How to Tell Great Stories moves preachers beyond simply preparing sermons, to developing a distinctive preaching voice and a deeper capacity for theological imagination. In our Preaching & Homiletics Institute, we help clergy and seminarians by bringing together biblical interpretation, homiletical theory, narrative storytelling, cultural analysis, communication, and embodied preaching practices. This cadre of skills helps clergy and seminarians create sermons that are theologically grounded, intellectually rigorous, pastorally responsive, and imaginatively compelling.
Our approach recognizes that preaching is both an act of theological interpretation and an act of communication. Our teaching and consulting adds value by helping clergy become more intentional architects of the preaching experience. When connecting Scripture with contemporary life, strengthening sermon structure and delivery, and creating meaningful spiritual opportunities, clergy can help congregants fully experience the sermon.
Through individual coaching, workshops, retreats, manuscript consultation, and intensive learning experiences, we help preachers develop the confidence to take creative risks, while remaining faithful to their theological commitments. The result is preaching that does more than explain Scripture; it creates connection, awakens imagination, speaks meaningfully into contemporary life, deepens faith, and helps people discover new possibilities for living.
We help preachers become imaginative interpreters, compelling storytellers, and transformative voices in the lives of the people they serve.
How to Tell Great Stories helps leaders approach the church's most significant seasons with theological depth, creative imagination, and intentional storytelling. Rather than treating Lent, Holy Week, Advent, and other seasons as a series of sermons to be completed, we help ministry teams imagine the season as a cohesive preaching and worship experience. We support ministry teams with collaborative planning, biblical interpretation, homiletical coaching, narrative development, and creative communication. We help them connect Scripture, worship, congregational life, and contemporary experience in ways that make each season more transformative.
Our seasonal consulting adds value by giving ministry leaders both the creative space and practical tools. This helps leaders to prepare well without carrying the entire burden alone. We engage with churches to develop a unified vision for their seasonal ministry. From sermon series and worship experiences to congregational storytelling and participant resources, we create frameworks that can be adapted to a church's particular context, traditions, and people.
The result is more than a collection of seasonal sermons or services—it is a spiritually engaging experience. The experience invites congregations to encounter familiar biblical seasons with fresh imagination, deeper connection, and renewed spiritual purpose.
We help churches imagine what the season can become and create experiences congregations can enter, remember and carry with them.
Preaching Innovation Lab
At How to Tell Great Stories, we believe preachers become stronger communicators when they have a place to experiment, question, practice, and learn alongside others. The Preaching Innovation Lab is How to Tell Great Stories’ cohort-centered community of practice. Rather than treating preaching development as a solitary exercise or one-time workshop, the Lab creates an ongoing environment.
Through facilitated conversation, collaborative learning, constructive feedback, and creative experimentation, participants are challenged to develop a preaching voice that is both authentically their own and responsive to the communities they serve. The Lab adds value by creating an ongoing ecosystem for preaching development. Rather than a one-time training experience, participants continuously learn from the facilitator and one another. They expand their imagination through the process of sharing perspectives, preaching traditions, experiences, challenges, and creative approaches. Cohorts can be organized around a particular denomination, church network, seminary, preaching initiative, or shared ministry challenge and can include sermon development, manuscript consultation, worship planning, leadership reflection, and individual coaching.
The result is not simply stronger sermons, but stronger preachers and ministry leaders. A community where preachers can develop practical strategies for preaching in an increasingly complex world.
We create a community where they can experiment, discover, refine, and reimagine what preaching can become.