Hey Friend

We are back in our 2nd installment talking about creating a sermon calendar (you can read week 1 here). You still have time to knock this out and experience the fruitfulness (and margin) of having this process worked out in advance. If you're still working on messages early Sunday morning, a yearly preaching calendar is your best bet. It will help you avoid stepping into the pulpit with wet ink on your message!

Let's talk about how we can create this calendar.

Prep work

First, I always keep a note running in Evernote on preaching themes or ideas. Every year I put a page break in it, write down the year, and start dropping ideas in. Sometimes it is a message idea or a scripture. Sometimes I get a broad idea for a sermon. Usually, it ends up being a phrase and description of what might be a sermon series. Occasionally, I will have a well-formed idea, and I find myself writing down an entire series outline. I don't worry about anything but ideas in this list.

Alongside that, I am always trying to have conversations with people in the church and community about what their biggest needs are.

How are they experiencing brokenness? Where are they celebrating? What questions about faith are they asking? You can even survey your congregation once a year to understand these sorts of things (I highly encourage it, do it right when school is starting back. Then you can use the information as part of your planning).

These practices will help you keep a full dugout of things to pull from before you jump into planning your calendar.

Building the calendar.

You've done the prep work. You know the needs of those around you and you have ideas you think might be appropriate. Here is where we start to flesh some things out.

I prefer to build a preaching calendar in Trello. It allows for flexibility, and I can put all sorts of other information in it to share with others as part of worship. It also is a visual example of where things are going. Just open a new workspace, and build out 12 lists. One for each month, and each Sunday/Worship service gets a card.

At this point, we need to start filling in the gaps. Go ahead and put major Sundays or Holidays in the calendar. Easter, Christmas, Mother's Day, Labor Day Weekend, etc. Some of these might have special worship services and others might be low/high days of historical attendance. You'll want to be aware as you build things out.

Next, you might have a rhythm in your church you need to start notating. If you celebrate the church calendar, go build Advent, Lent, All Saints, etc into the calendar. If you typically do Stewardship at a certain time do that as well, the same with vision series or any other recurring focus. If you already know the time you are taking off, make sure to build that in at this point. Same thing with study leave or conferences you like to go to.

Now, we are at the place where we can start building out messages and series and putting them into the calendar. I have a specific strategy for that...and we are talking about it all next week. Thanks for reading. As always, you can hit reply and get into my inbox.

Chad
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PS. Do you need to start wrangling your personal approach to ministry productivity? Check out my course Becoming Productive. For $47 you get 11 modules filled with videos, worksheets, and directions to build it out from top to bottom.