The red pen is your best friend.

On the matter of taking a red pen to your sermon, people might find this article by Tony Payne on Editing Sermons (from The Briefing in 2005) interesting.

Hi Michael,

I agree about critique. But I would take it one step further. Early on in my preaching, I used to make myself preach the sermon onto tape (okay, so it was another millenium) and then listen to myself back, so that I could critique and edit before I preached. I found that just the process of speaking the sermon out loud alerted me to weaknesses in my argument or parts where the logic fell apart or where it was too dense to listen to etc.

On the full text - I’d like to hear more from you about that. I always use full text. not that I actually preach what I’ve written, but I find that writing out the full text disciplines my thinking and forces me to understand and articulate the logic of what I’m saying before I get up to say it.

What are the problems with full text as you see it.

Grimmo.

John ‘Chappo’ Chapman who, under God’s good hand, is arguably Australia’s greatest ever evangelist

Sorry Sandy - I’m a bit naive about John’s history and the history of evangelism in Australia - but on what evidence do you base this statement?

@Sam
I think those links work ok. I suspect you were just unlucky in that we were changing over our domain to new servers around the time you tried. Our new web site has finally launched, and if you try again, I think you’ll find the article this time. Sorry about that. Ian

Howie, sorry for the delay.

In regards to my claim that Chappo was Australia’s greatest evangelist,  I did say ‘arguably’, but uncharacteristically, I was forgetting to qualify myself and giving in to hyperbole!

It is an unprovable claim. You can read brief comments at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chapman (click on “John Chapman (evangelist)”).

However ...

Under God, as a much younger man, John was responsible with Clive Keerle and Ray Smith in turning the Anglican Diocese of Armidale in a much more evangelical direction than previously, so that the gospel of Jesus rang out more clearly.

He served as an itinerant evangelist for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney for roughly a quarter of a decade, and preached thousands of evangelistic sermons, throughout Australia and the UK and elsewhere, through which, by God’s grace, many found Christ.

Likewise hundreds, probably more, have been helped to Christ through reading his excellent evangelistic book A Fresh Start.

He trained others in personal evangelism and evangelistic preaching. His books on those respective topics - Know and Tell the Gospel (personal evangelism)  and Setting Hearts on Fire (evangelistic preaching) are both modern classics.

As mentioned above, over many years, he has trained a generation or two of students in preaching, and evangelism at two key theological colleges in Sydney.

I and others could go on. We thank God for John’s life and ministry.

Regards,
Sandy

P.S. A polite reminder that on this blog, we ask people to use their full name.

Really only two suggestions, critique (before is best) and don’t read from a manuscript in a stilted fashion.

I was hoping for a little red pill that would fix my preaching (and taste nice)

In the interest of introducing a new preaching lesson let me share the one I am struggling with at present.

“Fish has bones, a sermon has a skeleton.”

God Bless,
Michael Hutton

@Steve Grose: Thanks for bringing that to our attention. It’s a problem with URL encoding brackets. Because the URL for the John Chapman article includes brackets, I can’t link to it directly. I’ve fiddled and fiddled with it, and short of installing a plugin (which I don’t have time to do at the moment), the best solution is to go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chapman and click on “John Chapman (evangelist)”.

At my church we’ve just finished a Teaching preaching program that is in its second year. A group of guys (6-7) prepare 1 talk on a book each getting section. This year we went through Matt 5. Following the talk we each face the music of one another’s critique good point and bad points in light of the book that we have all been studying. That being Setting hearts on fire by John Chapman. A guide to giving evanelistic talks. It was so helpful!

One thing that Chappo stresses is the need to make sure that the main theme and its supporting ideas are founded by studying the bible passage selected for the talk and that each supporting idea is
a. stated
b. identified in the bible passage
c. explained
d. illustrated and
e. applied

Sandy

Thanks for your response. Having read John’s books and really appreciated his wisdom on preaching, it’s encouraging to hear about his background.

Sorry for the double comment! The best preaching lesson I’ve had is to ask the question “So What?”. From Bryan Chappell’s Christ-Centred Preaching:

“The message remains uncooked without thoughtful, true-to-the text application…a grammar lesson is not a sermon. A sermon is not a textual summary, a systematics discourse, or a history lesson…Preachers who cannot answer a ‘So What?’ will preach to a ‘Who cares?’... We are not ministers of information, we are ministers of Christ’s transformation.”

I’ve found this helps get to the main point of the passage - like Chappo’s “Big Idea” - but with the focus moving directly into application.