Plan your preaching in advance

Each year about this time I post an article recommending that ministers need to plan their preaching in advance. This is especially true for bivocational ministers. It's another way of controlling your time, a topic I covered in yesterday's post.

When I was a pastor I began my preparations in the fall of the year for the next year. The process I used was very simple. I took a legal pad and wrote down every Sunday's date. Because we had evening services each date had two lines, one for the AM service and one for the PM service.Using two lines allowed me to have enough room to record the Sermon title and text for one quarter of the year for each message. I would then go through the calendar and note any special days such as Mother's Day or Easter.

I would then prayerfully consider what needed to be addressed in the upcoming year. On the Sundays between Mother's Day and Father's Day I would normally do a series of sermons on family life. During the summer I would do a series through a book of the Bible or a major section of the Bible such as the Sermon on the Mount. By planning in the fall of the year this gave me a lot of time to get any research material or books I might need for my sermon preparation. Once I filled in major blocks I could begin to look for opportunities for shorter sermon series or individual sermons. Possible titles and text would be written on my sheet of paper in pencil. I always wanted to be able to make a change if circumstances required. My goal was always to prepare at least one quarter in advance.

There are so many advantages to planning your preaching schedule.

1. When you plan ahead you can focus on sermon preparation instead of trying to decide what you are going to preach on the next Sunday.
2. You avoid the "Saturday night specials" which usually are not that special.
3. You allow your worship teams to also plan in advance. During a recent stint as a Transitional Pastor the worship leaders in both services voiced their appreciation for knowing my sermons a month in advance so they could develop a worship service that flowed around the message.
4. You are prepared for those times when you have an extremely busy week with people in the hospital, funerals, and other situations that would make preparing your sermon difficult.
5. You will have a more balanced approach to your preaching because you will have more time to prepare messages on the more challenging topics that require more study.

I always began this preparation in the fall because I found that time was a little slower for me, especially the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas when many families were involved in their own activities.

Some question whether such preparation takes away the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I've always believed the Holy Spirit can lead us in preparing a quarter in advance just as well as He can lead our preparation a week at a time. That's not to say that I never changed my message from what I had scheduled. Certainly, the Sunday after 9/11 I did not preach the message I had prepared for that Sunday but preached one more pertinent to that event. There were other times I switched messages around, but these were few and far between.

If you have not prepared your messages in advance I encourage you to try it in 2019. I think you'll be happy with the results.