Jump Start Your Preaching (part 4 of 6)

I'm a week late putting this out.  Part of the reason for that is that last week I didn't do as much preaching as usual, so I wanted to spend another week working on the challenge from part 3.  So, I'll be at least 7 weeks now in completing this "6 week challenge" (typical!)

This week I want to challenge myself (and anyone who wants to join me) with something I know I need a ton of work on.  As I continue working on the challenges from the past few weeks, I now want to add the following challenge:

Week 3 - Eliminate bad habits (personal "crutches," etc.) 

Before our next Ministry Training Workshop at our KC Mission work, we are working on making some evaluation sheets to use in helping our preachers receive some helpful criticism from others.  This is something I have thought about a lot, and hesitated to implement, because I don't want people to get into the habit of criticizing preachers while they preach.  Instead, we should be listening to the preacher and applying what they preach to our own lives.  However, I do want our preachers to have some good feedback to help them improve.

Sometimes it is difficult to know what our bad habits are.  Here are some of the challenges that might help:​

• Listen to several messages you have preached.
• Make a list of bad habits you catch yourself doing or saying.
• Have someone else (that you can trust to be honest with you) look over that list and give their opinion of those areas you feel you struggle.
• Next time you preach, have someone watch and record each time they notice you doing the things on that list (saying "Uhhh...", using a particular word or phrase over and over, like "You know what I mean?" ect. 
• Have that person (or, even better, a different person) add a few things to the list that they notice that you may have missed.
• The goal is to decrease the amount of times you do the things on that list (My theory is that subconsciously this will naturally happen if you know someone is recording every time you do them).