Connecting Intentionally

March 23, 2026

Building Authentic Relationships for Deeper Impact

Effective preaching goes beyond delivering messages from the pulpit—it requires cultivating genuine relationships with the congregation. This is part two of a five-part series of posts that explore principles to help you preach contextualized sermons to people who are different than you.

This principle focuses on the importance of intentionally connecting as a generational immigrant so you can foster the trust and relatability that are necessary to increase the impact of your sermons.

The Challenge of Generational Distance

As pastors age, they can soon discover they are significantly older than many in their churches. Even when the congregation grows older with their pastor, the future of the church depends on it growing younger.

When there is a generational gap between the preacher and the congregation, it can inadvertently create barriers where younger parishioners feel misunderstood or distant from their pastors. The clergy–laity boundaries many practiced in the past can be off-putting for younger members.

What It Means to Intentionally Connect

Intentional connection means making an active effort to engage younger or older generational cohorts in ways that acknowledge their unique perspectives and needs.

It involves lowering traditional boundaries, being approachable, and demonstrating genuine care.

Practical Ways to Build Connection

Here is a truism: the more connected the congregation feels to their preacher, the more receptive they are likely to be to his preaching.

Here are four ways preachers can build connections that will result in more effective preaching:

Be accessible: Simple gestures like being visible in church lobbies or responding to social media interactions show availability and interest.
Share vulnerabilities: When pastors are appropriately transparent about their own struggles and failures, it builds authenticity and trust.
Engage beyond Sunday: Investing time in mentoring, attending social events, or hosting informal gatherings helps build deeper relationships.
Say “yes” more often: Affirming and encouraging younger generational cohorts by saying “yes” to prayer requests or meetings can have profound positive effects. The book Growing Young by Powell, Mulder, and Griffin is especially helpful on this point.

The Payoff of Connection

When younger Christians feel genuinely known and supported by their pastors, they are more open to hearing challenging biblical truths.

Relatability increases receptivity, making preaching a collaborative journey rather than a one-sided lecture.

Pastors need to remember that ministry is as much about being present and connected as it is about the content of sermons.

Putting in the Reps

April 16, 2026

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been preaching for a while now, and I still walk away from some Sundays thinking, Well, that could have gone better.

There’s no shame in that. In fact, I’d worry about the guy who walks off the platform every week thinking he knocked it clean out of the park. Overconfidence in the pulpit is a little like overconfidence behind the wheel of a tractor — sooner or later, you’re going to end up in a ditch.

I sat down recently with Patrick Lightfoot, lead pastor at Traverse Christian Church in Windsor, Colorado, and something he said stuck with me. He talks about “stage time” — the practice of actually getting up on the platform mid-week and preaching the sermon out loud before Sunday arrives. Not reading it over in your recliner. Not muttering through it in the shower. Actually standing where you stand and speak the words into an empty room.

He calls it “putting in the reps.”

I love that. Because preaching is a craft, and crafts require practice. You don’t sit in the bleachers and become a ball player. You don’t read books about farming and develop a feel for the land. You have to get your hands dirty.

Patrick also talked about watching yourself preach — playing back the recordings and sitting through the awkward “ums” and the rushed transitions and the conclusions that sort of just… trail off. He admits it’s uncomfortable. Of course it is. Nobody enjoys watching themselves on video. I watched one of my sermons once and became briefly convinced that I needed a new career. But that discomfort is where growth hides.

What strikes me most about Patrick’s approach is the discipline underneath the Spirit-dependence. He doesn’t treat those two things as opposites. He plans sermon series a year in advance and still makes room for the Holy Spirit to redirect. He rehearses thoroughly and still steps to the pulpit trusting God, not his notes.

That’s the balance, isn’t it? Preparation isn’t a lack of faith. It’s faithfulness.

Francis Chan puts it in the form of three questions: Am I worried about what God thinks? Do I genuinely love these people? Am I depending on the Holy Spirit?

Patrick has those written on a notecard and tucked in his Bible. They’re a better pre-sermon checklist than anything I could come up with, so I plan to put them in my Bible.

The congregation sitting in front of you every Sunday deserves a preacher who has done the work — and who has also gotten out of the way enough to let God do His.

Put in the reps. Then trust the One who makes them count.

BONUS CONTENT: Here are Francis Chan’s seven questions Patrick Lightfoot mentioned in his recent podcast appearance. Print them off and tuck them in your Bible and see if they don’t shape your preaching.

Am I worried about what people think of my message or what God thinks?—Teach with Fear.

Do I genuinely love these people? — Teach with Love

Am I accurately presenting this passage? — Teach with Accuracy

Am I depending on the Holy Spirit’s power or my own cleverness? — Teach with Power

Have I applied this message to my own life? — Teach with Integrity

Will this message draw attention to me or to God? — Teach with Humility

Do the people really need this message? — Teach with Urgency

Summon the Heroes

May 7, 2026

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, my guest Mark Christian said something that’s been rattling in my head ever since: “It takes a whole lot more talent to be at a church of 125 than it does to be at a church of over 3,000.”

Mark pastors one of the largest churches in Missouri, but before that he was the pastor of a small church in central Michigan. So, he isn’t romanticizing small-church ministry from the cheap seats. He’s earned the right to say it. Then he went further. He pictured a line forming at heaven’s gates, and the VIP treatment going not to preachers with podcasts and platforms, but to the faithful pastor who served nineteen years in a farm community nobody noticed.

That image stopped me cold. It looks a lot like my dad.

When I was a junior at Great Lakes Christian College, Dad became a freshman. He sold the family farm in his forties and spent the rest of his life as a bivocational preacher in small churches across North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. He called me once, discouraged, thinking about quitting. I asked how many attended the church when he arrived. Twenty. And now? Sixty. He had tripled the church in five years, doing the counseling, the marrying, the burying. And he thought he was failing.

He wasn’t. He just didn’t have a platform to tell him otherwise.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: a platform is a terrible feedback mechanism. It rewards what photographs well. It has nothing to say about the hospital visit at 2 a.m., the marriage you prayed back from the brink, the funeral where you were the only clergy anyone in that family had ever known, or the teenager who kept showing up because you learned his name. A platform doesn’t measure faithfulness; it only measures reach.

If you’re preaching this Sunday to forty people in a town of four hundred, hear this: the percentage of your community you’re reaching would embarrass most metropolitan megachurches. You are not waiting to be called into ministry. You are already in it.

Summon the heroes. They look like you.

Kill the Celebrity

August 27, 2026

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tony Johnson, lead pastor at 2|42 Community Church, for the latest episode of the Better Preaching Podcast. Before we got anywhere near a sermon illustration, we spent a good five minutes on the vertical bar in “2|42” versus the humble backslash. Apparently there’s an etiquette to this. Who knew church branding had its own grammar police?

But once we got past my keyboard ignorance, Tony said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. He told me that when he arrived at 2|42, the phrase floating around the staff was “kill the celebrity.” Then he credited a wiser voice — Steve Larson — with refining it: it’s not about killing the celebrity, it’s about minimizing it. Because the moment any of us steps behind a pulpit, some measure of celebrity attaches itself whether we invited it or not. The question isn’t whether it exists. The question is what we do with it.

Now, Tony’s fighting that battle across seven campuses with a team of preachers. Most of you reading this aren’t. You’re the only voice your congregation hears, week in and week out, in a building where everybody already knows your name, your kids, and probably your car. So what’s the equivalent for you?

I’d argue it’s this: minimizing the celebrity in a small church isn’t about diluting your platform among other voices. It’s about refusing to let the pulpit be the only place people see you. It’s showing up in the hospital room without a sermon in your back pocket. It’s letting a deacon teach the text you were wrestling with in Wednesday night Bible study instead of saving every good insight for Sunday. It’s being willing to say “I don’t know” from the front row of a small group, not just the platform. The solo pastor’s version of “just another guy on staff” is being just another sheep in the flock who happens to carry the crook that week.

Tony told me he wants to sound the same in the pulpit as he does in a hallway conversation — no performance layer bolted on for stage lighting. In a church of eighty, there’s nowhere to hide that gap anyway. Your people know if Sunday-you and Tuesday-you are strangers. Minimizing the celebrity, for you, might simply mean letting that be true on purpose instead of by accident.

Because the gospel doesn’t need our personality to shine; it needs our honesty. When people watch a preacher wrestle authentically with a text, whether from a stage or a folding chair, they don’t walk away impressed by the preacher. They walk away believing they can wrestle too.

Give the full conversation with Tony a listen at betterpreaching.org.

Better preaching makes a bigger impact.

Fresh preaching insights await.