Sermon Competition #4

KellyJay

1. You stayed well on topic with your sermon carefully and logically building up to your point.
2. I see why you chose the verse you chose and how it works in your sermon.
3. You kept the integrity of the passage.
4. You used an anecdote from your own life to show how our most minor choices come with consequences. As I’ve said before, we’re not looking for the revelation of deeply intimate stuff but confessional preaching should impact your audience emotionally and your experience was too dry to do that. If you went on to explain how that incident revealed something to you or gave you understanding you didn’t have before, that would have greatly increased its impact.
5. You make some good points in this sermon. What we are doing here is making choices and taking actions that have consequences so we’d better make sure we see ourselves and our world clearly so we can make good choices. I think you could have edited it down a little bit to concentrate your message and pumped up the confessional aspect.

Hand of Hecate

1. You stayed on topic.
2. You chose a good passage for your sermon.
3. You kept the integrity of the passage.
4. Excellent use of confessional sprinkled throughout your sermon.
5. You are clearly a persuasive and intelligent writer. Your sermons are a pleasure to sit through. Given your propensity to wish disease and damage on peoples’ balls and rectums, I can almost believe that this Reverend Billy Bob whatever possesses you when you write your sermons. There is medication for that now, you know.

Vistesd

1. You stayed on topic.
2. Excellent choice of passage for this sermon.
3. I can’t profess any real familiarity with the TaoTeChing but it seemed to me that you kept the integrity of the passage.
4. Very good confessional style here.
5. Like KellyJay, you emphasized the importance of seeing reality as it is instead of seeing and hearing only what we want and what fits inside our notions. This was a terrific sermon – persuasive, well laid out, logical and personal – both for yourself and for your audience as you gave them something to relate to. Very nice.

Sharpemother

1. You stayed well on topic until your last paragraph. I understand your point that making your marriage a priority is a way of seeing to the well-being of your children but I have a problem with your phrasing. You spend your sermon talking about your purpose as your kids’ mother but the shift to “my most compelling purpose here is to first love my husband unconditionally and exclusively” rather suddenly. I understand what you’re saying but it leaves your audience saying “wait, I thought we were talking about raising kids”. If you had said “one of the most important ways I provide for my children is to love my husband…..” that would have better.
2. Good job in choice and application of passage.
3. You kept the integrity of the passage.
4. Most of my critiques, it seems, have tried to encourage more confessional from the preacher but in your case, you could use a little less. I like your style but parts of it read more like a conversation over a cup of coffee rather than a sermon. Remember, a sermon’s purpose is to set people on a road and get them started walking on it.
5. You have the persuasiveness of someone who believes deeply and of course, that is very effective. I would suggest that you replace about 25% of the confessional stuff with an equal amount of direction-giving and you’ll have yourself a very good sermon. Overall, a strong first effort and you show good potential.

The submittals are getting better each round, I think. I loved Vistesd’s entry and award him the win for traditional sermonizing and Chronicleaky gets my vote for overall winner just because his entry was powerful, creative and something refreshingly different.

Thank you to all the contestants and judges in this BWA event. I've gotten so much religion of late that we will take a little break from this discourse and may revisit it down the road.