While I was at Moody Church, I learned that the attention span in the big city is not quite that long. So I limited a series to perhaps three months and then a break. When I did Acts, for example, I preached from Acts for three months, then took a break. Without telling people, I often followed the Christian church calendar. I recommend this. I didn't announce it; it would have scared some of them! But I watched the calendar so that I was always ready for a break in my series at the Lenton season. I wanted to have the church prepared for Good Friday and Easter. I would prepare for the advent season in the same way.

Preaching: How did you know what you ought to be preaching? In selecting a series, how did you go about evaluating that?

Wiersbe: In planning a series, I would try to say to myself, "What is it that excites me?", because I can do my best with that which excites me. Where is the state of the church? Do we need the outreach emphasis with Acts? Do we need the faith emphasis of Hebrews 11? What does this church need at this point? This is where pastoral work comes in. We must know our people. We should also listen to the people. When I was at the Moody Church, I came to a point one year where I was stymied. I didn't know what to plan for the fall messages, and I always tried to plan six months in advance so that the staff knew where we were going. At an elders meeting, I confessed my perplexity. I said, "Brethren, I've been here several years now -- I don't know what to do." One of the elders spoke up and said, "Have you ever considered doing a series on suffering?" I said, "No, but I know that a lot of our people are going through difficulty." He said, "Pray about it." So I did and the Lord gave me seven messages on suffering which were greatly used by God to help both the church and the pastor. The series eventually developed into my book, Why Us? When Bad Things Happen to God's People. In that situation, the series idea grew out of the eldership.

I've always tried to balance the series. If I'm doing the Old Testament in the morning, I want to do something from the New Testament at night. I always felt that the evening service should not be a duplication of the morning service. We always had more music, more participation and a different kind of a message.

How do you evaluate it? I guess the general growth and development of the church. You preach by faith. Somebody described preaching -- radio preaching in particular -- as a doctor standing at the top of the Empire State Building with an eye-dropper in his hand trying to get medicine into somebody's eye down there on the street. It's hard to know what is being accomplished. But people say to you, "The messages in this series are helping me." That encourages you.

Preaching: Talking about radio preaching it strikes me that it would be very different from preaching to a local congregation -- preaching Sunday by Sunday to a very different kind of audience.