The Sermon Crafting Blog

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence At the Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence, we are all about encouraging preaching and encouraging preachers. We want to see preaching done, and done well, and done by those who are growing in the calling and the [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence I’ve always wondered what it was like to preach in days of the New Testament apostles. In Acts 2, Peter doesn’t even get to finish his sermon before the audience is crying out, “What shall we do?” I’ve [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence So you’re preaching through Genesis, and you’re working on Genesis Chapter 4. You really want to focus on “...sin is crouching at the door, but...?” but you know as you read the text at least a few folks [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Sermon illustrations. You can buy books of them, you can keep files of them, you can find them on internet preaching websites for free or behind a paywall (is that where the “better” ones are?). But what are [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence In this post of the Sermon Crafting Blog, we look at the second of three areas Dr. Craddock treated in his book Preaching under the heading of “Enriching the Form.” This second section deals with using description in [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence In last week's blog post, we looked at the process of selecting a form for the sermon—the shape in which the message is packaged and delivered. In his book Preaching, Dr. Craddock went on to describe the next [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence “Form follows function” is a common maxim in many areas of art, architecture, and engineering. It was first stated in those words by architect Louis Sullivan in 1896, but it speaks of a much older principle. Like architecture, [...]

by Kendra Fullwood, PhD Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Composition, Johnson University Thinking more about delivery, the next term sociocultural location comes to the fore.  Direct feedback from the audience is very important, for audience responses are a valuable resource for ideas in the black context of preaching.  Another homiletician, [...]

by Kendra Fullwood, PhD Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Composition, Johnson University In my structured interviews with traditional black preachers over the past five years, one among the many questions I asked them was to describe their preparation for preaching and ministry, be it through education, mentorship, etc.  The preachers [...]

By Chuck Sackett Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL In order to move from despair to doxology, we need to gaze upon Jesus, see Him afresh. He is characterized by love; He is the source of forgiveness, freedom from our sins; He trusts us with significant responsibility. Often the [...]

By Chuck Sackett Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL Since we always compare translations as part of our exegetical work, we quickly discover the King James Version translated the word “loves” as a past tense verb, “loved.”* Such observations compel us to pursue those words and phrases more carefully. [...]

By Chuck Sackett Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL John’s outburst of praise occurs immediately upon describing Jesus. Instead of continuing his horizontal reflections, John sings out in doxology: “To Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His own blood and has made us [...]