Clear Preaching

Dr Jonathan McClintock
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Christianity

You worked hard on that sermon. Did they actually hear it? Clear Preaching is the podcast for preachers who are serious about closing the gap between what they meant to say and what their congregation actually heard. Hosted by Dr. Jonathan McClintock — preacher, pastor, sixteen-year homiletics instructor, and developer of the four-domain Clear Preaching Framework — each episode delivers practical, framework-driven teaching on the discipline of preaching with clarity. Through solo teaching episodes, conversations with preachers and scholars, and real sermon analysis, Clear Preaching helps you develop clarity at every stage of the preaching process — from the moment you open the text in your study to the moment you close your Bible in the pulpit. Whether you are stepping into the pulpit for the first time or have been preaching for decades — if you believe the message you carry is worth delivering as clearly as possible, this podcast is for you.

  1. 3d ago

    Ep 34: Growth Comes From Rain: Nate Whitley on Developing as a Preacher (Part 2)

    Send us Fan Mail What happens to a preacher's voice when AI enters sermon preparation? In Episode 34, Jonathan McClintock and Nate Whitley pick up right where Part 1 left off. Nate compares AI to the early days of the internet: a useful tool that should never write the sermon. From there, he and Jonathan talk about why life experience can't be rushed, the preachers who shaped Nate most, including J.H. Osborne and Raymond Woodward, and how home Bible studies and weekly chapel for 250 students became the two things that sharpened his preaching most. He closes with one more "Dear Young Preacher": put down the phone, quit measuring yourself against others, and develop a strength beyond preaching that brings value to the church. In this episode: •      Using AI as a tool while guarding your own voice •      Why a preacher's voice grows with life and ministry •      What to look for in a mentor •      How to keep developing when you rarely get the pulpit New to this conversation? Start with Episode 33. Resources mentioned: •      Treasures Old & New: A 365-Day Journey Through Scripture: https://nswhitley.square.site •      Nate's Bible Exposition Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KZFB2S7 •      All of Nate's books: https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Books-Bibles-Nathan-S-Whitley/s?rh=n:12290,p_27:Nathan%2BS.%2BWhitley •      Nate's links: https://linktr.ee/nswhitley •      Leadership Pain by Samuel Chand Grow your preaching with the Clear Preaching Academy: https://clearpreaching.com  Explore one-on-one coaching:  https://clearpreaching.com/coaching

  2. Oct 27

    Ep 33: Dear Young Preacher: Nate Whitley on the Call, Mentors, and Finding Your Voice

    Send us Fan Mail What does it take to find your own voice as a preacher? In Episode 33, Jonathan McClintock sits down with Knoxville pastor and author Nate Whitley, the voice behind the "Dear Young Preacher" posts, for the first half of a two-part conversation. Nate tells how an eighteen-year-old drummer sensed God's call while pulling out of a church parking lot, ran from it for years, and surrendered at Easter 2005. He talks about the internships with Tim Gill and Brother Vasquez that taught him ministry beyond the pulpit, why he started writing to young preachers, and the prayer in a Mississippi hotel room that changed how he prepares to preach. In this episode: •      Hearing the call to preach, and running from it •      What two mentors taught him about everyday ministry •      Why a preacher has to stay teachable •      Why young preachers today come better prepared, and the risk of mimicry The conversation continues in Episode 34. Resources mentioned: •      Treasures Old & New: A 365-Day Journey Through Scripture: https://nswhitley.square.site •      Nate's Bible Exposition Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KZFB2S7 •      All of Nate's books: https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Books-Bibles-Nathan-S-Whitley/s?rh=n:12290,p_27:Nathan%2BS.%2BWhitley •      Nate's links: https://linktr.ee/nswhitley Grow your preaching with the Clear Preaching Academy: https://clearpreaching.com  Explore one-on-one coaching:  https://clearpreaching.com/coaching

  3. Oct 20

    Ep 32: 87% of Pastors Are Using AI. What Are We Losing?

    Send us Fan Mail Most pastors are already using AI somewhere in their sermon prep. In a December 2025 Barna survey, only 13 percent of American Protestant pastors said they use no AI at all. The question in front of every preacher now is where the line belongs. In this episode, Jonathan McClintock walks through his UGST Symposium talk, At the Intersection of AI and Apostolic Preaching. He looks at what preaching is, who the preacher is called to be, and why God chose to send His Word through flesh and blood. From there he works through the three movements of sermon preparation (Learn, Listen, and Speak) and asks a hard question: at what point does AI's involvement diminish the mind, heart, and voice of the preacher? In this episode: • Why the study is where the Word becomes flesh in you • The "mechanized mirror" and what AI hands back when you describe your people • A word to young preachers about finding their own voice • Jin Hyung-Sub's research on pastor overload, sermon consumerism, and the preaching ecosystem • Four questions to ask before you use AI on your next sermon AI after the wrestling is a tool. AI before the wrestling is a substitute. Want help building a clear, Spirit-led preaching process? Join us at the Clear Preaching Academy: clearpreaching.com

  4. Oct 13

    Ep 31: Don’t Preach Past the Peak . . . A Conversation with Paul Pamer

    Send us Fan Mail “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.

  5. Oct 6

    Ep 30: The Shuffle Test: Why Your Sermon Isn't Going Anywhere

    Send us Fan Mail 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.

  6. Sep 29

    Ep 29: Trade Your Points for Movements - Never have "Main Points" Again

    Send us Fan Mail 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.

  7. Sep 22

    Ep 28: Freeze the Frame . . . Slowing the Story Down So the Truth Can Land

    Send us Fan Mail 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.

  8. Sep 16

    Ep 27: How Much of the Bible Are You Preaching?

    Send us Fan Mail 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.

See All (34)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

You worked hard on that sermon. Did they actually hear it? Clear Preaching is the podcast for preachers who are serious about closing the gap between what they meant to say and what their congregation actually heard. Hosted by Dr. Jonathan McClintock — preacher, pastor, sixteen-year homiletics instructor, and developer of the four-domain Clear Preaching Framework — each episode delivers practical, framework-driven teaching on the discipline of preaching with clarity. Through solo teaching episodes, conversations with preachers and scholars, and real sermon analysis, Clear Preaching helps you develop clarity at every stage of the preaching process — from the moment you open the text in your study to the moment you close your Bible in the pulpit. Whether you are stepping into the pulpit for the first time or have been preaching for decades — if you believe the message you carry is worth delivering as clearly as possible, this podcast is for you.

Information

  • Creator
    Dr Jonathan McClintock
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    34
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Clear Preaching
  • Show Website
    Clear Preaching

You Might Also Like