I have a discipline in my life that causes a good number of my fellow Christians to shake their heads in disbelief.  I have even sometimes been accused of not allowing the Spirit to work through me – replacing the Spirit’s wisdom with my own.  These accusations annoy me, especially when I sit in on the sermon of someone who’s blasted the discipline I practice –  hot-air rhetoric is not what I consider to be speading the Good News.

What is my scandalous discipline?  Well, I prepare my sermons.  I even [gasp] write out a manuscript, each week!  Not only that, but every July I sit down and map out my preaching passages and sermon titles for the entire year.  In many of the Christian circles I’ve walked in over the course of my Christian life – this has been akin to heresy.  Let me share why I disagree:

First, go ahead and read this short story from John Stott’s Between Two Worlds.  This explains why I don’t preach extemporaniously.  Frankly, I could do so.  I’m well, read enough, and have enough natural speaking skills, that I’d be able to muttle about for years without having to prepare a sermon.  The problem is that I’d be falling into patterns of laziness that I really don’t want to pick up (heck, suffering through them in High School was enough).  If I preached this way I would soon run out of anything genuinely substantive, because there would be no need to stretch my own person or understanding.  I might be able to make people feel good on occasion, or impress them with the words I’m able to use, but the “well of me” would dry-up rather quick.  Yes, I believe that the Spirit gives Christians words to speak when confronted by challenges to their faith – but I’m not sure that can be applied to preaching to the Church.  It also seems to be true to me that even when the Holy Spirit is giving disciples the words to speak that the Spirit draws upon the actual experience and knowledge of the disciples (Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 is a prime example of this).  I also am a firm believer that the Spirit, being God, is able to work in advance.  I have never gotten an adequate response to the question, “Why is the Spirit only working at the moment of the sermon delivery?  Why isn’t the Spirit working when I’m translating, or refelcting, or writing my manuscript?”

Second, for years I’ve been mapping things out in “arcs.”  I look at a sermon series as a narrative – which has a beginning, middle, and an ending (sometimes stretched over several volumes).  Because of this, I need to have a general idea of where I’m going with a series – as well as what I want communicated by the end of said series.  If I’m randomnly picking Scripture to serve as my sermon topic, with no thought as to how it fit in the grand scheme of the series – then I’m not doing a very good job at presenting either the over-arching Scriptural narrative or the short narrative of my current series.  It might be easier in the short run to do a lot of “one shot” sermons, but the price that I pay later is never worth it (by the way, if your congregation is calling a pastor, don’t ask to read on of their sermons – ask for a series).

Third, when I work out my general arcs in advance, I can go deep.  I would never have been able to write the three CrossPointings.org devotional studies if I wasn’t working in advance.  It took time to tie those Biblical themes together in a way that helped people travel the narrative path of Scripture.  It also took time to come up with challenging questions, prepare lesson ideas, create the work-outs, film the videos, and put the booklets together for use in the congregation (and there’s still typos!).  Without that time, those three series would have been “just another time of pastor talking to/at us.”  With that time spent in preparation,  they were each a shared journey that 25 people took together (almost a third of Central Baptist – and we’re gunning to have everyone that is part of this community to take these journeys).

Fourth, if I don’t work in advance there is no way I can visualize the sermon properly.  See, I use the projection screen to preach.  Rather than using a visual medium as though it were a textual medium, however, I use images to backdrop my sermons.  This means that where many pastors will put either their sermon outline, or random quotes to support their ideas (often taken out of context, sigh), I will splash image after image on the screen.  These images function as visual memonic devices – linking the sermon ideas with the images on the screen (people never got the idea of what it means to love one’s enemies until I quoted that teaching by Jesus as an image of Osama Bin Laden appeared on the screen – saying the name didn’t have the same visceral effect, there wan’t enough emotion behind it to get the impact of what Jesus taught).  In order to do this, however, I need to have my sermon written (yes, I type out my manuscripts every week) by Thursday of each week.  This gives me friday mornings to tweek the manuscript, find out where I want my visual cues to go, and put together the presentation.  This process also aids in my memorization.

Fifth, and last, planning out my sermons a year in advance gives me a time to pause and ask myself, “Am I touching on the whole of our story?”  Preachers, like most people, tend to migrate towards passages that they already understand or are comfortable with.  Given the short amount of time that most pastors give themselves to prepare sermons, this isn’t surprising!  It means, however, that we pastors often miss huge swaths of the Biblical material in our preaching, and that we are often remiss in connection the Biblical narrative to the theology of the Apostolic Tradition.  When I look out at my sermons for the year I can ask, “OK, what am I missing?”  It was this type of preparation that encouraged me to take the time to put together a series which explored Jesus’ links to wisdom teaching (specifically, Ecclesiastes) – highlighting similarities and dissimilarities between Jesus and Qohelet.  Without working in advance, I have never even attempted it.  There wouldn’t have been enough time!  To be quite honest, this last point came to me through an excelent book entitled, Planning a Year’s Preaching, by Stephen Nelson Rummage.  If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to do so at the nearest opportunity.

So those are some of the reasons why I work far in advance with my sermon series.  While I do occasionally get snide comments from people who feel that my approach isn’t “spiritual enough,” I think I’ll stick with this method which has stretched, challenged, and encouraged me both in my pastoral life.