Preaching: How do you plan your strategy in terms of what you are going to do in preaching?
Warren: I have a preaching team I meet with. When you start a church you literally do everything. I set it up; I took it down; I stored all the stuff in my garage. From the beginning of the church it has been my goal to work myself out of a job. As the church grew, I began to give the ministry away to more and more people — to lay people and to staff and on and on. About 10 years ago I realized I finally had given up everything I was doing except two things, the feeding and the leading. I was still doing that myself, so I began to start building a staff of other leaders and feeders. I now have a preaching team of six pastors who share the pastoral teaching and preaching.
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This year, for the first time, I will be preaching 26 of the 52 weeks at Saddleback. Now why is that? Well, several reasons. Number one, most people never have done five weekend services, and they don't know what a toll it takes on your body. I want to live a long time. Because we are doing five, we probably will go to six. I will preach in one month what some guys will preach in a year just because of multiple services.
More than that, I believe you need to hear God's word from more than just one personality. I think that is healthy. I think for a lot of people, if they hear a guy for about six or seven years, he has shot his wad. You’ve heard what he has got to say, and you either have to start hearing the same stuff over again or move to a different church. I want people to stay at Saddleback for 30 or 40 years, so I’ve built a team of different preachers with different personalities — I do believe preaching is truth through personality, like Brooks said.
It doesn't bother me at all if somebody likes another pastor's preaching better. “Well, I like his style.” That’s fine. I think that is good. They hear it and stay here, and as long as they are growing and happy and are being built on the purposes of moving them out into ministry and mission I am happy about it.
I take that team and we do planning. I am a collector of ideas, collecting future sermon series and ideas. There are some series I’ve been collecting for 20 years that I still haven't preached on. For instance, I did a series through
Psalm 23 a couple of years ago. I had collected material for more than 20 years. I just knew that one day I was going to preach on Psalm 23. So when I get a quiet-time insight, when I hear a good sermon and I hear a quote, I throw it in that file. When I get ready to plan a series I’m not starting from scratch. I have what I call my bucket file. My bucket file is not real organized. It is just stuff tossed in there. Once you get enough to start making a series, you say to yourself, “I want to do this series on the family, or I want to do this series on I Peter, or I want to do this series on the second coming” — you start the file. Right now I have maybe 50 series in the hopper.