If you can get Nick Saban chocked up, you must be a pretty special person.
I love the life lessons that can come to us from the sporting world.
This weekend, Alabama was playing Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. The Crimson Tide were trying to continue one of the most dominating seasons in college football history, but they had struggled against Georgia and trailed by 7 when star quarterback Tua Tagovailoa (the favorite to win the Heisman trophy as college football’s best player) left the game with an injury. (more…)
I love weddings. I’ve had the chance to have a wedding (thanks Kari). I’ve officiated several weddings, and been in a few more. I also do public speaking every week.
Having to write a speech can be scary and a major source of stress for people who are less comfortable in front of an audience.
Listen to me. You can give a great wedding speech. You have it in you.
1. Do not make the toast about yourself!
Common mistake.
It’s not about you. People are not at the wedding for you. They’re there for the bride and groom. Make it about them.
Sure it’s appropriate to say how you know the bride and groom. It can be appropriate to share a story about you and the bride or groom or a story that involves you and the bride and groom.
But don’t have the toast revolve around you.
2. Keep it short
Have you ever seen a commercial that was so poignant it moved you in your soul? You can say something meaningful in a short time.
The Gettysburg Address was 272 words. That’s a 2-3 minute speech.
If your wedding toasts goes past four minutes, that’s too long.
Also to show what can be accomplished in a short period of time:
3. Humor is optional
Wedding toasts can be funny. But don’t feel pressure to make it funny.
Good rule of thumb: are you funny?
I’m not asking if you proclaim yourself to be funny. Do other people tell you you’re funny and laugh at things you say? If so, sure use humor if you want to. If not, don’t try to make a wedding toast the opportunity to do something you’re already bad at.
4. Do not say any of the following
“I”m not a professional speaker.” No one cares. I’ve seen people who have plenty of public speaking experience give terrible speeches. And I’ve seen people who have very little public speaking experience get up there, speak from the heart, and give awesome speeches. You don’t have to be a pro to speak well.
Similarly, if you make a mistake, don’t apologize, don’t say “oops,” keep going. People won’t remember it if you keep moving forward with the speech.
If you’re the best man, and you don’t know the bride very well or if you’re the maid of honor and you don’t know the groom very well, don’t say “I don’t really know (their name)…”
Don’t mention an ex of the bride or the groom in the speech. That person is from their old life. Your friend is going forward with someone else (who’s better).
5. Awkward and embarrassing stories about the bride and groom
Don’t!
No one looks back fondly at wedding toasts that were trying to embarrass the bride and groom. People do look back fondly at the ones that support the couple and where it is evident that the toast master has a lot of love for both the bride and groom.
6. DO NOT make jokes about their love for each other, commitment to each other, references to past relationships, or any suggestion whatsoever that the relationship might not last.
I once went to a wedding and the best man said “I wrote a great toast…but I plan to give it at his next wedding.”
That’s not funny.
It’s poor form. (Also that person did have a lot of public speaking experience and should have known better).
It dishonors the bride, the groom, and their marriage. It’s not the time or the place. In fact, it’s the worst time and place to joke about the status of their relationship or the sincerity of their love.
And while we’re at it:
7. Do not use the toast as a soap box to complain about marriage
Don’t say things that undermine or undervalue the union of marriage.
Maybe you’re cynical about love or marriage. Maybe you’re divorced. Whatever the case, if you’re not a huge fan of the commitment of marriage, that is not the time or place to share your views.
8. Public speaking tips
Don’t wing it. The week of the wedding, give some thought to your relationship with the bride and groom, practice a few times. If you’re drinking alcohol at the wedding, make sure you’re able to give a clear speech. Speak slowly. Breathe.
If you follow the rest of what I’ve said, you’re going to be fine. If you give a quick, sincere speech that focuses on the bride and groom, that shows a lot of love, you’re going to give a great speech.
Questions? Feel free to ask in the comments.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!
Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.
Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral in Houston. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The sexual abuse scandal is the never ending story.
This week, authorities in Houston raided the offices of Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, who’s the archbishop of the Houston-Galveston Catholic Dioceses. Being the archbishop of the fourth largest city in America is pretty significant, but DiNardo is also the President of the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The raid was related to the Houston diocese handling of sexual assault allegations against a local priest named Manuel La Rosa-Lopez.
It’s been a rough few months for the Catholic Church in America, largely because of self-inflicted wounds. In July, the New York Times ran a cover story alleging sexual abuse of a Catholic seminarian perpetrated by Theodore McCarrick, a Catholic Cardinal, who had retired as the archbishop of Washington D.C. in 2006. Shortly after the Times story was released, McCarrick resigned as a cardinal. He’s the highest ranking American Catholic to have been accused of abuse. But there were also Catholic leaders who say that they had heard of these allegations and reported them up the chain, prior to the July story.
In August, Carlo Vigano, who had served as the archbishop nuncio to the United States (basically the Vatican ambassador to America) wrote that he had previously reported on McCarrick, as had Vigano’s predecessor. The abuses were swept under the rug.
There were several stories about Vigano this summer. Vigano is a pretty credible person to be making those claims. Vatican gave smoke and mirrors. Pope Francis asked people to pray for the Catholic Church in these “attacks from the devil.”
Chicago archbishop Blasé Cupich brushed off Vigano saying: “The pope knows we have a bigger agenda. We have to speak about the environment, about the poor, we have to reach out to people who are marginalized in society. We cannot be distracted at this moment,”
The hits kept coming.
In August, a Grand Jury Report came out in Pennsylvania, investigating eight of Pennsylvania’ diocese. They found evidence spanning decades of hundreds of priests allegedly sexually assaulting over a thousand children.
When that report was released, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro talked about a “sophisticated cover up,” and claimed they even had evidence that the Vatican was aware of the cover up.
Pennsylvania had been the former stomping grounds of Cardinal Donal Wuerl, who had succeeded McCarrick as the archbishop of Washington D.C. Wuerl had previously been archbishop of Pittsburgh and was one of the names named by Vigano. Wuerl resigned in October.
And now we come to Houston. It’s possible that DiNardo knew nothing of the current allegations within his diocese. But it doesn’t look good that it’s a question that even has to be asked of the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops when there’s already a major scandal.
What has been seen is that higher ups have known about abuses and covered up abuses. Which gets at a major crux of the problem: then who is going to actually work to fix the problems?
Because the Catholic Church continues to fail at fixing the problem. And some (not all) Catholics are apologists and want to talk about all of the steps that are being taken. Grand conspiracies to cover up child sexual abuse is an abomination. In America, it’s taking grand juries and local law enforcement to get to the truth, because the Catholic Church is failing.
Next February, the Vatican is hosting a summit on these clerical abuses. This week, Blase Cupich (Mr. Environment) was tapped as one of the organizers for the summit. I was immediately skeptical of this selection. In addition to talking about how the Pope had to focus on the environment (something he doesn’t’ control) rather than being troubled with an imploding sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church (something he does control), said they weren’t “going to go down a rabbit hole” on Vigano’s credible allegations.
It all seems reactionary and slow to come. And my concern is that it still won’t fix the problems. People can try to dismiss these issues as being things that happened a long time ago, but when many of the higher ups within the church are being shown to have had knowledge (or in McCarrick’s case, to be the perpetrator), it remains a major crisis.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!
Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.
Much has been said about John Chau, the American missionary who lost his life when trying to approach the Sentinelese tribe, who live on a remote island off the coast of India.
There are different camps people fall into with this story. I wrote about this last week. Some people looked at a story of a Christian going to another part of the world to try to reach others with the gospel with such scorn that they practically celebrated his death.
I literally saw people comment that they weren’t even sorry for him. I think that’s pretty sick.<!–more–>
Others were apathetic to his death because he was exposing people to diseases. I’m not a doctor, he might have been, however he had been heavily immunized and even spent time in quarantine before going. At the very least, it seems that Mr. Chau was thoughtful to avoid that (and he had also received medical training).
I’ve been critical of the methods used to approach the Sentinelese people. I still do believe that things could have been approach in a manner of better judgment, especially once the situation was obviously perilous. But I also might have been unfair in my initial assessment.
From the available information, Chau had put a great deal of thought into this trip. It wasn’t throw together on a whim. He had planned for this trip. He had trained for this trip. I always thought his desire was admirable: reaching people with the gospel who had never been reached with it.
It’s a complicated story because people fall into many camps. There is the aforementioned group who are hostile to the gospel and its spread. There are people who aren’t necessarily hostile to the gospel but who were opposed to this particular effort because of the risk of disease.
But Christians also have differing opinions. I think we should remember the good things about Chau’s effort: having a desire to reach the lost with the gospel. He was in an extreme situation but so many of us aren’t even willing to share the love of Jesus with a friend or neighbor because we’re so uncomfortable.
As I’ve said, I think that there is room to question some of these methods. Not even to bad mouth a young man who lost his life, but just in terms of evaluating missiological strategies. Ed Stetzer, who’s a missiologist and author noted a couple of Bible verses that apply to this situation. In Matthew 10:14, Jesus told his disciples: “if anyone will not welcome you or heed your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town.”
There is a lot of hatred in the world. Missionaries and Christians lose their lives and are persecuted for their faith.
I still think it’s fair to question if Christians should deliberately put themselves in positions where they are facing almost certain death?
It appears that Chau never had any sort of end with the Sentinelese people. Perhaps more information will come out, but standard avenues to try to reach and positively interact with a society seemed to be closed off.
Christians should pray for the Sentinelese people, and to pray for John Chau’s family.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!
Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.
Much of society associates love with tolerance and acceptance.
And while we can agree that love is good, truly having love for people is challenging. Yes, it’s easy to love family and good friends. Jesus addresses that in the Gospel of Luke: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that (Luke 6:32-33).”
The Bible shows us what love is on the cross. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).”
In 1 John 3:16-17, the Apostle John says:
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?
-1 John 3:16-17
It’s easy to agree with that. It’s easy to see the virtue in that.
But what an incredibly difficult picture of love that is. I don’t think that it exclusively means dying (the second half of the passage talks about helping those in need, which assumes someone is alive to do that).
Being apathetic to what people do, and calling that love, is easy.
Just saying you love people is easy.
Actually loving people is hard. Actually serving people is hard.
And perhaps the truest test of love is how we treat those who are hardest for us to love. Again, it’s easy to love those who are nice to us. It’s easy to love those we like.
But we’re sinful. And we all have those who are harder for us to love. Who is it who is hard for you to love? Maybe it’s someone who believes differently politically. Maybe those of another religion. Maybe it’s those who are rich or those who are poor and on the bottom of society’s rungs. Maybe it’s criminals or those who battle an addiction or have a mental disorder. Maybe it’s more than one of these groups.
Again, it’s easy, in theory, to agree that we should love everyone.
But whoever it is who’s the hardest for you to love is who you need to love. It’s a message that makes no sense to the world. And it’s a message that Jesus died to bring to the world.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!
Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.
