This book will make you certain about what the Christian message is; and what it is not. It will bring home to you the Christian messengers often under-rated responsibilities and how to readily fall on their right side. You will acquire a rational approach to accomplishing your objective as a messenger of Christ through reading this book. This book will alert you to popular errors that are quietly creeping into even the most conservative church audiences. It will teach you how to classify your church, and therefore make you see the urgent spiritual remedies required. You will understand the dynamics of how churches fare well or fail by the Lords biblically revealed yardstick. High-end spiritual poisons do take longer than one generation to gestate; so that the arrival of their ill-effects often take the new leaders in place by surprise. However, this book will show you a simple scriptural way to know spiritual poisons at first contact. Many books give dozens of steps to take in order to accomplish desirable objectives, but this one will avail you of simple, easy to remember, but often overlooked principles that will save you from deadly and pervasive hazards of preachers.

Richard Eslinger discusses with insight, humor, and concision what he sees as the most critical pitfalls in the various contexts of preaching and offers practical strategies for avoiding them.

James P. Osterhaus offers pastors tangible and much-needed advice to help them at work and in their personal lives—advice that they do not often hear in seminary. More and more, men and women who minister find themselves depressed. Their marriages are often in trouble. Their families are negatively affected. Often, they have few if any close friends. Over the years, Osterhaus has coached and counseled hundreds of these ministers from various traditions on four continents. As he sat with ministers who have been nearly crushed by the burdens of ministry, he came to learn that the average training of ministers across the globe is woefully deficient in the very areas that allow ministers to avoid many of the pitfalls. This guide is a result of those countless conversations. Avoiding Pastoral Pitfalls is an attempt to fill some of the void left in the training of pastors. It offers down-to-earth, practical guidance in areas of ministry that are often neglected: understanding yourself (both strengths and weaknesses), what effective leadership looks like, the complicated organizational makeup of the church, how to deal with conflict effectively, how to make sense of your governing board, and how to both enter a new ministry and leave a ministry effectively.

Preachers often feel stuck when met with quickly shifting and dense media topics that flood the headlines. If and when they determine it is appropriate to address issues that arise in the news cycle, they are often at a loss for how to speak about them from the pulpit. When preachers understand that a responsibility to sustain life is embedded in the purposes of preaching, they discover greater fluidity between the everyday world, the biblical text, and preaching itself. Preaching the Headlines reframes preaching as an ongoing conversation between the modern world and the world of the Bible, exploring where the divides between the two may be less rigid than we often acknowledge. The preacher uses what they know about life as a bridge to the text, while life in the text provides the bridge back to faith in the contemporary world. The goal of the book is to help preachers do theological reflection on the everyday world as an integral part of sermon development. The process offered in this book is not a substitute for basic methods of sermon development nor a model of exegesis for preaching. Preachers will use this process as a supplement alongside their current method of sermon preparation. Before the preacher can ever translate the meaning embedded in the headlines, they have to learn more about the topics they seek to preach about. They do this by digging behind the headlines and expanding their own resources beyond theological traditions alone. This work is done in order to think earnestly about how faith might spur transformative action in our world for more just ways of living together.

This book gives you a behind the scene look at what preachers go through and show that preachers have problems just like everyone else.

(Revised and expanded) Practical advice on how to handle issues such as church splits, burnout, and pastoral priorities.

Today's culture war raises questions about pulpit ministry; the answers to which are often assumed but rarely thought through. Drawing on his transatlantic studies of both politics and theology, scholar-pastor Tim Trumper weighs the various homiletical approaches to political engagement. In doing so, he eschews the predominant apolitical and party-political tendencies of the day, preferring a mediating biblical-political approach that upholds the sanctity of the preacher's calling and the expository method of preaching. The result is a tract for our times, one that calls for the sermonic pre-eminence of the Kingdom of Heaven and the prophetic application of its lessons to the church and to the world.

Charles Stone?s research on thousands of pastors and ministry leaders demonstrates the dangers of approval-motivated leadership. Bringing together biblical insights and neuroscience findings, Stone shows why we fall into people-pleasing patterns and what we can do to overcome these tendencies and have more effective ministry.

Teaching preaching, like preaching itself, is a noble endeavor. After nearly four decades of teaching, Richard Lischer has sent legions of preachers across the world to preach gospel. This volume pays tribute to his faith-filled life of preaching and teaching. The contributors, some of whom were taught by Lischer, have received many laurels themselves, so readers will find in these pages wisdom for preaching from many quarters. Some authors include sermons with helpful commentary about the preaching exercise; some offer essays to illuminate the task of sermon writing; all acknowledge the influence of Richard Lischer on their preaching and teaching endeavors.