To plan carefully and thoughtfully for a year's worth of sermons, you should schedule a retreat that includes four to six days of concentrated review, prayer, contemplation, brainstorming, and sermonic spadework. Taking that much time to plan might seem impractical or impossible, but extended planning pays dividends of saved time later, so it is worth the trouble. Even if you should limit your planning to a quarter of a year at a time, you will need to schedule a "mini-retreat," at least a half day, when you can concentrate on scheduling your preaching for the next three months. A six-month plan will require one or two days of intense planning and scheduling.

It would be unwise to try to do extensive planning while simultaneously doing your weekly work as a pastor. You will not have time to do meaningful planning if you are engaged in all of the activities that take up your work week. Furthermore, you do not need to have the pressures of planning for a year's worth of preaching while also preparing for the coming Sunday's sermons. In all likelihood, if you try to do your planning at the office during a normal week of pastoral work, the "tyranny of the urgent" will force you to neglect your planning to attend to more pressing concerns.

Without scheduling a real, away-from-the-office retreat, your planning will probably be frustrating and unfruitful. By leaving the church field for the planning retreat, you will think more creatively because you will be away from the pressures of administering the church, caring for church members, and preparing sermons. You also might find that you will see the needs of your people more clearly when you are away from the church field.

You could schedule your planning retreat for any time of the year, but the most common times for planning are the summer months or the weeks immediately after Christmas. Blackwood advocates the summer as the preferable time for planning. He writes, "The best time to plan is during the summer vacation, when the minister is far enough away from the parish to see it as a whole. He can review the last year's pulpit work, and then think about what to do in the next twelve months."6

In scheduling your planning retreat, select a time that tends to be a less hectic period in the church schedule. You might choose to plan your preaching in conjunction with your family vacation, or you might take special time away from your ministry field for the retreat. If you intend to combine your planning retreat with the family vacation, two weeks is a suitable amount of time. You can plan your preaching in the morning hours, then be available to enjoy recreation with your family in the afternoons and evenings. Otherwise, one week of intense prayer, study, and planning will get the job accomplished.

Determining the best time for planning depends on when your yearly cycle of preaching begins and ends. Your preaching calendar might have any one of several beginning places. The civil calendar year begins January first. In most congregations, the church program year begins somewhere around Labor Day, when vacations are over and children are going back to school. The classical Christian year goes from Advent to Advent, with the Advent season beginning on the Sunday nearest November thirtieth. Any of these three calendars could serve as your "preaching year."