When You’ve Got to Print the Bulletin Before You’ve Got a Sermon Title

Mike Leake 2 Comments

It’s Friday morning and the sweet lady who does the church bulletins is hounding you for a sermon title. You’re still laboring over the text and not quite sure what shape the sermon will take. You’ll have something by that evening surely but you aren’t getting a decent sermon title before noon and so you just look at the text and make something up.

I’ve been there. Done it several times and then whenever you go to actually preach the sermon you look like a silly person because the content of your sermon doesn’t seem to match the title.

As I read the sermon “Accusers Challenged” by John Newton I couldn’t help but think that Newton’s secretary was hounding him for a title a bit before he was ready. The sermon seems to have nothing to do with the title. There isn’t much discussion of an accuser and there isn’t much display of how these accusations are challenged by the blood of Jesus.

Newton didn’t print bulletins and so I’m not really too sure why the title doesn’t fit the sermon. The sermon was good but the dissonance between the title and the sermon has left me unsettled. Because of this I want to use this experience to learn from Newton—this time in what not to do.

So let’s imagine that it is Friday morning and you don’t know your sermon title. What do you do? Do you just make something up that seems to fit the text or do you just leave it blank? (If there is a third option I’d love to hear it).

It’s possible that if you choose the just-make-something-up option you’ll get lucky and the sermon will fit your shot in the dark title. But there are a couple dangers of doing this. First, you can try to make the sermon fit the title you’ve got in the bulletin rather than the text. Secondly, you’ll end up being faithful to the text but your faithful bulletin readers will be distracted the whole sermon trying to figure out when you are going to get around to those “accusers” and how they are “challenged”.

That second one is what happened to me as I read through Newton’s sermon. I had a difficult time following his argumentation because I wasn’t sure how it fit in with the title. When we give confusing titles our people are going to have a difficult time discerning our main point.

So, I’m not a big fan of just throwing something together. If it’s Friday and I’m pressed I’ll just leave it blank and put the text up there. Or if the sermon does end up not fitting the sermon I’ll tell people early that they should change the title (but this isn’t ideal because you are wasting precious sermon time).

What I’ve tried to do when I’m preaching is get the sermon title in my mind early. I want to study the text and get the main idea and try to put together some sort of a title early on. I can change it as I interact with the text—but if I can work on the main idea early in the week then I’ll be able to give a better title if pressed on Friday morning.

Of course Newton never had to worry about this. But we do. What do you do when you’ve got to print the bulletins but you don’t have your sermon title yet?

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Photo source: here

Today in Blogworld 04.24.15

Mike Leake

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Sex Appeal and Female Christian Artists

Mike Leake 7 Comments

I’m not much of a fan of CCM (mainstream Christian music) in the first place. But I haven’t entirely thrown the baby out with the bath water. There are some phenomenal Christian artists who God uses to engage my heart in worship. I’m grateful for music with biblical lyrics that encourage my walk with Jesus.

But there is something I’ve noticed with the promotion of female artists that really annoys me. Here is another one of those areas where I believe CCM follows culture a bit too much.

Let’s take a look at a few album covers by some of the top selling Christian male artists:

Here Matt Maher is apparently marking off his steps to measure the distance of his makeshift football field on top of a roof somewhere.

Michael W. Smith, obviously a guy in deep thought about music.

Here is Jeremy Camp obviously watching a slug in a salt ring.

Notice something about these pictures. They are simple photos that you’d expect in any type of artistic photo shoot. They clearly aren’t glamour shots intended to attract people by their level of hotness.

Now consider a few album covers of top female artists:

Notice the positioning of the left arm. Can you imagine a Christian male artist posing in this fashion? What is this meant to evoke?

I’m not really sure what is going on here. But consider this tip from a professional photographer for adding sex appeal: “Have the model sit on the edge of a chair and arch their back. This gives the appearance of a long, sleek body which will add sexuality to a photo.” Something tells me they never asked Big Daddy Weave to sit on a chair this way…

Contrast this JJ Heller album with the Michael W. Smith album. Are we led to believe that she’s going to perform a trick while she plays the piano—or is she going to hop up on it and give us a Marilyn Monroe impersonation? One seems to be saying—”this dude likes music and plays the piano, he’s serious about his craft”. The other is saying, “Look this attractive woman can do piano tricks”.

I’m not trying to say that every female album cover is designed with sex appeal in mind. There are many of them that look similar to the album covers of guys. But far too many seem to be selling the woman rather than her music. You don’t see this with male artists, their music seems to be enough.

This bothers me. Am I alone in this?

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No disrespect is meant to any of the female artists represented here. My beef is with the CCM music industry and how they, in my opinion, are using sex appeal with female artists and they shouldn’t be. As I tweeted the other day, I want to know if she can sing and that she loves Jesus—I could care less how well she straddles a chair.