Preaching Still Matters

March 2, 2026

Preachers have beautiful feet. You read that correctly. Before your thoughts turn to hammer toes and plantar warts, consider this: Scripture agrees with me. Paul quoted Isaiah to the church in Rome, “As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” (Romans 10:15)

He was talking about preachers. In the verse just before his podiatric metaphor Paul wrote, “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent?” (Romans 10:14–15)

Paul was thinking specifically of his Jewish brothers and sisters in this text. Despite his calling as the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul began the chapter declaring “my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.”

The Evangelical Imperative for Preaching

God’s heart still breaks for the lost. Even though some think preaching is foolish business (1 Corinthians 1:18–21), God still wants everyone to be saved and understand the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). How does God do that? Through preaching.

Charles Spurgeon, one of England’s greatest preachers, credited a sermon he heard on Isaiah 45:22—“Young man, look to Jesus Christ”—for becoming a Christian when he was 15 years old.

Louis Zamperini was a hero and World War II prisoner of war. In 1949 he attended a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles where Graham’s sermon on forgiveness and salvation led him to surrender his life to Christ. He went on to forgive and reconcile with his former captors and became an evangelist himself.

Johnny Cash was addicted to pills and booze and even though he grew up in a Christian family had walked away from God. It was gospel preaching that led him to rededicate his life and shape his public witness as a Christian artist.

Introducing the Better Preaching Podcast

God loves the lost—and preaching leads them home. That’s why we began the Better Preaching Podcast. Better preaching helps more people find the God who loves them.

The Better Preaching Podcast is founded on four assumptions:

Preaching matters – God uses preaching to change lives. (Romans 10:14–15)
Better preaching – One can become a better preacher. (2 Timothy 2:15; 4:1–3)
We’re better together – Learning from the past leads to the future. (Jeremiah 6:16)
Great sermons are timeless. (Psalm 119:1–5)

My Story

It was a long list of preachers who changed my life. I learned about Jesus from my father, Larry Weller. He became a Christian because of the preaching and witness of a minister named Jim Platner. Jim became a Christian through the influence of preachers like Hank McAdams.

I’m not only a preacher because of this spiritual ancestry, but I am a better preacher because of the example of preachers like Dr. Gary Carpenter, Bob Russell, and many others.

Lost people matter. So preach like it.

The Better Preaching Podcast can help.

You Can’t Outsource Your Soul to a Bot

August 6, 2026

Chris VandeLinde called his air conditioning company last week and spent four minutes talking to a robot before he figured it out. The only giveaway? The robot was a little slow.

Pretty soon it won’t be.

Chris is the Lead Pastor of Cornerstone Christian Church in Shiloh, Illinois, and my guest on this week’s Better Preaching Podcast. He’s no AI alarmist. He told me he uses it every day for research. But he sees something coming that every preacher ought to notice: we are rapidly approaching the day when we can’t trust anything we see or hear online. Was that video real? Did that person actually say that? Am I even talking to a person right now? (For the record, Chris wondered aloud whether he was talking to the real Frank Weller. I assured him I’m one of a kind, which my wife confirms with a sigh.)

Here’s the surprising part. Chris believes this erosion of digital trust is going to drive people back to the things they can know are real. Their neighbors. A circle of chairs. Prayer with actual people in an actual room. Paper Bibles.

And the data backs him up. While AI usage is going through the roof, paper Bible sales are climbing right alongside it. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a hunger. When everything on a screen can be faked, ink on a page starts to feel like solid ground.

Chris thinks we may be standing at the front edge of another golden age of preaching—live proclamation, in person, from a flesh-and-blood preacher people know and trust. I’ve been saying the same thing about Christian higher education. You can learn a lot from a YouTube video. You can ask a chatbot to explain Colossians. But you cannot outsource spiritual formation to a bot, any more than you can outsource physical fitness to a workout video. As Chris put it, at some point you’ve got to actually lift the weights.

Formation happens face to face. It always has. The digital world is about to remind us why.

So preacher, take heart. The very technology that seems to threaten your calling may be the thing that sends people back to your pews, hungry for something real.

That something real is the analog church.

Episode Summary:

In this episode, Dr. Frank Weller talks with Chris VandeLinde, Lead Pastor of Cornerstone Christian Church in Shiloh, Illinois, about preaching that builds culture and reaches the next generation. Chris explains why every sermon must answer questions people are actually asking—especially questions of identity—and why culture-shaping belongs in every message when the average family attends less than twice a month. He shares who taught him to preach, from his youth minister to the podcast preachers who pastored him from afar. A lifelong soccer player, Chris draws a surprising lesson from World Cup culture: the church holds a unifying identity far greater than any flag or team. The conversation closes with his prediction that as AI erodes trust in the digital world, the church will see a resurgence of the tangible: paper Bibles, small groups, and in-person gatherings.

For show notes:

Covenant Connections https://www.covenantconnections.life/

Blessed are the Undone

October 15, 2026

All week long that old Joni Mitchell tune, Both Sides Now has been stuck in my head. This week on the Better Preaching Podcast Nate Ross provided a moment that has made me think: I really don’t know preaching at all.

Nate was two and a half years into leading Northside Christian Church — the church where his father had been lead pastor. The numbers were exactly what any of us would want: twenty percent growth, a twenty-eight-million-dollar campaign successfully raised. And he was miserable.

So he did what most of us do. He pulled levers. He got his preaching calendar a full year out. He built a teaching team with names like Mike Breaux and Efrem Smith on it. Every lever worked. None of them touched the problem. “Everything looks unbelievable,” he told me, “but something is not right in your soul.”

I’ve sat in that chair. Most leaders I know have.

What finally broke it open for Nate wasn’t a better system. It was a question. A counselor asked him to set aside the business model and the branding and answer one thing: what is the Lord doing in your heart? And Nate’s honest answer — “I’d rather help leaders lead their thing than lead my thing” — came out wrapped in shame, because in ministry we’ve absorbed the idea that stepping out of the pulpit is a demotion.

Here’s the framework Nate gave us, and I think it’s worth writing on the inside of your study door. Awareness. Access. Action. Most of us live at the third step and never visit the first two. We take action, take action, take action until the wheels come off and all we’re left with is the awareness that something is badly wrong, with no capacity left to do anything about it.

Nate finds the pattern in Revelation 2. Jesus told the church in Ephesus to “remember” the height from which they’d fallen. Then repent. Then do the things you did at first. Awareness, then access, then action. We keep trying to run the sequence backward.

And underneath all of it is the hardest word in the conversation: undone. Nate describes the deep waters of Proverbs 20:5 the way a diver would: dark, cold, high pressure, nothing you’d enter casually. But he insists that’s where Jesus starts with us. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the undone. Judas left because he wouldn’t be undone. Peter kept reaching for a sword because he wouldn’t be undone. We all keep a lever within arm’s reach.

Here’s the earworm that displaced Joni Mitchell rattling around in my head: the best thing you can give your church, and your family, is the healthiest version of you. Not the most impressive version. Not the version that can keep pace with whoever preached that same text better than you did on Sunday.

But that means sitting in a powerless position long enough to let Jesus hold the power.

Standing in the Middle

March 9, 2026

“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” (2 Timothy 2:2)

My Biological Ancestry

My family’s American experience began ten generations ago when my seventh great-grandfather, Johann Jacob Weller, arrived in America in 1737. Four generations later, my third-great grandfather—Johann’s great-great grandson—moved to northeast Indiana. That’s where he and four successive generations of Wellers rest at Cedar Chapel Cemetery. It’s where they’ll lay my bones one day to await Christ’s return.

My Spiritual Ancestry

As fascinated as I am with my family’s genealogy, I am more intrigued with my spiritual family tree. I wish there was a good website for tracing the ancestry of my spiritual fathers and mothers.

I learned about Jesus from my dad, Larry Weller. My childhood preacher, a man named Jim Platner, led my father to faith in Christ. Jim tells me he became a Christian through the influence of, among others, a preacher named Hank McAdams.

That’s as far back as I can trace my spiritual heritage.

If Brother McAdams were still living, I’d be fascinated to find out who told him about Jesus. And who told that person. And the one before.

In eternity I think I’ll have all the time in the world to meet every person in that long line reaching all the way back to Jesus. Jesus discipled Peter, who told Clement about Jesus, who told Ignatius, who told Polycarp, who told Irenaeus, who told someone, who told someone else, all the way down the line to Hank McAdams, Jim Platner, Larry Weller, and eventually me.

Christians Stand in the Middle

That’s because all those folks lived according to 2 Timothy 2:2—“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.”

If you’re a follower of Jesus, you’re called to stand in the middle between the generation who led you to Christ and people who have not yet become followers of Jesus.

Preachers Stand in the Middle, Too

In 2020 I began meeting with a group of younger preachers for coaching and encouragement. These guys ranged from their late twenties to early thirties, and each were first-time preachers.

By that time, I had been preaching nearly every Sunday for twenty-three years, so I had a lot to say. I’ll leave it to them to decide whether I had much to offer.

We talked about preaching. We explored leading in the context of a complicated time in our nation’s history (remember, it was at the start of the pandemic). Our topics ranged from the mundane—like how to prepare a sermon—to deeply personal subjects like how being in ministry impacted our wives and children.

As I move into my fifties, investing in the next generation of servant leaders feels more important to me than ever.

There was a slogan on the wall of the chapel at the college I attended: “God give us preachers.” This rallying cry is as relevant and needed today as it was forty years ago when I first read it.

It is a prayer, but it is also a reminder that I am the answer to that prayer, because I stand in the middle between the preachers who taught me and the ones who will pick up the mantle of proclaiming God’s Word to a new generation.

Evangelism is the responsibility of every Christian. But it’s important that preachers understand their responsibility to stand in the middle pulpit.

Fresh preaching insights await.