I steward Productive Pastor, a podcast and community of ministry leaders focused on how productivity and strategic ministry in the average church. I write about practical approaches to ministry productivity. I also write emails about church stability/development and my own theological musics in our current social moment.
Are you thinking about your 2025 preaching calendar yet? | Productive Pastor
|
It's almost the end of the year. By almost, I mean we are starting the 4th quarter. This is the perfect time to start thinking about next years preaching. A yearly preaching calendar can transform your preaching. It will also improve your workflow and approach to the church's vision. This month, I want to dig into not just why this matters, but how you can do it? Are you ready? Let's get after it. Yearly planning matters because it lets us create space in the future. Just by creating this space, we end up giving ourselves some time back. Knowing what we are preaching on does this wild cognitive thing in our mind. We are able to think out further than just the next week. I can't tell you how many times I've done the work to create a preaching calendar and stumbled upon a resource, quote, or book that would matter in a few months. Or, my daily Bible reading has me inside a passage I might be preaching later that year and I can channel some wild holy spirit power and do a quick potential outline. I then save the outline in my preaching calendar (I like to use Trello for this). The preaching calendar does some pretty cool things. One of the parts of it I find helpful for a larger spiritual vision is avoiding what I call "preaching islands." I've talked about this on the podcast and wrote an article about it here. In short, preaching islands are the places we go to in our preaching so often we end up leaving big things out. It might be our own fascinations or interests, but our sermons end up disconnected from the mainland of mission and the kingdom of God in our own ministry context. Planning out for a year helps us avoid preaching islands. So have you thought about a preaching calendar yet? Let's buckle in together and walk through it over the next few weeks. I don't want to leave you without an action point for this week. Start a list of the spiritual and theological topics you feel matter for your context. Go ahead and write them all down. Do it in a place you can refer to over the next couple of weeks, but start building out those bigger pictures. See you next week for some tips on creating your 2025 preaching calendar. Chad PS. New episodes of the podcast started rolling out today. Listen to episode 116: Fighting Brain Fog |
Hey. I'm Chad Brooks.
I steward Productive Pastor, a podcast and community of ministry leaders focused on how productivity and strategic ministry in the average church. I write about practical approaches to ministry productivity. I also write emails about church stability/development and my own theological musics in our current social moment.
For the past year, I’ve been on a personal tear about the church and social media. For the gist of it, here’s a video about one of the biggest mistakes I see churches make. The TLDR is that many pastors and other leaders in normal-size churches don’t understand how the algorithm drives Facebook, to really get traction, you have to pay to play, and the realization that many churches' posting strategies are actually HURTING their ability to reach people on Social Media. What’s the biggest...
A decade ago, when I was church planting, I was in a season where I wasn’t “at” a local on Sunday mornings. I spent some of that time preaching for colleagues when they needed a Sunday off. I also led worship at another United Methodist Church frequently. But on the Sundays when I didn’t have some assignment at a local church, I decided to skip church. I think you need to do it every now and then as well. Does this sound a bit off? Well, I realized this past week how the idea is actually...
Let’s wrap up these conversations on “calling on the name of the Lord” as a primary spiritual act. I’ve got a few articles* you can read if you want to catch up, but let’s get right into it. You might know I’ve got a really intense system of Bible notes and list-making. One of my commenters on YouTube remarked last year, it seems like what you might find in the Thompson Chain Reference. I’ll call that a compliment! This feeds into today. It isn’t about a specific mention of “calling on the...