You Might Need a Preaching Calendar If…

You Might Need a Preaching Calendar If…

• You find yourself desperately scrambling to put some thoughts together Friday or Saturday night so you will have something to say on Sunday.

• You are downloading other preachers' sermons and trying to pass them off as your own.

• Your schedule does not allow you to do proper biblical exegesis.

• Your sermons suffer from a lack of creativity and diversity and have become boring and predictable.

• You have learned that leading a church in a new direction will require more than just one sermon.

• You want to make sure your preaching is providing a well-balanced and nourishing menu to help your people grow spiritually.

Should any of these descriptions fit you, then a preaching calendar is just what you need. The following steps demonstrate how anyone responsible for preaching each week can gain better control of his or her schedule, creating more time for planning, study and the development of effective biblical messages.

STEP ONE: Determine how many days you actually will be preaching.

Let me use a four-month calendar as an example. There would be approximately 18 Sunday morning sermons. Step back and calculate exactly how many of those 18 sermons you are responsible for in that four-month period.

Look at your church calendar and ask yourself if you have any scheduled guest speakers; note dates you will be out of town, dates you will share the pulpit with another member the church staff and when special programs planned. The goal is to determine how many days you actually will preach.

STEP TWO: Determine what kind of impact holidays will have on your sermons.

This will include national holidays (religious and secular), plus special days in the life of the church or in the life of the community. Include nationally recognized days such as Mother's Day and Father's Day.

Consider consulting the Christian calendar the church has been using for centuries to educate its people about the Christian story. For example, Advent (four Sundays before Christmas), Resurrection Sunday (Easter), Pentecost and Reformation Sunday are all important dates around which you can build sermons. Of course in some cases, these days will not directly affect the sermon; but they might receive attention somewhere else in the service.

The important thing to remember is that holidays and special days can provide opportunities to address issues that are on everyone's mind. At Christmas for instance, you have an opportunity not only to preach about the real meaning of Christmas, but also about how many temptations exist that threaten to make us lose our focus on what the day is really about, such as the materialism, sentimentality and the cultural pressure to take Christ out of Christmas. Our culture might take Christ out of Christmas, but the church must never. These yearly events create a springboard that the wise preacher can start from and lead into the gospel.