Category: Audio

Tim Keller on Willow Creek, ecclesiology, and preaching

Post author By Andy Rowell
Post date October 22, 2009

I highly recommend New York City pastor Tim Keller's first two blog posts:

He describes Willow Creek as "kingly", Reformed as "prophetic", and emerging as "priestly." I agreed with him–giving a couple lengthy comments–trying to show that the "kingly" has particular strength with regard to evangelism.

I had previously interacted with Keller about large church vs. small church ecclesiology in the comments of David Fitch's blog in December THREE QUESTIONS FOR THE ATTRACTIONAL PRACTICIONERS WHO QUESTION THE FRUIT OF MISSIONAL: A Response to Dan Kimball

His second post encourages pastors to be involved doing pastoral care and not just preaching.

Preacher-Onlys Aren't Good Preachers

He writes

I pastor a church with a large staff and so I give 15+ hours
a week to preparing the sermon. I would not advise younger ministers to spend
so much time, however. When I was a pastor without a staff I put in 6-8 hours
on a sermon. If you put in too much time in your study on your sermon you put
in too little time being out with people as a shepherd and a leader. Ironically,
this will make you a poorer preacher.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Keller's thoughts on preaching at

Gordon Conwell's PulpitTalk – Volume 5. Spring 2007 – Preaching to the Heart.

Preaching to the Heart by Tim Keller. Pastor's Builders Series- Audio Resource.
Unintentional Preaching Models by Tim Keller. Notes from Pastor's Forum Seminar.
Reading and Preparation by Tim Keller. Notes from Pastor's Forum Seminar.

There he talked about how he plans sermons far ahead of time, reads lots of newspapers and books, and believes it takes 3,000 sermons to become a good preacher. He says he did less preparation in his early years of preaching. He only decided to make his preparation more tight after he had to preach multiple times the same sermon. He talked about liking:

Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon by Bryan Chapell (Hardcover – Mar 1, 2005)

but likes to put the theological aspect at the end of the sermon after the application.

They have also just recently announced that 150 Keller sermons are now available on the Redeemer website for free. Free Sermon Resource.

The June cover story of Christianity Today profiled Keller: How Tim Keller Found Manhattan
The pastor of Redeemer Church is becoming an international figure
because he's a local one. By Tim Stafford | posted 6/05/2009 09:47AM

He has three books:

The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith by Timothy Keller (Hardcover – Oct 30, 2008)

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller (Hardcover – Feb 14, 2008)

Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters by Timothy Keller (Hardcover – Oct 20, 2009)

Audio Preaching Willow Creek Community Church

Willow Creek’s 6 characteristics of good preaching

Post author By Andy Rowell
Post date October 22, 2009

On October 11th in his sermon entitled "All In" on the church's 34th anniversary, Bill Hybels shared Willow Creek Community Church's renewed commitment to six characteristics in their weekend teaching. He said that he had gotten together over the summer with 20 leaders from Willow to talk about weekend teaching and they came to a consensus around six characteristics.

Hybels said

teaching at weekend services needs to be:
1. Biblically based–coming right out of the text of the Word of God.
2. High challenge–not low challenge, not a mild dose of anything.
3. Intellectually rigorous–we're not going to dumb it down for any reason or anyone. We want to produce intelligent Christians who think with a Christian worldview who can really interact with the complexity of a really complex world.
4. Theologically stretching–not just the easy parts of the Word of God but the doctrines that force us to think deeply and to put our roots down deeply.
5. Clear application–so that we all know what to do with the Word of God when we have to put it into practice on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
6. Accessible–We want it to be accessible to people who walk in the door who don't understand the Bible because they didn't grow up with it. It should be accessible to rookies and veterans.

Hybels went on to note that they have tried to embrace these characteristics in their September-October series The Forgotten Way.

Notes:

Willow Creek is the third largest church in the U.S.A., 23,400 weekly attendance for 2009, according to Outreach Magazine.

Download Willow Creek sermons at iTunes or watch the video at their Media Player.

Follow Willow on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WillowCreekCC

Teaching pastor Nancy Beach and Darren Whitehead (http://twitter.com/darrenwh) share the teaching duties with Hybels.

Interesting trivia: Beach notes on her blog post Anniversary Celebration at Willow that "On the very same weekend that Willow Creek was launched, the phenomenon known as Saturday Night Live also began."

Audio Business Duke Divinity School Ecclesiology Kavin Rowe L. Gregory Jones Leadership Missiology

Greg Jones on Traditioned Innovation

Post author By Andy Rowell
Post date October 22, 2009

On October 5th at the Duke 2009 Convocation & Pastors’ School, I listened to a workshop by Duke Divinity School Dean Greg Jones on "traditioned innovation."

Update January 27, 2010: Duke Divinity School Press Release:

Dean L. Gregory Jones to Become Senior University Advisor for International Strategy Jones will step down as dean of Duke Divinity School at the end of the current academic year; Professor Richard Hays to finish out Jones’ term.

R. R. Reno writes in A 2009 Ranking of Graduate Programs in Theology, "Duke and Notre Dame remain at the top. Indeed, they are stronger than
ever, in large part because the longtime Dean of Duke Divinity School,
L. Gregory Jones, and the longtime chair of the Notre Dame department
of theology, John Cavadini, provide steady leadership."

I just thought I would share with you the resources Jones mentioned since
it is fascinating to get a glimpse into what is on his mind.

He mentioned a few leadership books that he has recently learned from. But he later said they do not provide a completely satisfactory account of Christian leadership so he is exploring a concept he is calling "traditioned innovation."

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide by Cass R. Sunstein (Hardcover – May 13, 2009)

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow (Hardcover – May 18, 2009)

Leading Minds: An Anatomy Of Leadership by Howard E. Gardner and Emma Laskin (Paperback – Jun 13, 1996)

Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs by J. Gregory Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy (Hardcover – Mar 29, 2001)

(Dees teaches at Duke's Fuqua School of Business).

Jones reflected briefly on these business books in an article at Duke Divinity's Faith & Leadership website.

‘The end’

Jones then explained that he was talking with Duke Divinity professor Kavin Rowe who has recently written:

World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age by C. Kavin Rowe (Hardcover – Jun 29, 2009)

After talking with Jones, Rowe explored in four articles this idea of "traditioned innovation" at Duke Divinity's Faith & Leadership website.

That was the basic flow of Jones's talk.

However, Jones also mentioned in passing a number of other books as illustrations of various points.

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul by Richard B. Hays (Paperback – Jan 27, 1993)

Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics by Samuel Wells (Paperback – Sep 1, 2004)

The Promise by Chaim Potok (Paperback – Nov 8, 2005)

The Chosen by Chaim Potok (Mass Market Paperback – April 12, 1987)

On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent by Gustavo Gutierrez (Paperback – Jun 1987)

Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Robert Schnase (Paperback – May 1, 2007)

Numbers (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) by David Stubbs (Hardcover – Oct 1, 2009)

The Art of Reading Scripture by Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays (Paperback – Oct 2003)

He also mentioned:

the article Walk into the Bible

and

Jones has also written:

Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry (Pulpit & Pew) by L. Gregory Jones and Kevin R. Armstrong (Paperback – Mar 30, 2006)

The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher by L. Gregory Jones and Stephanie Paulsell (Paperback – Oct 25, 2001)

All of Faith & Leadership's audio and video content is available for free download on iTunesU.

and now also they are on Twitter. http://twitter.com/faithleadership