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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.

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Most of us tell Bible stories the way we give driving directions. He went here, he said this, then this happened, and then Jesus did that. The congregation follows along, nods, and moves on, and the moment that should have stopped them cold goes by at forty-five miles an hour.

In Episode 28, Jonathan works through a storytelling technique the biblical writers used long before any preacher named it. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do with a story is hold it still.

Take-Home Truth: Freezing the frame on the moment that carries the weight lets the congregation see what the text wants them to see.

The biblical writers freeze the frame themselves. Luke held the camera on distance before he gave us the embrace... the father saw his son "while he was still a long way off" (Luke 15:20). Mark stopped a miracle story long enough to tell us the grass was green (Mark 6:39). And Pilate literally froze the frame when he told the crowd, "Behold the man!" (John 19:5). Scripture already slows its own stories down at the moments that matter most, which means holding the frame still is a way of following the text.

A four-step tool for your own preaching. The Freeze, the Zoom, the Contrast, and the Anchor, walked through using Zacchaeus standing before Jesus in Luke 19:8, caught between two worlds while a complaining crowd looked on.

A live demonstration. Luke 15:20 told at plot speed, then told again with the frame held still... the son on the road, still a long way off, still rehearsing the servant's apology he wrote in the pig pen, while his father had already seen him. Every detail in that frame came from Luke. The compassion came before the confession.

The guardrail that keeps imagination honest. Matthew 14:30 tells us exactly what Peter saw when he began to sink... he saw the wind. It would be easy to build a beautiful moment around a detail Matthew never gave us, and people go home and read their Bibles the way you model it. The episode offers three filter questions for every detail you add, so imagination stays on a leash held by the text.

Making it work for the ear. Short sentences, visual prompts like "hold right there," a slower rate as you enter the frame, and a real pause before the anchor. It's intentional pause built into the language itself.

This week's assignment: open Sunday's passage and find the one frame worth holding still. Write down only the details the text gives you, pick two of them, and ask what the text wants your people to see there.

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Here is a question that sounds simple until you sit with it for a minute.

What do we preach?

Most of us have a quick answer. We preach the word. And of course we do. But here is the follow-up question that might not be so comfortable: how much of the word do we preach?

In Episode 27, Jonathan works through two ideas that came straight out of what he has been teaching his students recently... and both of them will quietly reshape your preaching calendar if you let them.

Part One: All the counsel.

In Acts 20, Paul says goodbye to the Ephesian elders knowing he will likely never see them again. He reviews his ministry with them, and in verse 27 he says something that should shape our entire preaching life... he had not shunned to declare all the counsel of God.

All of it. Not the parts he preferred. Not the parts that were easy. Not the parts his audience was asking for.

Here is the implication... if you preach for thirty years and never touch a third of the Bible, what you have declared is not all the counsel of God. It is your favorite counsel of God.

And it does not happen by decision. Nobody sits down in year three and decides to avoid the prophets for the next quarter century. It happens by drift. You preach what you are comfortable with. You preach what gets a good response. And twenty years later there are whole neighborhoods of Scripture your congregation has never been taken to... and they do not know it, and you might not either.

The episode offers a year-end diagnostic with three questions to ask of what actually landed on your calendar... including the third one that tells the truth: did I preach anything I did not want to preach? If the answer is no, you are probably curating rather than preaching.

The difference between preaching a text and using a text. Preaching a text means you sat down with the passage, found out what it says, and built a sermon that says what the passage says. Using a text means you already knew what you wanted to say and went looking for a verse that would let you say it. Both produce a sermon with Scripture in it. From the seventh row on a good Sunday they can look identical. Only one is faithful preaching.

Part Two: Preaching Christ from all of Scripture... without doing injustice to the text.

Luke 24 anchors the conviction... beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

But the conviction gets pulled in two bad directions. Allegorizing ... where the five smooth stones become five spiritual disciplines, or one letter each in the name of Jesus. And tacking Jesus on at the end ... executing a passage faithfully and then swerving into a ninety-second gospel presentation that has nothing to do with the text. The impulse is right. But when the swerve is disconnected, you have taught your congregation that the text and the gospel are two separate things that have to be stapled together.

Five honest ways to get from the text to Jesus: direct prophecy, covenant trajectory, divine character, human need, and pattern and type... with a guardrail on that last one. If Scripture calls something a type, you can preach it as a type. Adam in Romans. Moses in Acts 3. Jonah in Matthew 12. The Passover lamb in 1 Corinthians 5. The bronze serpent in John 3. In every case the New Testament makes the connection. You are not inventing it, you are following it.

How the two halves fit together: Part one says preach all of it. Part two says when you go there, Jesus is already in that text waiting on you. Which means the hard passages are not a threat to your preaching.

The assignment: pull up your preaching calendar for the last twelve months and look at it honestly. Where are the gaps? Which testament got shorted? What have you been steering around? Then pick a text you have been avoiding, put it on the calendar, and go preach what it says.

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"I learned to preach like I learned to swim. I fell in the creek and you gotta swim."

In Episode 26, Jonathan sits down with Jerry Jones — author, professor, and one of the most respected voices in Apostolic preaching — for a conversation about how preaching is actually learned, why theory matters as much as experience, and what happens to preachers who try to do this alone.

What this conversation covers:

The genesis of We Preach. Jerry started preaching without Bible school and without formal training — eight sermons a week as a young evangelist, learning by experience what worked and what didn't. But years in, he realized something: he had the feel for it and no theory behind it. Until you understand why something works, you really can't teach it. That gap became the book — now required reading for general licensure in the UPCI.

Why preaching matters more than we let on. Romans 10 was the subject of his master's thesis: preaching plays a role in the salvation process. You can do a lot of good things that help people here and now, and they are all worthy. But preaching affects people's eternity. Greeks want a seminar and Jews want a sign — but we preach.

The dissertation that's taking on a widespread academic claim. Jerry found a nationally recognized church-planting author advising readers not to include preaching in their paradigm, because persuasive rhetorical preaching supposedly didn't exist in the first two centuries of the church and was a later borrowing from pagan worship. He calls it bad theology and bad history. His doctoral work will argue the case using Hebrews and 1 John as sermons, and a remarkable text — a sermon by Melito of Sardis, discovered in 1939 and published by 1960 — written by a pastor roughly sixty years after John's death, who likely knew Polycarp. It's powerful, fiery, and persuasive. If the apostles didn't practice this, we shouldn't be doing it. I think we have to settle that.

Teaching preachers, and what it actually looks like. Nineteen students, three sermons each in sixteen weeks. Students who have never stood behind a pulpit sitting next to students who have preached for years. Why a purely evangelistic sermon is so hard for a young preacher, and how sixty to eighty percent make discernible progress by the last sermon.

The finding every isolated preacher needs to hear. Jerry describes a study of ten years across ten districts, examining every church closing and every church that left truth. The vast majority of closures traced back to the preacher — and not for lack of calling or love for people. They got isolated. They got out there by themselves. Most of those men were no longer in ministry. Many were no longer in the church.

"That first step by yourself is critical. Because if there's not someone, there will be someone."

And the line that closes it. "I'm touching a generation I will not live to see. I'm teaching students that will one day teach preachers that aren't even born yet. I'll be forgotten, and that's the way it works. That's okay. But God doesn't forget."

📚 We Preach is available on Amazon and at pentecostalpublishing.com

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Where does a sermon actually come from?

In this conversation, Jonathan sits down with Rev Jerry Jones, whose messages have shaped a generation — and asks the question most of us never get to ask: what was the genesis of that message?

Two sermons anchor the conversation. And in both cases, the answer starts in personal devotions, not sermon prep.

"But Amnon Had a Friend."

A sermon that has been preached for over thirty-five years and still lands. It began with a question about youth camp — what breaks through on the first night when students arrive carrying weight from every kind of background? The answer was peer pressure, the one universal struggle. And the text was already there: Amnon, the heir apparent to David's throne, who knew what was right and was winning the fight — until a friend named Jonadab talked him out of it.

The conversation traces how the sermon evolved, how "a friend" broadened over the decades to include culture, society, and now TikTok, X, and Instagram. And how it closes — with a grandmother in the grip of dementia who could not recognize her own grandson, but who said, on the bad days, I sing. What a friend we have in Jesus.

"The Lost Letter."

The 2025 General Conference message. It started in devotion — Paul telling the Colossians to share their letter with Laodicea and to read the one sent there. Except there is no letter to Laodicea. Somewhere along the way, a church that was neither hot nor cold simply let it slide.

And it converged with a story from home: a hat that once belonged to Andrew Urshan, thrown in a trash can because nobody knew what it was, rescued by someone walking past who did. When Urshan's great-granddaughter later asked if she could hold it, something clicked.

The result was a message about what we're teaching when we quietly remove things — altar benches, communion tables, pulpits, songbooks, the preacher on the platform. Not because any of it decides heaven or hell. But because those things were teaching something, and we may not have realized it.

Don't tear a fence down until you know why it was built.

The closing questions. What sermon that someone else preached impacted you the most? And what sermon that you preached impacted you the most? The answers include A.D. Spears on grace, O.R. Fauss on "The Danger of Side Roads," and a message on the glory of God drawn from Moses interceding after the golden calf — where Moses won his appeal not by pleading God's love or grace, but His glory.

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There will come a season in your ministry when you are not sure.

The work is hard. The fruit is thin. And somewhere in the middle of a Tuesday you are going to catch yourself asking the question out loud: Did I actually hear God on this?

When that season comes — and it will come — you are going to need something more substantial than a feeling to stand on.

This episode is drawn from material Jonathan has taught to undergraduate preaching students for over sixteen years. Every semester there are two groups in the room: those wrestling with whether they're called, and those certain about it who have never really examined why. This episode is for both.

The working definition: Calling is a sustained conviction, confirmed by the church, that God has set you apart to proclaim His Word.

What this episode covers:

What calling is not — not a feeling, not excitement, not being good at public speaking, and not your pastor handing you the mic one Wednesday night. None of those things are bad. None of them, by themselves, are a call.

Why sustained means duration, not intensity — a calling that shows up at youth camp in July and disappears by December is an experience, not a calling. Callings hold when it's hard. They hold when nobody claps.

Why you do not call yourself — God calls preachers; the church confirms them. If nobody sees it in you but you, that's not a disqualification, but it is a reason to slow down.

George Peters' four biblical implications of the call — sovereignly exercised by the Holy Spirit, individual and personal, unique to the ministry of the Word, and a call to work. Including the line that convicts: If you love preaching but you do not love people, you are not called to preach. You are called to talk.

Four channels God uses to make the call known — human instrumentality, the Word, crisis experiences, and sound logical thinking. Some of you are waiting for a burning bush while God has already spoken through three pastors and a passage you cannot get away from.

The persuasion of the call — including why a deep sense of personal inadequacy belongs on the list. Moses felt inadequate. Jeremiah said he was too young. The preacher who feels entirely adequate for this work has misunderstood the work.

If you came in certain, this episode is meant to root you deeper. If you came in wrestling — the wrestling is not evidence against your calling.

Books referenced: George Peters, A Biblical Theology of Missions · Stephen Olford, Anointed Expository Preaching