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“If you keep going after you get to that peak, there is nowhere to go.”

In Episode 31, Jonathan sits down with Paul Pamer, senior pastor of the Apostolic Church in Barberton, Ohio and Men’s Ministries Director for the United Pentecostal Church International, for a conversation about legacy, adaptability, and what it actually takes to preach to men.

What this conversation covers:

A boy who wanted to be a preacher and a Kroger bag boy. Paul tells the story of riding in a shopping cart at his local Kroger, watching the bag boy who seemed important to the process, and carrying a sense of calling that traces back through his dad and both grandfathers. His great-grandparents started the church he now pastors. His father has attended it for seventy-four years.

What generations of ministry handed down. Loyalty, work ethic, and a love for truth. A grandfather who pastored while retiring from building tires after thirty years of service. Another who pastored while running the largest employer in North Little Rock. People who were the exact same at home as they were on a platform at a conference. As Paul puts it, borrowing from Eugene Peterson, a long obedience in the same direction.

Why you have to preach in different venues. Some of the finest preachers in America fall apart when they have to wear a pair of blue jeans and preach around a campfire at a men’s retreat. Paul walks through why youth ministry was the best preaching training he could have had, why he preached at nursing homes where four people showed up and three were asleep, and why the way you preach on a national stage rarely translates to a Wednesday night.

Preaching past the appeal. This is the heart of the conversation. There is a moment when people are ready to respond, and Paul describes what it costs when a preacher keeps going. You summited K2. If you keep climbing past the peak, you are headed toward Tibet, you are going south, and now gravity is working against you. Jonathan connects it to Wayne Huntley’s warning about preaching past conviction.

The convergence of time and technology. Paul names what he is hearing from men across the country. Time pressure from work, side hustles, and everything competing for a weeknight. Then technology layered on top of it, including the dopamine pull of video games that keeps men up until three in the morning. He notes that video games are never in his notes, and the Holy Ghost brings it up every single time he preaches to men.

Preaching to shame without crushing or excusing. Why men appreciate honesty and transparency, and why Paul spends deliberate time with brand new people and with sinners so he never goes tone deaf. If he is going to be out of touch with anyone, he would rather be out of touch with the fifty-year church member.

Credibility with men. Know the difference between a trout and a bass. Own a pair of blue jeans. Know that football is king in Alabama and barbecue matters in Texas. Men will struggle to receive your exegesis of Ephesians when they cannot see you as a real person.

The closing word. Drawing from Romans 10, Paul lands it: you have to find a way to engage men socially so that you can engage them spiritually.

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Here is a test that takes about thirty seconds and will tell you the truth about your last sermon.

Take your movements and swap their order. Put movement three first. Put movement one last. Then ask yourself honestly... did anything break?

Because if you can shuffle them and the sermon works just as well, what you have is a list. And a list can be true, biblical, well illustrated, and still leave a room exactly where it found them.

In Episode 30, Jonathan picks up where last week left off. We traded our points for movements and said every movement lands on the same Take-Home Truth. Now comes the other half, and the two together are the whole architecture of a Build.

Take-Home Truth: Every movement lands on the same truth, and each one gets your people closer to believing it.

Accumulation and progression. Accumulation says one thing five ways. Progression takes three steps to one place. You will hear both of them side by side on the same subject... four movements that make a single claim with no motion at all, then three movements on that same truth that travel from past to present to future, where each one needs the one before it.

Where progression actually comes from. Two places, and the first one is better. The text usually supplies it, because narrative has sequence built in and an epistle argues in steps. Preach the passage's own order and you inherit its momentum for free. Most sermons that lack progression abandoned the text's shape and laid a topical outline on top of it. The second place is your listener's resistance... ask what has to fall for someone to believe your Take-Home Truth, because you cannot skip a step in someone's heart any more than you can skip a step in an argument.

The rising line. Your movements should do more than progress. They should rise, with each one carrying a little more weight than the one before it. When the sermon has been climbing the whole way, the Close inherits all that momentum and simply has to land it. When the Build stays flat, the Close has to generate the entire weight of the sermon by itself in about six minutes. That is why so many of us get loud at the end. The volume is compensation for a Build that never climbed.

This week's assignment: run the Shuffle Test on your last three sermons. You are looking for a pattern rather than a verdict on a single Sunday. And when you find one that shuffles freely, hold onto it and rebuild it. Ask what order those movements would go in if each one had to earn the next.

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Three points and a poem. Point one, point two, point three. We have all done it, and most of us were taught to do it that way.

In Episode 29, Jonathan makes the case that one small word has quietly done damage to a lot of our preaching, and offers a replacement that changes how the body of a sermon gets built.

The trouble with a point. A point is a topic, and it just sits there. Picture an outline that says "Point Two: Faith." What are you actually claiming about faith? A label names a subject and then waits for you to say something about it, and an outline built on topics will let you talk for ten minutes without moving the sermon a single step forward.

The definition to replace it. A movement is a complete sentence that moves the sermon toward its destination. Both halves of that definition carry weight. It is a complete sentence with a subject and a verb, because a full sentence forces you to decide what you are actually saying. And it travels somewhere, carrying the listener one step closer to where the sermon is going.

Watch the difference. "Prayer" is a label. "The power of prayer" is a longer label. "Prayer is how a desperate man gets God's attention" makes a claim someone could argue with, and it sets direction for everything that movement builds.

A diagnostic worth using every week. If there is a fragment anywhere in your outline while you are building it, you have found a piece of the sermon you have not finished thinking about yet.

Every movement lands on the Take-Home Truth. Two images hold this together. A sermon works like a house, where the meaning of the text is the foundation, the Take-Home Truth is the roof, and the movements are the pillars holding it up. Or picture a wagon wheel, where the Take-Home Truth is the hub and every movement is a spoke coming in from a different angle. Spokes that never reach the hub are just a pile of sticks.

Your people are listening in real time. They cannot flip back a page. Every landing gives them a fresh chance to grab the idea, especially the ones whose minds drifted toward lunch three minutes ago.

How many movements should a sermon have? Usually two to four. Five or six usually means you are accumulating, so look for the ones saying the same thing and combine them. One movement usually means you have a devotional thought that still needs room to grow. Resist picking the number first and let the text show you its natural seams.

A worked example from Daniel 1. Take-Home Truth: Consecration will take you further than talent ever will. Three movements drawn from the text: Babylon loves your talent but despises who you represent (verses 3 to 7). Consecration is not afraid of the test (verses 8 to 16). God promotes those who consecrate themselves to his purpose (verses 17 to 21). The older version of that outline would have read "talent, the test, promotion," and those three words would have let him wander all over Babylon.

The whole episode in three sentences. Points give your people information. Movements carry them somewhere. Every movement lands in the same place.

This week's homework: pull out the notes from your last sermon and rewrite every heading as a complete declarative sentence. Leave the content alone. You will likely find at least one place where you did not know exactly what you were claiming, and that discovery is worth the whole exercise.