As a church pastor I’m generally preaching every week. It’s a huge privilege and I consistently remind myself that I’m incredibly blessed to get to do what I do!
But it didn’t take me long to find out that Sunday’s come around incredibly quickly and regularly when you’re leading a church, so I worked out years ago that in order to not be stressed out on a Saturday night or early Sunday morning every week trying to pull a last-minute message together that I needed a weekly plan! Over the years I’ve had lots of people ask me how I go about this, so I thought I’d take a moment and share the process.
Firstly – here’s some things that I do all the time:
Regularly – Time In The Word & Prayer
If you know me, you know I’m a bit of a fanatic about daily devotionals. I’m so passionate about the subject in fact that I wrote a book about it! I believe that every Christian benefits from spending time each day in the Word and prayer, and if you’re a church leader or pastor, then this really (in my view) is an absolute non-negotiable. I get up each week-morning and on Sundays usually about 4:45am and spend the first few hours or so of each day reading and studying my Bible and praying.
I generally use the Bible Study app from Olive Tree for my Bible reading/study, and each day I read a part of the Bible and I find a verse that stands out to me and write something about it, highlighting the passage blue when I do. I’m slowly turning my Bible blue with now thousands and thousands of little notes on verses all the way through the Scriptures.
This process is great for hearing what God is saying to me today – but it also provides a continual flow of God’s word into my life, which means that I always have something that I’m thinking about and ready to share. In fact, I’ve usually got more than enough! If you’re a preacher (or want to be) I’d encourage you to be in the Word all the time. Maintaining this discipline means that you’ll never be in the place where you’re struggling to have a message to bring.
Regularly – Gathering Inspiration
Effective illustrations and quotes are really important in your messages, and when you’re preaching regularly you start to see that nearly every aspect of your life can become a preaching illustration in one way or another! (Although, it pays to check with family members first that they’re OK with you sharing home stories…). But another way that I’m continually preparing for messages is by jotting down ideas, stories and quotes as I hear them. I use this great free app called SimpleNote for this – which lets me just take notes, and then I can tag them by category – so if I’m doing a message on forgiveness, or anger etc – I can just bring up the tag and find a whole bunch of stories and quotes connected to that topic. It’s just so useful to have these ready to go when you’re in preparation mode.
So while I’m doing the above regularly, here’s my general plan for the week that I’m preaching:
Monday – Getting The Overview
I start my process of writing a new message on Monday morning, right after having brought a message on the day before. My go-to place to hear from God is Eastern Beach, near to where I live in Auckland, and as I walk along the beach and pray, I find that God gives me the general idea for the message I’ll bring that next Sunday. I’ll often grab my phone and take voice notes as I walk.
When I get into the office, I write up all the voice notes and get a very basic outline of the message. I try to have the skeleton of it done by mid-morning on Monday, so that I have time to brew on it over Tuesday before I pick it up again on Wednesday.
A number of years ago I read a brilliant book by Andy Stanley called ‘Communicating For A Change‘. In this book he puts forward five questions which I’ve used to frame every message I’ve preached since I read it.
The five questions are:
- What do they need to hear?
- Why do they need to hear it? (This is important – essentially, why should they care? What will happen to them if they don’t take on board what you’re going to share)
- What do they need to do?
- Why do they need to do it?
- How will you make it memorable?
These questions have helped me really focus my messages, and also too can really help if I’m trying to speak on a particular subject but not sure quite how to approach it. I’ve done a lot of things with #5 over the years, from writing songs and handing out plastic sunglasses to everyone in the congregation, to once even cutting up money to make a point of how much power it has over our lives (someone pointed out to me afterwards that it wasn’t legal to do that, so I never did it again. But it certainly drove the point home in that message!)
Wednesday – Filling It Out
Tuesday is usually a day of meetings for me and I don’t get a lot of headspace to work on messages, so the next push often comes on a Wednesday. When I get to Wednesday morning I book out the first part of the morning to work on the message and basically get it to a fairly finished stage. I’ve found that using Microsoft OneNote is brilliant for this as I can put different ideas all over the screen and then group them together.
I’ll also at this point often jump online and read other articles, commentaries and insights on the topic that I’m speaking about and season my message with great quotes and input from others too. This is where I’ll delve into my SimpleNote database and pull in anything that I’ve found during my weeks that connects with the message as well.
My aim at this stage is to get the message down all the way from the intro notes (usually church announcements or stuff that I want to quickly chat about to the church before I get to the message) all the way through to the gospel invitation and altar call (if there is one) at the end. Depending on how long this takes me to do I might also do a quick check of the timing to make sure that it’s going to fit within 30 minutes, which is generally how long we allow for preaching at The River. I usually have more material than will fit into that time-frame, and so it’s a hard process each week choosing the which parts will end up on the ‘cutting-room floor’ – especially when you’re passionate about all of it and want to share everything! But I think it’s better to be to the point and punchy and leave them wanting more than to drag a message out trying to cover every last detail.
By the time I’m finished on Wednesday I want the message to be in a state that I *could* preach it right then if I had to. I’ve found over the years that putting in the hard yards early to get it to this stage really helps relieve the pressure on the weekend, and means that I can do more tweaking in the last stages.
Saturday Night – Review & Tweak
Having got the message to a fairly finished stage on Wednesday, I then leave it to sit for a few days, like a good brew 🙂 I then usually pick it up again on Saturday night and read through it again. I find that leaving it for a couple of days really helps it to settle, and sometimes things that I thought were awesome or made a lot of sense on Wednesday just aren’t working for me when I’m looking at it fresh again on Saturday. So this is a great opportunity to run through it and check it flows and that everything makes sense. Usually I’ll time it as well. I have this great app on my phone called Seconds Pro which enables me to create timings of the different parts of the message, so that I can glance at my phone and by the colour of the screen and the time I know exactly how far through the message I should be and how long I have left to go.
Sunday Morning – Final Prep
I’m a naturally early riser so I’m up bright and early on Sunday mornings and I usually head down to my office at church for the final preparation. After my time in the Bible and prayer, I go through the message again and just check that everything is flowing and feeling right. Usually on Sunday morning I’ll also create any slides for the data projector that go with the message as well. I know that there are others who take a lot longer and spend more time on the visuals that go along with their messages, but for me it’s about just making sure that there’s Scriptures and the basic points available for people who are taking notes.
At this point I’ll usually pay particular attention to the end of the message – especially looking at how it’s linking with a gospel presentation / altar call at the end. I always want to make sure that my message isn’t just presenting principles, thoughts and facts – but bringing people into an experience with the Holy Spirit. And most importantly laying the foundation for someone to make a decision for Christ or re-dedicate their lives to Him.
In recent times I’ve started using Notion as my weapon of choice when it comes to writing up my messages – I like it because it’s very simple and clear, easy to copy and move sections around, and also because it slowly creates a database of my historic messages and means that I can easily search them and tag them too.
Most importantly, once the prep is done – then I really take the time to pray again into what I’m going to say and ask the Holy Spirit to breathe on the words and bring them to life in the lives of those who will be listening. I see it that I have now done all that I can do, and I need God to come and do what I cannot. I’ve done my part – now He must do His!
Sunday Morning – Bringing The Message
When it comes to delivering the message I bring my iPad with my notes and my iPhone with Seconds Pro running my timer and then deliver it with as much heart and passion as I can! Because I’ve generally gone over the whole message around 6-7 times by the time I bring it, it means that I’m not so ‘notes-bound’ in the delivery which I think is pretty important. I really want to connect with the people I’m speaking to, and I feel like I can do that better if I’m spending less time looking at my notes and more time looking directly at them! Also what I find is that because I’m now comfortable with the general flow of the message, it becomes easier for me to think and hear from God in the moment and bring something else that I hadn’t prepared beforehand.
In Conclusion
So that’s a bit about my daily/weekly process for preparing and presenting messages at church. If you like, you can check out videos of my preaching on our church YouTube site.
How About You?
Are you a pastor or preacher who is regularly speaking and bringing messages? If so, what does your process look like? I’d love to hear about it – so write me a note in the comments below!