The Benefits of Planning Your Preaching

 |  December 7, 2018

Introduction

As a senior pastor, the privilege and weight of preaching week after week is a great honor and responsibility. All pastors know this. What we do on Sundays has not really changed through the centuries: proclaiming the gospel, teaching Scripture, celebrating the ordinances, offering prayers. There is an old joke that pastors only work once a week. However, we know first hand that preaching is not all we do. At the same time, the sacred moment of opening God’s Word and declaring “thus sayeth the Lord” is one of the most formative aspects of our ministry to the congregation.

For this reason, I firmly believe that planning a preaching calendar is one of the most important spiritual and administrative tasks that a pastor can do to prepare for the often unexpected work weeks that reside in-between the weekly preaching event.

Much of what I have to say is influenced by Dr. Stephen Rummage, who served as my pastor and pastoral ministry professor early on in seminary. In fact, he has written an excellent book that helps pastor’s work through the steps of this process titled Planning Your Preaching. For this post, I will focus solely on the benefits of planning your preaching.

Planning Your Preaching Allows You to Intentionally Manage Your Preparation Time

Because I plan my preaching, I walk into the office on Monday morning knowing the text I will exposit the following Sunday. For me, this reduces stress and allows me to give more time to my preparation rather than trying to decide what I am going to preach. I would even argue that planning a preaching calendar is easier than one might think. I typically preach through a book of the Bible, and the text units are easy to discern if you follow the paragraph breaks in your English Bible. Having a plan also allows me to gather resources and commentaries well before its time to prepare a sermon.

Planning Your Preaching Allows You to Intentionally Cover a Wider Range of Bible Genres

In early September, I took our pastoral staff on a one-day retreat to plan our preaching calendar for the following year. One of our goals was to make sure we evenly covered the different genres of Scripture in both the Old and New Testament. This benefits the congregation in that it teaches them to systematically and intentionally read their entire Bible. Some books are easier than others, and we are often drawn to genres we are comfortable with.  In fact, every preacher has theological hobbyhorses they like to ride. But, as A.W. Tozer once said, “We must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.” This also allows you to keep track of what you have preached on in the past, as you plan for the future.

Planning Your Preaching Allows You to Intentionally Plan our Services Around the Sermon Text

Every worship service follows a liturgy. In Baptist traditions, we seem to be allergic to that word, but we either have an intentional or unintentional pattern to our worship services. Planning ahead allows the other pastors with roles in the worship service to develop meaningful ways for all of the elements in the service to connect—from Scripture reading, to prayer, to songs. The various elements leading up to the sermon can support and even prepare people to receive God’s word more readily. Practically speaking, this is one of the reasons I plan the preaching calendar with the worship pastor and other pastors who will preach in our rotation.

Planning Your Preaching Allows You to Intentionally Rely on the Holy Spirit 

This may sound counter-intuitive, but its true. In some traditions, a pastor may not prepare much before he climbs into the pulpit, assuming that the Holy Spirit will work even more mightily when one doesn’t have a plan. However, our God is not a God of chaos. The Holy Spirit does not anoint or lead arbitrarily. In fact, the Holy Spirit will lead you in your planning as much as He does in your preaching. I have been amazed, and even uncomfortable, when the sermon text that I planned to preach months before addresses an issue that the church is currently facing. I am also thankful for these moments because no one in the congregation can charge me with operating a response driven bully pulpit. There is a certain amount of trust in God that comes with planning your preaching, namely, that  He will guide you to address the subjects that your congregation most needs to hear.

Conclusion

As Dr. Rummage often told our seminary class, “The best sermons are simmered in a slow cooker, not zapped in a microwave oven.” Planning your preaching is one of the best ways to carve out time to contemplate and think about the best ways to drive a message home and into people’s hearts. There are 52 Sundays in a year. Having a map for where you are going in that time is beneficial because it allows you to be intentional with where you are leading the congregation through God’s word. Once again, I firmly believe that planning a preaching calendar is one of the most important spiritual and administrative tasks that a pastor can do for a more effective pulpit ministry.


Dr. Matt Capps serves as the senior pastor at Fairview Baptist Church in Apex, North Carolina. He holds an MDiv with biblical languages from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a DMin in pastoral theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Matt has authored and contributed to several books. You can follow Matt on Twitter at @mattcapps.

Category: Blog Post
Tags:


Share This Post: