The Sermon Crafting Blog

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Last week, the Sermon Crafting Blog looked at the benefits to both the preacher and the congregation of preaching a series of sermons.  This week, as promised, we continue by looking at some common kinds of sermon series [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence This past week saw an important series, the Major League Baseball World Series, completed. My team (the Cards) didn’t even make the playoffs, but at least an NL Central team won. That’s a corny segue into a blog [...]

by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence Last week Chuck Sackett shared some insights from his experience preaching in a large church. My own experience is in a much smaller context. For over 25 years I preached in a church whose primary worship space was [...]

By Chuck Sackett Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL (NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series on how the size of the congregation/audience affects the way you prepare and deliver a sermon. BW) Each Sunday the preacher in a larger congregation (350+) delivers a message, he speaks [...]

by Rob Fleenor, PhD Professor of Old Testament, Johnson University Inspired scripture is valuable for the task of ministry, Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16–17. That value covers the whole of scripture in its entirety, including all the glorious chaos of Old Testament narrative. But it’s easy to hit hurdles [...]

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, [...]