Streamlining your sermon: what to keep, what to ditch

'Friends, I’m sure you’ll agree that once a robust postmillennial eschatology is established, the implications for ecclesial and missional praxis become self-evident'... said no preacher ever – hopefully!

One of the challenges for many preachers is how we package up all the stuff we’ve learned into digestible communication. It’s easy for an excited preacher to forget that most of the people in front of us haven’t read Calvin’s Institutes and (weird I know) probably don’t want to!

So, while our reading always helps us to clarify and shape our own thinking, one of the greatest challenges is working out what to leave on the desk. As one of my former teachers, David Jackman, used to say, ‘you need to learn to kill your babies.’