Hey Friend- It's week 3 in a writing series about creating a yearly sermon calendar. Today, I want to talk about developing sermon series in the yearly calendar. Week 1 | Are you thinking about your 2025 preaching calendar yet? When I first started preaching weekly, I immediately went into sermon series. It wasn't long until I realized starting off a new series on the first of each month when United Methodist churches normally serve communion, could create a more complex Sunday than necessary. Why? Because at that point I thought every series needed to be huge. And the first Sunday of the series needed to be the largest. I had been doing a consistent stream of 4 sermon series each lasting a month. Many people I talk with do the same thing. When I began church planting, I slowly fell into a new idea of how to do sermon series in a way that doesn't burn out the church or slide into the same pattern over and over. So Chad, you are writing this month about a yearly preaching calendar, how does this fit? That right there is the question I want to answer and the perfect time to build in this strategy of sermon series is when you are working on your year-round plan. I like to plan for 4 types of sermons.
Here is how I start trying to design them as I plan a year of series.
At this point you should have at least major parts of the year lined out. Special Sundays, and around 3 sermon series at some pretty crucial points of the year. At this point in the year, I now want to add in any vacation days or times I am going to be out on Sunday morning. If you have multiple people preaching, it isn't a bad idea to at least block out the days when someone else might be preaching. What I start to do at this point is looking where my mini-series sermons might begin to fit in. I do take the time to ask myself if there is a sequence to when this might be the most effective, in both discipleship and the church calendar. I try to start dropping them in where they make sense. After that, your calendar is starting to look decently full. Now, I begin assigning stand-alone sermons to the calendar. Sometimes I realize a stand-alone message can prop up an upcoming series or I realize a certain type of sermon I haven't thought about might work well also. I will try to brainstorm enough of it to get the information into the calendar. At the end, you hopefully have 52 weeks of sermons planned. I much prefer this idea of different types of series AND sermons to help think through a year of preaching. If you've got questions or just want to say hi, remember you can always hit reply to this email and get in my inbox. Chad PS. Have you checked out today's Productive Pastor episode? It is all about preaching with vision and strategy. Listen here. |
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.
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