Hybels: Correct, both Saturday night and both Sunday morning. That's the approach we're taking at this point. If we find out that that's too exhausting for one of the players, then we'll readjust and handle it differently.

Preaching: How far out do you try to plan the preaching schedule for the church?

Hybels: We have it planned out for about nine months. We do that in community. It's very important for your readers to understand that the elders, the teaching team, a few staff members, and a few lay people will huddle together and spend multiple retreats working out what we sense of the direction of God on that matter. We spend a lot of time discerning the Spirit on the preaching menu.

Preaching: When you do that planning, you're planning not only who's going to speak but topics?

Hybels: What the series is about, how many weeks, which series should follow which to provide some sense of continuity. That's closely scrutinized by a group of very godly, discerning people because if most pastors are honest, what they preached on in the last year will tend to reflect their own biases and hobby horses and strengths and so on. That's not necessarily what would serve the congregation best.

I think the best illustration of that is this: I was at one of the sermon planning sessions, and someone encouraged me to do a series on fear. I said, "Well, that's a good idea, do the rest of you have any other ideas?" I planned to take a pass on that idea, but one of the elders stopped me and said, "Bill, why don't you admit that you don't preach on fear because it's not a big problem for you because of the family you grew up in, the temperament you have, the personality you have, the faith you have. You don't wrestle much with fear." And I said, "Okay, that's true, I don't. Why don't you or one of the group here tell me if you do."

Then I listened for the next forty-five minutes, and it became very apparent to me that fear was an important subject in the lives of many people. So I wound up speaking on it for three weeks, and one of those messages became the most purchased tape of any sermon I did that year! So, they were right, I was wrong, and the congregation would not have been served well, in part because of my blindness and the way I'm wired up.

Preaching: How do you go about evaluating your preaching?

Hybels: I think probably the best way for a preacher to improve his preaching is to find some very discerning people, godly people in the church, who by invitation of the teacher will lovingly, but truthfully, evaluate each and every sermon and evaluate it in written form and give a written evaluation of it shortly after the message is delivered for the purpose of stimulating that spiritual gift, challenging it to grow, developing it, and cheering it on.

I've done this for over ten years now, and all four teachers evaluate each other's messages. When I'm out of town and one of the other guys brings the message, I listen to it by tape and give a written evaluation of it. Again, the primary purpose of it is encouragement and cheering each other on as the Scriptures implore us to do. We give constructive kinds of criticism that help us bump our preaching up a notch each time we do it. That's the thinking behind it.