In many churches, there has been a subtle change over the past decade. When we started using PowerPoint for worship, the majority of churches would use a slide for a verse, another slide for the chorus, and so on. Today, however, the trend is to use a slide for 2 to 4 lines — more like a snippet — in order to display larger font, include artwork, or show video of the band. While this generally looks better and in a few cases is helpful, we should not accept it without question. One downside of fewer lyrical lines being displayed…
Although I haven’t read much of Karl Barth’s writings, thanks to Richard Mouw’s blog, I discovered these deeply penetrating ideas in his Prayer and Preaching. Among many other pieces of advice, Barth offers the following advice regarding preaching: Do not indulge in allegory; exercising one’s talents on the Word hinders it from sounding out clearly. One should also beware of intruding one’s own individuality or enlarging on one’s personal experience by using illustrations or parables drawn from events in one’s own life. Barth’s emphasis on the sufficiency of God’s Word is a refreshing reminder that we are messengers of the…