The Haimish Line, by David Brooks
“Whole neighborhoods can exist on either side of the Haimish Line. Alan Ehrenhalt once wrote a great book called “The Lost City,” about the old densely packed Chicago neighborhoods where kids ran from home to home, where people hung out on their stoops. When the people in those neighborhoods made more money, they moved out to more thinly spaced suburbs with bigger homes where they were much less likely to know their neighbors.”
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The contents of this page have been moved to the new resources page entitled “Gospel and Law.”
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My friend Rick wants me to blog this sort of thing more often, so here we go. From David Murray on learning to preach extemporaneously:
And listen to these strong words from Dabney:
Reading a manuscript to the people can never, with any justice, be termed preaching…. In the delivery of the sermon there can be no exception in favor of the mere reader. How can he whose eyes are fixed upon the paper before him, who performs the mechanical task of reciting the very words inscribed upon it, have the inflections, the emphasis, the look, the gesture, the flexibility, the fire, or oratorical actions? Mere reading, then, should be sternly banished from the pulpit, except in those rare cases in which the didactic purpose supersedes the rhetorical, and exact verbal accuracy is more essential than eloquence.
Shedd argued that young preachers should from the very beginning of their ministries preach at least one extemporaneous sermon every week. By this he did not mean preaching without study or preparation – quite the opposite. Extemporaneous sermons require more preparation in many ways. What he meant was reducing your sermon to a one-page of skeleton outline, and becoming so familiar with it, that referring to it during the act of preaching is minimized. Then, throughout your ministry, try to reduce the size of the skeleton, and dependence on it, more and more. Let the ideas be pre-arranged but leave exact expression of them to the moment of preaching.
Shedd gives these requirements for extemporaneous preaching:
- A heart glowing and beating with evangelical affections
- A methodical intellect – to organize the sermon material into a clear and logical structure
- The power of amplification – or the ability to expand upon a theme
- A precise and accurate mode of expression
- Patient and persevering practice
To these we might add, prayerful dependence upon the Holy Spirit for each and all of these requirements.
From: http://headhearthand.posterous.com/preaching-without-notes-1
And then some steps toward preaching without notes:
http://headhearthand.org/blog/2010/09/08/preaching-without-notes-2/
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“Hosea 11:10-11 promises, then, that the Lord will restore his people from exile. … Matthew believed that the return from exile promised in Hosea ultimately became a reality with the true son of Israel, Jesus Christ. In calling Jesus out of Egypt – in replicating the history of Israel – we see that Jesus is the true Israel, the true son of the promise, the fulfillment of God’s saving purposes” (Thomas Schreiner, New Testament Theology, 74-75).
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Tagged New Testament Theology
“His miracles and exorcisms indicate the dawning of a new creation, and yet Jesus also taught that there is an age to come when God will judge the wicked and vindicate the righteous. Jewish thought regularly distinguished between “this age” and “the age to come.” It seems that Jesus taught the overlap of the ages, for in his ministry the age to come penetrated the present evil age, and yet the coming age had not yet been consummated” (Schreiner, New Testament Theology, 26).
Posted in Reading Notes
Tagged New Testament Theology
From the Geneva Bible:
The great providence of God, and his singular mercy towards his Church are set forth here most vividly, who never leaves his own destitute, but now in their greatest miseries and afflictions gives them Prophets, such as Ezekiel and Daniel, whom he adorned with special graces of his Holy Spirit. And Daniel above all others had most special revelations of such things as would come to the Church, even from the time that they were in captivity, to the last end of the world, and to the general resurrection, as of the four Monarchies and empires of all the world, that is, of the Babylonians, Persians, Grecians, and Romans. Also of the certain number of the times even until Christ, when all ceremonies and sacrifices would cease, because he would be the accomplishment of them: moreover he shows Christ’s office and the reason of his death, which was by his sacrifice to take away sins, and to bring everlasting life. And as from the beginning God always exercised his people under the cross, so he teaches here, that after Christ is offered, he will still leave this exercise to his Church, until the dead rise again, and Christ gathers his own into his kingdom in the heavens.
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One of the first things we read in our homiletics class at Mid-America was “The Word of God and Preaching” by C. Veenhof, translated by Nelson Kloosterman. It has remained formative for me as a vision for the role preaching plays in the life of the congregation.
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“Oh yes, work gives meaning to life: 1.) it is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others, and 2) thus to God; 3) it shares in weaving civilization, which is the form in which others make themselves useful to us, by providing us with the tools for doing our work well; and, 4) it sculpts the kind of self we are becoming, through the choices we make in the handling of our talents on the job” (Lester DeKoster, Work: The Meaning of Your Life, 41).
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