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​