Years ago my church hosted a conference to encourage and equip our lay leaders and staff.

One of the speakers at the event impacted me with her engaging presentation.

She spoke for nearly an hour training our leaders how to do ministry effectively in our context.

About halfway through her presentation I had filled my page with notes and was eager for more.

I started to think about what made the experience so captivating. Turns out, she had four key traits of irresistible speakers. In this episode, I'll share the four traits with you and show you how you can use each of them in your next sermon.

Years ago I met with a pastor in my area who led a thriving church that he had planted the in 2003. At the time, it had grown from three families to 2,500 people in attendance.

He spent an hour sharing a lot of fantastic insights about casting vision, setting direction, and bringing people along on mission to reach the community.

But of all the insights he shared, one still sticks with me to this day. I want to share it with you:

"Tell your church what they are and eventually they’ll become that."

These words rang inside my head as he explained that his job as a pastor is to set the expectation high and let his church know he believes that’s who they are. Eventually, they will become that.

Great leaders set high expectations and truly believe their church is capable of meeting them.

I've found this to be true over and over again. In this episode, we will explore this concept and discover how to speak TO our church ABOUT our church to build the kind of church God is...

For more than a week, there has been an ongoing, unplanned revival on the campus of Asbury University in Kentucky.

It's been the talk of social media and thousands have even have made the trip to be part of it.

In this episode, I want to draw out three lessons that we, as pastors can learn from this historic event.

Do you ever get stuck in a sermon prep rut?

I know I do.

Sometimes the sermon comes together like a beautifully crafted work of art.

But other times I struggle to get any thoughts to come together.

It’s hard to break out of sermon prep stuck-ness, but I’ve learned a few things that help me overcome these stuck times, and I want to share them with you.

In this episode, we cover 16 things you can do this week to get unstuck in your sermon prep.

As a preacher you want to make your ideas come alive. When you labor preparing a message and perfectly craft your points you’re not thinking, "I’m sure this will be altogether unremarkable, but I’ll give it a try!"

No, you’re thinking, "How can I make them see this and feel it and be changed by it?"

We all want this because, what good is it if you make a great point, but no one feels it? If no one does anything with it?

An effective illustration is the secret sauce that makes your listeners grab onto your ideas on an emotional level. A good illustration will reach out and grab your listeners and pull them into your content. It will make them care.

But how do you use illustrations for the maximum impact? You can have a killer illustration that you misuse and have it fall flat. You can give a great illustration at the wrong time and have it lose its punch. You can have an amazing story that you tell poorly, or an interesting analogy that doesn’t quite...

There is almost nothing more important to sermon preparation than your outline.

It is the structure upon which your sermon is built. Without an outline that takes people on a compelling, purposeful journey your sermon will seem aimless.

If your sermon is aimless, people will not give it their attention.

In this episode, I'm going to show you my four-step sermon outlining method. It will give you a framework for building sermons that take people on a meaningful path toward life-change.

Every church I've served has had multiple services, but no one ever took the time to explain best practices for maintaining energy levels while preaching all of them.

Maybe they thought everyone was born knowing this stuff?

Well, I am going to share so that there will be something in the world regarding this topic. ;)

In this episode, I'm going to share my 7-step survival guide to preaching multiple services.

Preachers do weird things. One weird thing we do is prepare our sermons alone.

Every week you have to get up in front of a group of people and say words.

Those words have to be engaging, powerful, motivating, encouraging, accurate, practical and spiritual all at the same time.

Every. Single. Week.

And you prepare alone. All by yourself.

I think this started with Moses. He went up on a mountain and heard from God. He came down and told the people, “This is what God said.” We’ve never really changed the model. Preachers have been preparing sermons alone ever since.

I used to prepare my sermons alone. I would read commentaries, watch sermons and research articles, but it was mostly just me, by myself.

If you’re like most preachers, you prepare alone. But is there a better way? Could you benefit from bringing others into the process? The answer is yes, and in this episode, I'm going to show you how!

Being a pastor is unlike just about any other profession. Because of the holistic nature of the work, we tend to take on “pastor” as an identity and not just a profession.

Add to that the spiritual component that we are not just providing a service to people, but showing them how life is supposed to be lived for God’s glory (no pressure).

Most people don’t quite know what to do with us because we seem like non-persons to them. They don’t understand us, but we really wish they did. We don’t feel any different than anyone else, and sometimes we feel like explaining ourselves, but most of the time we just live with it.

Pastor, I want to speak on your behalf today. I want to help you put into words what you might be feeling and wish people understood about you.

In this episode, I’m sharing from my thoughts and experiences of being a pastor for fifteen years and working with thousands of pastors here at Preaching Donkey. You may not relate to...

If you're in ministry leadership, I don't have to tell you ministry is hard.

You know it, you live it.

There are unique challenges to church and ministry work.

But, often we make ministry harder on ourselves than it needs to be.

In this episode, I'm going to discuss a Carey Nieuwhof article where he shares five ways pastors make ministry harder than it needs to be.

In this we'll discover ways we can avoid making ministry unnecessarily difficult for ourselves.