Sitting in my congregation on any given Sunday are a multitude of needs and expectations, levels of maturity and orientations. And I’m supposed to offer a preaching menu to nourish every one of them. That means I’ve got to be an intentional biblical nutritionist.
— Stuart Briscoe
Once I preached a series on the fruit of the Spirit. Following the final sermon, a woman approached me in the narthex and asked, “When are you going to preach on something relevant?” (She wasn’t the world’s greatest diplomat.)
Taken aback, I stammered, “Relevant to whom?”
“To most of us,” she replied. “We’re sitting in the congregation with problems in our families and our marriages and our homes. We need help. When are you going to say something relevant?”
Ah, I think I understand, I said to myself. “Let me ask you some questions. About those problems of families—is there a lack of love there?”
“Yes, there is.”
“And there’s probably little joy in such situations,” I continued.
“Absolutely! People are miserable.”
“I suspect there’s really no peace in those households.”
“You’ve got it!” she assured me. I baited her shamelessly as I continued through the list of the fruit of the Spirit, each one getting her hearty endorsement. When I finished, she looked at me bewildered and pleaded, “So why can’t we hear sermons that help us with these real needs?”
I explained that when the fruit of the Spirit are being evidenced, they’ll show up in marriages, in families, in every aspect of life. I had been addressing these very needs, but I had come at it from the side of God’s provision rather than our need. I had offered a spiritual dynamic. She wanted ten snappy hints to help her raise her kids or cope with her husband. As far as she was concerned, I got an F on that series.
That experience underscored the importance of thinking through my preaching plans. Sitting in my congregation on any given Sunday are a multitude of needs and expectations, levels of maturity and orientations. And I’m supposed to offer a preaching menu to nourish every one of them. That means I’ve got to be an intentional biblical nutritionist.
The Heart of the Plan
Menu planning must recognize the purpose of the meal. Preaching is, first of all, proclamation — an announcement of who God is and what he has done and intends to do. So any menu I prepare will be God-centered, aiming to make all of life God-centered. I would rather my preaching magnify God than offer quick answers to specific life dilemmas. I’d rather nourish solid spirituality than knock the edge off spiritual hunger with homiletical junk food. And so I plan my sermon series accordingly.
Consequently, my starting point is not so much “What do these people want to hear?” as it is “I’m going to give these people the Bread of Life.” Basically, people need to know God in the midst of their particular situations. So I relate every need to these fundamentals: acknowledging Christ as Lord, being his disciples, operating as his people in the unique institution of the church, focusing on his Word in the Scriptures. I can’t go wrong if I start with the Scriptures and expose people’s hearts to what they say.
Why Plan?
Nevertheless, I do find great merit in teaching and preaching systematically. So I plan carefully, and do so for several reasons.
First, planning makes preaching easier because I don’t have to spend half the week scratching my head about a subject. The task of finding a new topic each week can tyrannize a preacher, and the “Saturday-night specials” that often result can victimize a congregation. When I plan, I know on Sunday afternoon the topic and text for the following week.
Second, planning helps me avoid repeating myself. When I lay out a sermon series, I see immediately that I’ll be covering a number of texts and ideas. Such planning prevents me from dipping into the same old well week after week. And that, I trust, keeps my preaching fresh and helps me provide my congregation with the whole counsel of God.
Third, many in my congregation schedule in other areas of life, so they expect some kind of strategy to my preaching. Young businessmen, in particular, plan a great deal, and they ask me specifically what’s coming next. I like to be able to point them in a known direction.
Finally, planning allows me to preach sermons in series, whose momentum often builds as the theme develops. People get interested in the series and come back to hear more. I’ve had a number of people say, “Could you map out the series for us? We’d like to be reading ahead.” That’s what I like to hear.
Although I try to make each message a self-contained unit, so that people can miss a week and still comprehend any sermon, the sermons do build throughout a series. People benefit from hearing the series one week to the next. Audiences used to love the old Saturday serials at the cinema. If I can put that “Come back next week for more exciting adventure!” feeling into a series, the interest in my sermons mounts.
In our congregation, although some people come practically every week, many (I suspect about a third) miss services on any given Sunday. Because of this fact, some preachers object that many people will miss the progression of a series.
Frankly, I don’t worry much about those who aren’t there. I target my preaching for those who are, and I’ll hit the moving targets as best I can without being overly concerned about them. I cannot govern my planning by the casual attenders.
Getting a Plan
I never could be labeled a hyper-organizer. At any given point, I usually can tell you three things about my preaching schedule: where I am going with my present series, when I intend to preach three or four topical sermons as breathers between series, and what my next series will be. Beyond that, I cannot say. Some pastors know a year or two in advance what each Sunday will bring, but I find I do best concentrating on one series at a time; it takes most of my mental energy just to get through my present series.
Ideas for my series come from many sources. I’m blessed with fellow staff members who come up with great ideas from their ministry contacts. Sometimes I’ll get an idea from my general reading or study. Other times, ideas come as suggestions from the congregation.
One of my recent series examined the Apostles’ Creed. It was conceived when a member wrote me of her concern about the New Age movement and asked if I had considered preaching a series on its dangers. She sent some material I found provocative and helpful. As I considered her suggestion, I thought. She’s got a point. On the other hand, I felt a series on the New Age might have limited interest.
Then I remembered something from my days in England as a bank examiner. One of my responsibilities was to identify counterfeit currency. As a young examiner, I felt a little inept, so I asked an older inspector for some clues on how to recognize counterfeits.
“Spend hours and hours handling the real thing,” he advised. “The more familiar you are with the genuine article, the more automatically you will recognize the counterfeit.”
That made me think. Probably the best way to encourage church members to distinguish counterfeit religion is to make sure they are aware of the real thing. So rather than preach on the New Age movement, I prepared a series on the Apostles’ Creed. I plotted out sixteen sermons that took the articles of the creed and contrasted them with counter positions. That series, “Christian Belief in the Modern World,” helped anchor people’s belief in orthodox Christianity so they could reject the bogus.
Occasionally I systematically poll the congregation to find what people most want to hear. I keep it simple—a card asking for their ideas. This provides a wealth of topics. Some I may turn into a series, but even the discards give me a better understanding of people’s interests.
Most often ideas for series come from a combination of resources. One week as I went about my pastoral duties, I ran into an unusual number of grim people. We’re taking ourselves so seriously! I thought to myself. And then the thought struck me, I wonder how seriously we take God?
The phrase “taking God seriously” stuck in my mind. It seemed we in America were becoming a church full of self-centered people. We needed to become more God-centered. So I went off with a title in search of a series—not my typical tactic.
At the time I was reading through the Minor Prophets and realized the twelve would make a great twelve-part series under my orphaned title. Actually, in that series I was chewing more than I could swallow, trying to devote only one sermon per book. But “Taking God Seriously” turned into a constructive series that received an enthusiastic response from the congregation.
My longest series was on 1 Corinthians and ran about sixty messages. Genesis took about fifty—one sermon per chapter. But I no longer preach series that long. I found the ideal length is about twelve weeks—long enough to develop a theme and produce momentum, but not so long that people tire.
I also plan breaks in my series. First, I break between series, allowing the congregation a breather before we plunge into another string. It also gives me the opportunity to preach sermons about timely and specific topics.
However, I also break within a series if it is necessary. Special events from the sublime (Christmas, for instance) to the ridiculous (preaching on “World Serious” when the Milwaukee Brewers were in the World Series) dictate a hiatus in a series. Sometimes I can work a series to coincide with special days, like dovetailing the Apostles’ Creed messages to have “crucified, dead, and buried” and “on the third day he rose again from the dead” to fit on Palm Sunday and Easter, respectively. Other times I just stop and preach a special sermon. It would offend some people if I were to plow through my planned series, taking no note of Christmas.
Types of Series
Of the two kinds of series I typically preach, the book series is the most straightforward. I choose a book of the Bible and preach through it, breaking it into preachable segments. As I preach the parts, week by week, I try to keep people aware of the whole.
For instance, I recently did a series on Deuteronomy, called “Enjoying the Good Life.” Most weeks I would start off by saying something like “When Moses led the children of Israel into the Promised Land, he said it was a good land full of good things, and God wanted them to enjoy it. That puts the children of Israel right where most of us are today. We’ve been looking at what this good life is all about in recent weeks, and today we’d like to look at this aspect.”
I try to integrate the overall message of the book into a contemporary theme. I want to make each message topical in the sense that I apply the biblical material to a specific contemporary topic.
In a way, this blurs the distinction between the book study and a topical series, which is the second kind of series I preach. My messages on the Apostles’ Creed, Christ’s “I am” statements, the churches of Revelation, or the Lord’s Prayer would fall into this category. If you pin me down, I’d call myself a “topical expositor”—one who exposits a text whenever I preach, whether the series derives from a book of the Bible or a group of related topics.
Balancing Preaching Fare
When planning my preaching, I constantly try to keep a number of twin emphases in balance.
• Old Testament and New Testament. I find people generally don’t know the Old Testament all that well. To correct that, I subscribe to this rule of thumb: follow an Old Testament series with one from the New Testament. When I preached on the life of David, using mostly material from Kings and Chronicles, my next series, “Discipleship,” derived from John and had a New Testament flavor.
• Doctrinal and relational. I see a great need for solid doctrinal preaching. Without sound doctrine, people are out to sea in the midst of their problems. At the same time, they want and need sermons on the family, marriage, and communication. Sometimes, in fact, they become so wrapped up in their problems that “dry doctrine” falls on deaf ears. Nevertheless, we need to balance the relational and the doctrinal. More to the point: we need to apply the doctrine in ways people understand and relate to.
• Masculine and feminine. Talking with a Green Bay Packer and his wife about team Bible studies awhile back, I realized again how different are the agendas of men and women. The woman said, “We wives are studying ‘How to Be a Woman of Excellence,’ and the guys are studying ‘War among the Angels’!” We laughed, but it underscored the differences.
Women tend to gravitate toward subjects that strike the heart strings or deal with their homes, families, or roles. Men, on the other hand, would rather wrestle with concepts. I try to bear both needs in mind as I plan series, prepare topics, and illustrate sermons.
While speaking once at an engagement with Karen Mains, Becky Pippert, and my wife, Jill, I started listening to the different illustrations the women used. I’m big on sports. I talk a lot about the Marines, the business world—macho things. The women, however, illustrated from the family and marriage. They tended to be much more open about themselves and their own failings. Those are emphases I need to include if I intend to preach to more than 50 percent of my congregation.
• Inward growth and outward ministry. I’ve known some preachers so outreach oriented that they wear everybody out. Others can be so inner oriented that they fail to notice anybody outside their sphere. We have to take root with the Lord so we can bear fruit, so I try to balance exhorting my people into personal growth with getting them out into the world to make a difference.
Both individual sermons and sermon series can be heavy on one aspect or the other. If that’s the case, the next one I preach ought to tip the balance in the other direction.
Plans Change
Naturally, I sometimes change my plans. Following the first service one Easter, Jill remarked, “That was a graphic description of death you gave, but I think it needed personalizing a bit.”
She was right, so in the next service, I revised the sermon to devote no more than two minutes describing my father’s death. The congregation was totally still, absolutely not a person moving. It was an electric moment, what I call a “loud silence.”
I don’t often open up like that, part of the British reserve, I suppose. And such personal material can become worn out so easily. But I did it that time, even though it wasn’t part of my original plan. That’s okay. People heard and felt and responded to God’s Word that morning. And that was my plan.
Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today
