Stanley: Well, they can't preach verse-by-verse and assume interest but I think that preaching verse-by-verse through books of the Bible is not a good idea anyway as far as every week, week after week. We have a conceptual preaching calendar that we follow every year, and after Christmas every year I do preach through a book of the Bible — we did Romans 6, 7, and 8 one time. Even when we did James we picked the key parts of James. We didn't do verse-by-verse: "we'll pick up at verse four next week." I don't know where that came from. Jesus didn't model it. Nobody modeled it. I don't think it's terrible. I think there is a place for Bible study and learning the themes of scripture, and I'm so grateful for seminary, but in terms of building people I just don't think it's a good model at all. And I went to Dallas Seminary — that's kind of what we were taught to do! To be honest it would be easy to do if all I had to do was study and get up and say we are going to cover the next six verses and we'll pick up next week; the way I'm wired that would be fun because I love digging out all the stuff. But I don't think you leave people with a sense of, "I'm going to take this home and make use of it." It's harder to do that but that's just my opinion.

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Preaching: Tell me about your sequential preaching calendar.

Stanley: We start with Easter, and Easter in our church is different than a lot of churches. Easter here is not a once a year thing because our church is so young and new. People who don't go to church — when Easter rolls around they don't think about North Pointe, they go to the other church that they used to go to that they go to once a year. Easter for us is when everybody that normally comes all come. So I don't feel the need to say, "Hey, we've got this one shot because it's Easter and they're here." I don't feel that at all. Easter is a harvest Sunday for us. Our Easter sermon is: "You know what you've been thinking about it, you've been listening to it, you've been looking at it; today is your day! Why not put your faith in Christ?" Not because you're only here one time; we're assuming you've been here for six months and you'll remember this day forever. And we have a big stand-up invitation.

So that's kind of almost the end of a cycle for us. Depending a little bit on where spring break falls, because spring break around here is a ghost town — one year spring break was right after Easter and it was like a 7,000 person swing; we could have met in my office! It was amazing. You've got that huge Sunday and then . . .

So we come out of Easter with what we call the "big hook." We do a very, very high needs-driven series. Like this last year we did a thing on parenting, did a thing on marriage, did a thing on God and the workplace. Something that's kind of a secular bent in terms of a big hook coming out of Easter. Then after Easter and that section we get into Father's Day/ Mother's Day so we do a relationship series. It could be on parenting, could be on marriage. I did a series called Prescription for the Fractured Family — just healing, forgiveness and family. That takes us kind of through that May/June period.