Sermon Planning and My 2020 Sermon Calendar

I’m excited to announce that the2020 Sermon Calendar is now available!

Get organized, save time, and get ahead on your sermon planning with this beautiful sermon calendar template.

Why You Need to Plan Your Preaching

How far ahead are you on your sermon planning?

If you’re like a lot of pastors, the answer’s probably not very far ahead—maybe a month, maybe a week. Maybe you’re thinking, “I’ll be ahead Saturday night when I finally figure out what I’m preaching this weekend.”

A lot of pastors are behind on planning their sermon because there’s so much work and other ministry things and responsibilities that they have to do. 

But here’s the follow-up question to my first question: How’s that going for you?

You see, if you’re behind in your sermon preparation and you don’t know what you were going to say in advance, here’s a few things I know about you. 

1. You Are Stressed

You’re probably stressed. The burden and the weight of having to say something every single week as a pastor is immense, and if you don’t know what you’re going to be saying, your sermon preparation on Saturday night or whenever it is that you’re writing your sermons or preparing for your message that you’re about to preach is probably incredibly stressful.

You may not even realize the effects that this stress is having on you, whether it’s hurting your health or maybe it’s just causing tension in your relationship with your family or other people because you are just tense and stressed the night before you preach or the week before you preach and you’re carrying that burden around. 

Not knowing what you’re going to preach in advance can really cause a lot of this stress to mount. The longterm effects on you and your relationships and your relationship with people in your church can be a problem.

2. Your Team Feels Stuck

If you have a team, whether that’s staff or volunteers, they feel stuck. They can’t prepare for the ministry that God wants them to do because they’re still waiting for you. 

It’s like the proverbial relay race. You have that baton, and you’re running your race and your people are waiting for their chance to run, but they can’t start until you hand them the baton.

You’re holding your team back from using their gifts and the things that God has created in them to be able to do well.

They could thrive a lot more if they had time to think and to process and to come up with ideas and do some things that they can’t do when you’re so far behind.

3. People Are Less Excited and Invited

Also, the people in your church are less excited about the coming week and what’s going to be happening in your church because they don’t know what it’s going to be. And if they’re less excited about what’s coming up on Sunday because they don’t know what to expect. 

Another catch-22 of this is they’re less likely to invite their friends or coworkers or family to come to church because they don’t know what you’re going to be talking about.

Let’s be honest, a lot of people, if they know that you’re going to be talking about tithing, they’re not going to want to invite their unchurched friends that Sunday. 

They want to invite their friends to something that’s going to be applicable to their life. 

So if they know that there is a sermon coming up that’s going to be discussing some of these issues that could help their friend, family, or someone they know that just needs to hear that message, they’re going to be way more likely to invite that person to hear it than if they have no idea what you’re preaching on next week.

Look, I know this because that was me early in my ministry. 

I was constantly week to week in my preparation. I was constantly behind. I didn’t have the right systems and the right structure in place to help me get ahead and I was doing all of the work of the ministry myself. 

I was overwhelmed, over-burdened, stressed out, and my relationships with the people around me were suffering because I was not prepared to do the work that God was calling me to do.

Stop Serving Tables and Preach

Here’s the problem: You are so busy serving tables that you’re neglecting the duty that God has given you to preach.

If you don’t believe me, open your Bible to Acts 6.

In Acts 6, the church is just getting off the ground. It says,

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.”

Acts 6:1-2 ESV

Now, they’re not saying that serving tables is a bad thing. They’re not saying that serving tables is wrong. They’re not saying that we should neglect serving tables. 

Helping widows and people who need food, helping the poor, serving people, works of justice and ministry, that’s awesome. We should help people. They’re not saying that, but they were called by God specifically to preach the Word.

That was their job that only they could do as those called and chosen by God to ministry. There were others who could do this great work of serving, who could use their gifts to serve these widows even better than they could. 

They continue:

”Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”

Acts 6:3-4

The Twelve said, “We are going to devote ourselves to two things: prayer and ministry of the Word.”

They’re talking about preaching and teaching God’s Word to other people. 

What the disciples did in that moment is set a precedent for us today in our ministry. 

If you feel stuck, like all you’re doing is serving tables, which are all good things but it’s not the most important thing that you’re called to do, then you need to follow the example of the disciples. 

You need to find good leaders in your church and you need to appoint them to use their gifts to serve and help and take care of other people.Then you can devote yourself to prayer and ministry of the Word. 

This isn’t something to be taken lightly because if you don’t do that, your responsibility and your holy calling, your sacred duty of teaching the Word is going to suffer because you’re so focused on everything else. It’s a trap that so many pastors including myself get caught up in all the time. 

So if you’re so wrapped up in other things, you need to drop what you can drop, hand off what you can hand off and focus on the ministry of preaching.

Plan Your Sermons

One of the best ways to begin focusing more on your preaching is to start planning it out in advance. 

If you’re not ahead in your planning it’s hard to get focused. It’s hard to do your job well. 

Now don’t get me wrong, this is done in partnership with prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit to help speak through you to deliver God’s message to His people. 

Every time I talk about planning your sermons, people fire back and argue, “Well, what about the Holy Spirit? Shouldn’t you leave room for Him and be more spontaneous?”

I always hear this pushback and my response is, “Why can’t the Holy Spirit work in advance?” 

Why does it always have to be this spontaneous fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants thing, like I’m more holy and righteous if I’m unprepared because then God has to speak through me at that moment or we’re all in trouble?

Why does that sound more spiritual than spending weeks studying, preparing, praying, and relying on the Holy Spirit in my preparation and work in advance?

God is a Planner

Didn’t God before the creation of the world know exactly what he was creating or was he just flying by the seat of his pants? 

Doesn’t God know everything that’s about to happen and so he sees things in advance and he knows what’s going on long before it ever comes to be? 

When we read in the Old Testament where God told Noah to build the ark, didn’t he help Noah with those plans and show him what to do?

Noah didn’t just go, “Well, God wants me to do this so I’m just going to grab some trees and grab some nails and get my hammer out and just start hammering stuff wherever I feel God leading me and just hope this all works out.” There was a plan there. 

Proverbs 21:5 says, “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.”

Those who plan see abundance. Those who are hasty and have no plans come to poverty and ruin. I want your ministry to see abundance.

I want to see your preaching thrive. 

Yes, God can do that occasionally through a spontaneous sermon. But honestly, he’s going to do it most when you put in the work in advance and work with him along the preparation path. 

My 2020 Sermon Calendar

So if you need help planning out your sermons in advance I want to tell you about a little resource I just launched today that could help you out. 

We just launched a new store on ProPreacher.com that you can check out. And in the store we just released the 2020 sermon calendar.

It’s a resource that I created to help you see the big picture of what your year looks like and map out and plan your preaching in advance based on the Scripture that you’re going to be teaching for each week. 

Just imagine how it would feel to have an entire year just mapped out in a calendar, where you can look at each week and say, “Okay, this week I’m talking about this. This week I’m preaching on this passage of Scripture. This next one, okay, I’ve got a sermon coming up in a couple months where I’m going to be wanting to talk about these things.”

Then you can be prepared and start collecting materials. When something pops up you can set it aside knowing you are going to need that later. 

Imagine what that would feel like to be that far planned out. 

• You’re going to know what you’re preaching about in advance and so you’re going to be less stressed. 
• Your team is going to know what you’re preaching about in advance so they’re going to be more prepared and they’re going to be able to do the job that you’ve asked them to do with more excellence, with greater creativity and better ideas because they’ve had more time to think about it.
• And your people are going to be more excited because they’re going to be able to know what’s coming up and they’re going to be able to get prepared mentally for the message that they’re going to be hearing from God, but they’re also going to get more interested in inviting a friend or a family member or a coworker to a message that they know is coming up that they know that that person needs to hear. 

Here’s What the calendar looks like

You’ll get a spreadsheet with every week that you need to preach, all 52 weeks of the year. 

You’re going to see a calendar on the side that shows you all the dates so it helps you kind of just get a visual representation of what is coming up to help you think through what that week’s going to look like, what the months ahead are going to be like. 

Holidays

There’s an option to include US holidays in one of the spreadsheets, which is just a great reminder when you’re planning so you don’t miss something. 

Those dates like Christmas and Easter are kind of big ones. You want to make sure you don’t forget that.

Then there’s other minor holidays like Mother’s Day that sometimes churches do things for that you want to pay attention to, or maybe it’s just going to be a low attendance week so you want to make sure that you’re not scheduling the launch of some brand new big initiative on that Sunday when no one’s there. 

No Holidays

There’s also an option for no holidays if that’s your thing and you just want it clean. 

Multi-Sermon

Another option includes multiple sermons. So if you preach more than one sermon a week, you have room to include multiple messages. Or if you have other services like a Good Friday service, or other occasional midweek things, you can plug those in there as well.

Now, the cool thing about these is these are fully customizable Excel spreadsheets so you can add rows, delete rows, change font sizes, and change the size of the columns if you need to if you need more room or less room. 

You can print it out, mark it up, and make it your own however you need it to be. You can open it up in Excel, Numbers, or Sheets. There’s plenty of different ways you can use this to make it your own.

PDF Version

Plus, you’re also going to get a PDF planner that’s more of a one page planner for each message. 

This is really helpful for you if you want to sit down and just focus on preparing your planning one message at a time. 

You can print these out if you and lay them all out on a table if you want. You could write on the PDF directly using any sort of PDF software, or you could print it out and mark it up however you want—whatever works for you and your creative process.

I know that thousands of other pastors have downloaded previous years of this calendar. I think it’s going to be really helpful for you as well. 

I’m not just trying to sell you something here. My goal is to help you. 

My desire and my mission is to try to help other pastors and preachers. I’m not just trying to get rich by selling stuff. 

Now, to be honest it is a way that I help support this ministry and help support my family. So if you do purchase through my website, thank you very much. I really very much appreciate that. 

But if I was trying to make a ton of money, I would be in a different business.

Trying to help pastors, that’s not where all the money’s at. I could be selling or working on a far more lucrative things, but God has called me to the ministry of helping pastors, helping preachers to do their jobs and to resource and equip you in any way that I can.

So this is just one way that I’m trying to do that. 

The Bottom Line

It’s not right for you to neglect the duty of preaching to serve tables. 

Get prepared. 

Start planning. 

If you’re spending too much time on other things, find people to help with those areas of ministry so that you can focus on the primary responsibility that God has called you to, prayer and preaching the Word.