William Willimon

What’s Your Motive In Ministry?

“My colleague, Stanley Hauerwas, was recently asked about the moral confusion of contemporary clergy. Hauerwas said something to the effect that, ‘You have these people who get out of seminary thinking that their job is to ‘help people.’ That’s where the adultery begins.’ What? ‘So you have these clergy,’ he continued, ‘ who have no …

Read more

Informed Imitation

“Informed imitation, that’s our goal.  We don’t listen to the preaching of others so that we can be slavish imitators. We listen as fellow artists, as those who have learned enough about preaching to know competence when we hear it, to respect the ways in which more experienced practitioners of our craft can teach us. …

Read more

The Dangers of Using A Sermon Manuscript

In one of his recent books, William Willimon, offers some sound counsel concerning preaching with the aid of a manuscript in our current culture.  The point is this I believe: don’t be bound to your manuscript, be bound and determined to communicate God’s Word clearly!  Here is how Willimon describes the task for us preachers: …

Read more

Preachers Are Word Merchants

“You and I, as preachers, are dealers in words.  Words are all that we have to do any important work.  Like some of the psalms of lament, I want both to thank God for speech and to blame God for speech being so difficult.  And I want to fall in love with language, over and …

Read more

Question = God? Answer = Jesus!

“Sometimes people say, “God? Oh, can’t say anything definitive about God.  God is large, nebulous, and vague.”  We wish. By rendering God into an abstract idea, we can be assured that we’ll always be safe from God. By God raising the crucified Jesus from the dead, it was as if God vindicated Jesus, as if …

Read more

Disciplined Pastoral Ministry

“Preachers must discipline their lives so that there is no time in the pastoral week when a sermon is not in process, when the pastor is not wrestling with the biblical text and the demands of the congregational context.  Preaching is hard work, requiring the cultivation of a host of skills that are difficult to …

Read more