Deacon Greg Kandra provides a reflection for the readings and Gospel for the 4th Sunday of Advent, Dec. 21, 2025.

The sermon is a message from God, not an essay, or treatise, or Bible reading. It should be born in prayer, or devotion, or Bible study or in the fire of human experience. This was one of the hardest ...

Instead of exhaustion, homiletics can bring you life. Perhaps the most visible part of pastoring is the upfront teaching and preaching. Bringing a timely and truthful message demands preparation, ...

John Wesley had a portable pulpit. The immediate need was practical: he was short, and his pulpit elevated him so that he could be seen and heard. Perhaps more importantly, the portable pulpit turned ...

Sometime in the late 1980s I was presenting a paper on my dissertation when I noticed that the most important person in postwar American preaching was sitting in the first row. I had the opportunity ...

On any given Sunday, churchgoers settle into pews as a clergy person takes an ancient holy text and figures out what it has to say about our lives today. But how would worshippers feel if they found ...

Three Sundays ago in Franklin, Tenn., twenty minutes south of Nashville and in the heart of the country’s contemporary Christian music industry, pastor Stan Mitchell of GracePointe Church preached ...

It is a fringe belief to think the Bible advocates for the government to arrest and quickly execute LGBTQ people, an expert on American religious history says. But a Knoxville pastor, who also is a ...