Some pastors are able to plan their entire preaching schedule for a year. I was not that good. I tried to plan at least three months worth, and I could often get six months of planning done before the new year started.
I always began by taking a yellow legal pad and writing down the dates for each Sunday in the left hand column. (Yes, you can use your computer. I'm old, and I like paper!) To the left of that I would write out if that Sunday had a special emphasis such as Mother's Day or the first Sunday of Advent. If you have to preach both on Sunday morning and Sunday night you will find that a legal pad will give you enough lines for one quarter of sermons. If you only preach on Sunday morning, just skip a line between each date.
The next thing I would do is pray about what I wanted to accomplish. Your church's vision should inform much of what you are wanting to do. I would then begin to think about themes. Soon these would lead to sermon titles with a text. That's what I would write down. The special emphasis Sundays would have their own special theme. (It really wasn't too hard to know what my topic would be on the Sunday before Thanksgiving!)
One thing I often did was plan a series of sermons on the family between Mother's Day and Father's Day. That was often one of the most popular sermon series I did each year.
The Sunday after Father's Day I would often begin a lengthy sermon series through a book of the Bible or a major portion of Scripture such as the Sermon on the Mount. This series would normally run through the entire summer and sometimes into the fall. This helped make sure I wasn't avoiding difficult passages, and it deepened our congregation's understanding about what the Bible teaches.
There are several advantages to planning your sermons months in advance.
- It allows you more time to actually prepare your messages. Too often, pastors who go Sunday-to-Sunday in their sermon preparation actually spend more time trying to decide what to preach than they spend in the preparation.
- It enables your worship planners to know in advance what your messages will be so they will be better able to plan the music and other elements of worship to coordinate with the message. This provides a better flow to your worship service.
- It lets you have a good overview of your sermons. One year as I was looking back at my messages for that year I realized that I had become rather negative in my preaching. God convicted me of that in such a way I apologized to the congregation the following Sunday and made a shift in my sermons.
- It makes sure you will have the necessary resources to prepare your sermons. For example, one year I decided to preach through the book of Romans for my summer series. At that time I did not have a lot of commentaries and other sermon helps on Romans. I made sure that problem was corrected before it was time to begin preparing those messages.
- It helps ensure you are not just preaching on your current interests. Right now, I am very interested in reading on apologetics. I have shared some of my learning with my current congregation, but it would be unfair to do that every Sunday. By planning my preaching I am more likely to offer them more balanced messages that includes more than just apologetics.
- It also gives the speaker an opportunity to keep the church's vision before them. We are told that a congregation needs to be reminded at least once a month of its vision for ministry. Planning your messages in advance can help make that happen.
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