Standing Behind the Pulpit
How to Preach the Word in a World of Words
By Gary D. Robinson
March 24, 2006

While planting a new church, I wrestled with the concept of preaching. At the time, “seeker services” were all the rage. Everybody knew about the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span, where the remote control is always within reach, the effects are always special, and the image always shifting. In such a climate, preaching—one guy standing in one place talking about one thing—seems anachronistic.

So I began the new congregation, injecting movie clips and funny skits into our services. It wasn’t that I abandoned preaching; preaching was in my blood. But I fretted at first that, if we didn’t offer some novelty, people wouldn’t come back. The interesting thing was that those who did come back—and kept coming back—did so for two reasons: The love of God they found. The Word of God they heard. The rest