Dramatically Improve Your Preaching By Doing This One Thing

The demands on a local pastor are diverse and never ending. Think about the job description!

• • Incredible Leader

• • Powerful Preacher

• • Caring Shepherd

• • Organized Administrator

• • Property Manager

The cognitive and leadership skills needed to be a local pastor are taxing to anyone.

Rarely do you find a pastor who does just one thing. Multiple hats are a prerequisite in most—if not all—situations.

While pastors are incredibly busy with what feels like an endless amount of responsibilities, one of their biggest areas of impact is preaching. This perhaps holds the biggest weight for unchurched people. Thom Rainer says, “90% of unchurched people will choose a church based on the pastor or preaching.”

Because pastors know what’s at stake, they spend a large amount of time every week on their sermon. That’s probably you, too.

I ran the numbers, and pastors usually spend more time in sermon preparation each week than the average adult spends eating meals. Most pastors spend over nine hours on each individual sermon.

With so much time being spent already on message preparation, you might be wondering: “Is there room for improvement in my preaching?” Will more hours of sermon study actually help you elevate your communication skills? If so, how are you going to fit that into your crowded schedule?

I think I may have a solution…

One quick way to dramatically improve your preaching is to do less of it. If you want to get better as a communicator, you need to preach less.

It sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out.

You can preach less and get better by adding people to your preaching team. Usually, the most common response I hear to this piece of advice is, “I don’t have anyone I trust enough to allow in my pulpit.” And I understand that. It takes work to include and train other people.

“Things are just faster for me if I keep it the same way it’s always been.” Have you said that before?

Recently, I visited a church where the pastor did all of the speaking—even before the sermon. He welcomed the people, walked through the announcements, took up the offering, and—lastly—delivered his message. By the time he started preaching, people were already tired of hearing him talk. His unwillingness to add other people to the speaking team will be the lid on him and his sermons.

So what can you do to make this delegation easier? How can you add people to your preaching team without compromising quality?

I believe one tool that will help you delegate more effectively is a sermon calendar.

A sermon calendar is a big picture look at your year in series and sermons. Planning out the entire year will give you and your team an opportunity to be better prepared and equipped for preaching responsibilities.

Letting your youth leader or deacon know the dates, series and topics ahead of time will help them avoid having to come up with a sermon from scratch. They will know in advance and will have ample time to prepare a sharper message while you have time off to sharpen yours.

Everyone wins. Your church, your team, and most of all, you.

When you do start to create a sermon calendar, here are a few questions to ask when building it out:

1. What topics or books of the Bible do we want to cover this year?
2. Is there a felt need our congregation has that a series could speak to?
3. Are we leveraging our biggest seasons with series that connect with everyone?

As you add other speakers to your sermon calendar, you will see a dramatic improvement in your preaching in 2017. You will be fresher, well rested and more focused. Your sermons and the people who hear them will be the beneficiaries of your planning.

At Ministry Pass, we have created a few free resources that will help you get started in your sermon planning. You can download our free 2017 sermon calendar template HERE.

In a few weeks, we are going to be releasing our 2017 sermon calendars with all the sermon and media resources you need to pull off an incredible year of series.