dr. Wayne Shaw, long-time Dean of Lincoln Christian Seminary and past-president of the Academy of Homiletics, preached the first such sermon I ever heard. It was Palm [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Sometime in my first decade or so of preaching, I began to think of the sermon as a bridge, something that helps travelers cross an obstacle to reach their destination. It wasn’t like I decided I needed a [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Today is October 31, 2025. Exactly 508 years ago today, Martin Luther sent a letter to his ecclesiastical superiors expressing concern about the sale of indulgences and including in that letter 95 theses, or propositions, he thought should [...]

By Chuck Sackett Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL Occasionally our local weatherman leads with, “Dense fog advisory.” We all know the implications of his words. There were times visiting my oncologist I wanted to quote the weatherman, “Dense fog advisory.” I couldn’t see what he was saying. Haddon [...]

by Dr. Fred Craddock Excerpted from Craddock on the Craft of Preaching, edited by Lee Sparks and Kathryn Hayes Sparks (These are the fourteen points that Dr. Craddock condensed from years of lectures on preaching to new students in his P301 course. BW) We have all heard good preachers, but [...]