Preaching, Priorities, Preparation

Can I start with a commercial? 

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If you regularly read this blog, you know that my passion is preaching the Word of God and helping preachers to improve their workflows and end product. This book is just another example of “taking it to the streets.” Exegesis, that is. Please buy it, read it, and review it on Amazon! Thank you. Now, back to our regularly scheduled blog.

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Ministry can be as elusive as it is rewarding. Much of what a preacher-pastor does is unseen. We rarely advertise. Quite a bit of the criticism leveled at the ministry would never occur if people realized this single truth. There is a lot that you just can’t nail down or that defies the idea of punching the time clock. Just an example. I left my study around 6.15 last night (Wed). Mrs. Beckman was working so I worked as well. I went home, fed the boys, relaxed a little bit. By 7.15 I was working. I have piles of things to read and when filing them in dropbox so that they are available on all my devices I specify some which I will read at home. And I stuck with it until Georgia arrived home. I made the notation on my calendar Study Block 7.15-10.15. I was of course at home, in a comfy chair with a cup of tea on the table and a cat laying on the floor. Yet those couple of hours may end up being just as significant as time spent here behind my desk. 

Do not think of this as a complaint, it isn’t. I signed up for this. I am obsessed with this. This is the mission. I have spent this entire month preparing a plan for preaching and teaching the Word of God to this congregation for the year 2022. I’m already turning the soil, planting seeds, and preparing for a harvest. The work done in October 2021 will begin to yield a harvest in December. The work I did yesterday will resonate next October. 

The Church lives amid crises. It always has, it always will. Not because God is faithless, or because the promises have faltered. The Church exists in crisis because we humans are fallen. We are works in progress. We are adrift in a sea of our own sin and grace is the life-preserver that keeps our chin above water. Many are tempted to reinvent the ministry, turning its focus to this or that good work. In difficult times such as now, we hear concerns voiced and questions raised such as:

• “We need to do something.”

• “What should we do?” 

• “Can’t something be done?”

The assumption behind these questions is essentially the same. Crisis calls for a change in plan. It’s bad. Worse now than ever. It is time for drastic measures. 

This sort of reminds me of the story in Acts 6. Some widows were hungry and felt neglected. They brought the issue to the Apostles and asked them “what are you going to do differently?” Their stunning answer? “Nothing.” Rather than changing the focus of their ministry, they expected other, competent people to fix the problem while they did what they were called to do, specifically…

“But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”” (Acts 6:4 ESV)

If you want to preach well if you want your congregation to know what the Word of God teaches them about the richness of grace and the mercy of God you will make preaching your priority. You will plan and prepare like lives depend upon it because they do. If you want to preach well and be constantly improving you are going to need to give the same answer the Apostles did in Acts 6 when asked what new, innovative program they were going to implement. What are you going to do? Pray, study, preach. That is the Apostolic model for ministry. And it may be written rather than spoken but that is God’s Word for us today.

Eleven Days Out

    It is 20 October. That means that I am 2/3 of the way through the Sermon-Calendaring process. At this point, I want to provide a little bit of a status report as well as give you an idea of what I will use the next 11 days to accomplish in the process. 

At this point, I have chosen Texts, Titles, and Themes for four of the five sermon series I will be preaching in 2022. The way that it pans out weekly means that I know what I will be preaching for 46 of the 52 Sunday morning services in 2022. I know what Book I will be preaching from the other 6 weeks it’s just a matter of nailing down that final determination of Text/Title/Theme as well as adding a final T, Topic, to set up that series and crystalize the full scope of next year’s preaching. Incidentally, the series in question is not the last one of the year. There are times during the planning process that I work in a non-linear fashion. This generally arises as I make the necessary time adjustments on the larger (Gospel and Epistle) seasons of the year. Those two big rocks tend to determine what other issues can be dealt with throughout the year and at what level of detail. 

    I am now 11 days out from the end of the planning process. Over the next couple of days, I will devise a theme for this Blog and lay out the basics of 52 posts. I will look at my Sunday School class. We have been going through a rather long series entitled And Now Your Questions. Which is what it sounds like. The students have presented questions (in advance) so that I may incorporate study time into my week to answer them. We just began a series on the “Rapture.” As you might guess, the time frame for considering any particular question is open-ended. I will assign a specific length of time (generally related to how prepared I already am to answer the question) and give them a ball-park idea of how long it will take to deal with the subject presented in the question. This one will likely take until around Christmas. 

    One of the main reasons to give so much time to what seems like a mundane project is that it sets up the entire year of study for me. During the next two weeks (those 11 days until November) I will continue to work my way through the introductory and background materials for the first two sermon series of the year. I try and integrate similar books from the New Testament so that I am not complicating my study or whipsawing the congregation between otherwise unrelated materials. I am preaching from John, the Johannine epistles, and the book of Revelation in 2022. Much of the background for the first two series will be directly relevant to the rest of the year. One of my goals is to plan well so that I can study well. Just today I went back through my various collections of resources to determine what I may need to purchase. That is time-sensitive to October, as many software and publishing companies have specials for Pastor Appreciation Month. I need to strike now while the price is right so that I can strike better when the iron is hot. It may not be hot now but because I am working from a thorough plan, I can tell you right now when each issue will be hot and give myself plenty of lead time for all that iron striking I need to do. 

    One thing that I have not really mentioned to this point is the idea that, for located ministry, thinking one sermon at a time is not ideal. By thinking of the entire year of preaching as one contiguous project it allows the preacher to work cumulatively and comprehensively. The congregation will become accustomed to your normal rhythms of work and will learn to follow your path through each series of sermons and/or each book preached. Even if you are not able to put together a series which incorporates every single verse in a book they will benefit from your discipline and planning. For example, I am preaching from John, the Johannines, and Revelation during 2022. I will use texts from each of the three as we go through Advent and make our way to Christmas. I will preach from John from Christmas till Easter. There are more chapters in John than there are weeks between these two central Sundays in the Christian year. Even if I took chapter a week, I would be pushing things and there are chapters in John for which several weeks of preaching would only scratch the surface. Planning beforehand, selecting a theme for the entire year, and then using that as a kind of filter as I go through the individual books,  helps me to reduce the range of material for each week. Of course, I could just state at the outset that “I’m preaching from the Gospel of John from the first verse to the last!” Such a series sounds appealing at first but wears upon both the preacher and the congregation. Another strategy is to plan a multi-year path through a Gospel and spread the book over three years in that Christmas-Easter time frame. I’ve done that with Matthew before and found it fairly effective, but that means three years of concentrated study on a single Biblical book and still risks boredom. 

    However you cut it;  you need to preach from one of the Gospels every year. There are four of them. By the time you get to the fifth year of ministry, your flock will be hearing you preach from texts the second time. By the time you have been in ministry through three or four of those cycles, you will have a pretty good grasp of the materials in each of the Gospels and can be much more creative in determining thematic arcs to follow in each year of preaching.

    Why? Why not just pick up the Bible and fire away? Is all this necessary? That kind of depends on how long you intend to do this, how well you want to do it, and how effective a preacher you want to be. The real measure of success in the pulpit is the engagement, growth, and application of the congregation. The best way to accomplish those goals is to be intentional, thoughtful, Biblical, and thorough. If you get bored with your preparation you will get bored with your preaching. If you get bored with your preaching so will your congregation. I hope that these sermon calendaring blogs have been helpful, and I hope that you have a fruitful season of planning. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got eleven days.

Well or not at all

        It is October 14. I have been working on my 2022 sermon calendar for about 16 days. It is not quite 1/2 complete. I can tell you what books I will be preaching from, but I do not yet have all the specific texts chosen for the 52 weeks of the year. “What about vacations?” You might ask. If I am away from the pulpit for a week and need to have someone fill the pulpit, I will provide them with the text for that week so that they can prepare a sermon that fits into the plan for the year. “Hmm?” You might ask. “Shouldn’t the fill-in preacher choose his own text?” Answer. “No.” It is still my responsibility to prepare the overall plan for preaching and teaching in my congregation. Conscientious pulpit-supply preachers know that they are supplementing not replacing the ongoing work of the resident minister. I appreciate the fact that I have at least one Elder who has read my supplied sermon manuscript every Sunday before I even preach the sermon. When he fills the pulpit, he knows not only what he will preach but what I have preached and should have a pretty good idea of what’s to come.

         A specific task that I have had to undertake this week is the mundane job of reading my own past work. I began preaching regularly in July 1981. That, by my account, is 40 years ago. I have held several ministries. I have been in my current pulpit for parts of 6 years. The NT contains the “Fourfold Gospel.” No matter how you cut it, I’m covering material every year that 1) I have preached before—often a lot. 2) I have preached to this specific audience. That means I must make sure that I’m not unduly repeating myself, becoming stale, or not doing original exegesis. I have read past messages from the Gospel of John and the 1^st Epistle of John this week. There is nothing more testing than looking back at old sermons and trying to determine what was going on in August 2013 (1 John) or winter 2018 (John). And then there is this. 

         Amid all the clutter on the cabinet beneath it you might notice that the date on this sermon, which is from the book of Judges is December 30, 1984. My filing system then: stuff everything in my preaching Bible. I am grateful for good mentors, good books, and a good education that helped me to come to my senses and do a better job of researching, documenting, writing, storing, and preaching the Word of God. I hope to contribute my part to that ongoing body of instruction which makes for good preaching now, and into the future.

         My goal this month, in writing these essays whilst I am myself doing what they encourage is to convince you (if you have not already been) that preaching is the highest calling you could ever receive. Preaching is the most significant form of communication disseminated in the world. This is a work which can consume a lifetime, and when your life work is complete you will only have scratched the surface. It is important. It is critical. It is essential. It should be done with excellence, planning-aforethought, prayer, thought, reading, wrestling, blood, sweat, and tears.

         There are times I look back at my ministry performance and I am embarrassed. I have not taken the work seriously. I have not studied diligently. I have written cute and clever sermons rather than clear and wise sermons. I have been glib when I should have been serious. I have approached the sacred desk without godly fear, finding myself before a burning bush, standing on holy ground with shod feet, dishonoring the voices which have spoken before me, and the messages brought down by all our predecessors from the Holy Mountain.

            You and I, we serve a King. We are His spokesmen. We focus the energies of His people upon His desires for them. We help God’s people to understand the Mission and their place within it. We speak God’s cure to a sin-sick world. We tell the old, old story of Jesus. We call sinners to repentance. We remind the world of sin, righteousness, and the judgment to come. We bring hope to the hopeless. We bring comfort to the hurting. If you don’t want to do that to the best of your ability…then don’t do it at all.

Study

I have had some difficulty getting around to writing my blog this week. I don’t know if anyone waits with bated breath to see it, but I’d rather not take the chance in disappointing anyone. I had composed something in my mind yesterday while cooling my heels before and Elder’s meeting but didn’t like how it was shaping up, so I didn’t even put anything into electrons.

The reason I was having such difficulty is that I have planned to be blogging this month about my major project for October—writing my sermon calendar for 2022. What is keeping me from blog writing is the actual process of working on what is, the central project of my entire preaching year. I have decided to write a few words about what is, for me, one of the central motivating factors for being so forward-thinking and organized. Study time.

I know that the backbone of my preaching for 2022 will be 3 interlocked series covering the Gospel of John, the Epistles of John, and the Apocalypse of John. Consequently, for the last 6 days, I have been examining the vast trove of Johannine literature. I emailed a copy of my current working bibliography to my good friend Wes. It is 10 densely packed pages. I have added at least 10 works to it today which I found scattered in iBooks and the Kindle app. And I’m not done looking yet. You might say. “You cannot possibly read everything.” You would be correct. It is, however, valuable to have a large working bibliography so that when some work is cited in a book/article/monograph that you are reading, you have some chance of locating the original source of the information. 

Right now I am reading a very good book: Porter, Stanley E, and Fay, Ron C. The Gospel of John in Modern Interpretation, 2018. So today, whilst reading about some of the significant scholars who worked on the Gospel of John I was constantly looking online, in my Bible-Study software, in iBook’s, in my Kindle app, and on my shelves, (yes I have them) to see what I had access to. As I continue to read, investigate, outline, plan, scheme, and gameplay my preaching during this month of preparation I will be constantly prioritizing which things need to be read in detail, when they should be read, and in what order. I will also earmark journal articles and the occasional long-form monograph which deal with specific passages and make sure that they are associated with the other materials for those passages so that I can use them when I am exegeting that section of text. 

Again, you might be asking, “why?” I want to maximize my research time so that I have the best possible basis for exegeting each passage I will preach from. I want to know exactly what issues I need to deal with as they come to the forefront during the actual process of exegeting each text and writing each sermon. It doesn’t just happen. If I just began at the top of the book list and read them in alphabetical order I would not get through the list and I would not be able to leverage what I learned so that I would be better prepared to feed the flock to which God has called me to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. 

What can you take away from this essay? If you are a preacher, you need to work hard and be unafraid to share your methods of working with your congregation. Let them know how you study, choose sermon texts and series, how you work through exegesis and secondary literature to not only preach good sermons but also to improve as a preacher. If you are a listener of sermons rather than a preparer and preacher of them, you have the right to expect that the one who is preaching is doing the work. Good research has the greatest impact on the congregation when it is not evident through quotation, citation, or ostentation but through a continual arc of improvement in the preacher's understanding of the Bible and his ability to study and proclaim it. In other words. If it does not happen in the study, it eventually won’t happen in the pulpit.

You Must Have a Sermon Calendar

September is fading into October, for me, that means it is time to ratchet up my preparation for writing my sermon calendar for next year. The fact that Sunday is coming is not an esoteric mystery. It happens every week. If you are called to preach the Word of God a part of that process is preparing a long-range plan that will enable you to prepare individual sermons and series of sermons that meet the needs of your congregation. 

Like any task which requires both short-term and long-term thinking, you need a plan to help you in understanding both the immediate scope and long-term goals for the project. I just drove through a construction site today. Dozens of individuals were deployed in tasks ranging from traffic control to truck driving to running the paving machinery. Beyond that, someone had to decide that this road needed work now, as opposed to some other stretch of road. Someone had to take core samples and source materials. Someone had to determine how long the job would take, including both beginning and end dates. To be blunt the construction I drove through did not just happen. Someone planned it. Someone prepared. 

I intend to write many more words about the process of preparing a sermon calendar, throughout October, while I am preparing my plan for 2022. If you know me or have followed my blog you have, at some time, heard or read me address this issue. The Church desperately needs to hear Biblical preaching. Biblical preaching takes work. The best work which most of us will ever do is that which is considered beforehand, planned carefully, and executed lovingly. If you preach, I want you to preach well. I want you to be the best you can be and that begins by giving yourself enough time to do good exegesis, read quality books, think creatively, and write boldly. 

Some of you might wonder, “what if x happens?” First, “x” or “y” will likely happen. Ministry occurs at the intersection of eternity and right now. It is far easier to deviate from a carefully prepared plan and then return than it is to not have a plan and be driven by whatever is going on in the world. A plan provides discipline for your reading and study. Yes things, will come up. When the emergency passes, and routine resumes you need to be able to sit down the following Monday and say… “Now, where was I?”