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.