Category Archives: time management

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Ready for Another Year of Fast-Paced Weeks of Sermon Prep?!

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Sunday’s come so quickly!
Suggestions to handle the pace

Are you ready for another year of preaching Sunday to Sunday?

If you are a preaching pastor, you know that Sundays come so quickly. It is tough to keep up this pace week after week. Here are some things I do to work effectively and efficiently each week:

  1. Keep improving your own exegetical skills. This takes time, but saves time in the long run when it’s time to consult commentaries (later in the post). The more quality exegesis you do, the less you need the help of scholars.
  2. Identify the big idea (or whatever you call it) and intention of the preaching portion on Monday morning. For years I have taught a Monday morning ritual to aspiring and accomplished expositors that reverses normal sermon preparation sequencing (begin by gathering exegetical fragments, but wait until the end of the week to put it all together). Try locating the meaning of the pericope and what it intends to do to the church early. Then you will know how the fragments fit. It addresses the ole, “I’ve got lots of notes but no sermon yet,” end of the week syndrome.
  3. Use the best commentaries efficiently. This implies that you know how to find them. Access copies of the two OT and NT commentary surveys by Longman and Carson, respectively. Since you’re improving your exegetical skills, you read the best commentaries to locate only what you’ve missed. You can read faster than you would if you were relying on the commentators to find meaning and intention.
  4. Write your sermon while you study. This is the best thing I have learned through the years. I never study for a sermon without creating the manuscript in real time. As I execute my method, I write as if I were preaching.

Sundays come so quickly. I hope you will consider these four tips and I know our Lord will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through your efforts (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

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Lessons from Listening to Student Sermons

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Two Observations and Suggestions from Watching Another Round of Student Sermons.

No offense to my recent students, but my mentor and long-time homiletics professor, the late Dr. Haddon Robinson, once said:

“I’ve listened to so many bad sermons in my lifetime, it’s a miracle that I am still a Christian.”

I’m pretty sure he was only half joking.

Last week I had the privilege of listening to many good sermons preached in my Advanced Homiletics class. Here are a couple of observations and suggestions:

  1. Introductions usually are too long in proportion to the number of sermon minutes. Novice preachers tend to create sermon introductions that are too long. This tendency might be caused by a failure to think carefully about what introductions must do. It also appears that preachers think introductions are more valuable than they really are. A sermon introduction must do two things: (1) introduce the subject of the sermon and (2) tell why listeners need to hear that subject matter [a bonus (3) could be telling them the worship response: “We worship this morning by ____________.” In light of what I just experienced, my suggestion is to shorten your sermon introductions.
  2. The segment between the introduction and the first point is too long. Again, the more inexperienced preachers seem bent on spending precious sermon minutes on contextual or background information. Part of the reason might be what the students are used to hearing from their professors or from reading commentaries. My standard rule in class is, only supply contextual/background-type information that is critical for interpreting your preaching portion. My suggestion is before placing contextual or background information in the sermon, ask yourself, “Could I understand the meaning of this text without this piece of background information?” If the answer is, “yes,” then leave it out of the sermon.

As you can tell, I am a huge fan of saving sermon minutes for the theological interpretation of Scripture. And that clock sure moves quickly on Sundays!

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as a result of our evaluations and striving to preaching well.

Randal

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The Connection Between Shallow Sermons and Too Much Content

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I saw this caption on what is supposed to be a funny t-shirt. I said, “supposed to be,” because it’s describing the practice of a surgeon. Yikes!

But according to Carrell’s analysis in, Preaching That Matters,

“the reluctance to eliminate content seems to be the primary preparation obstacle for most who preach wide sermons” (p. 109).

Evidently many of us struggle with cutting anything out of our sermon preparation notes. And it hurts us and our hearers.

Carrell records the different ways preachers rationale keeping everything in and delivering it all on Sundays:

“It’s such good material!”

“The more material the better!”

“The more material, the better chances there will be something for everyone!”

The problem: the more material, the greater the risk you will lose your listeners. Listeners simply get worn out trying to keep up with all that good stuff.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of sitting down with one of our Elders who was going to preach on a Sunday morning. We met to go over his sermon notes. We talked about the best way to accomplish his goals for the sermon–the preaching portion’s goal for the worshiper. Apart from rearranging a few key segments, we spent most of our time deciding on what to leave out. We did that because cutting some things out would allow him to stay focused on what the preaching portion intended to do to the church.

Before Sunday, begin to look for some of the good, biblical information that may keep true transformation from taking place. And God will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

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“the almost feverish search for new books”: What I’m Learned From Reading Jonathan Edwards’s Early Sermons

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I am enjoying Kimnach’s analysis of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon making as much as Edwards’s sermons (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 10, Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723).

One of the reasons why Edwards was so effective in his day is because he read more than the average person in his day. We would find that most pastor/theologians we respect and admire are also voracious readers. Think Tim Keller, for instance.

Kimnach writes,

“Much of Edwards’ routine is summed up in this one entry. First is the reference to “books to read,” hinting at the almost feverish search for new books…” (p. 53).

I continue to find that masters and doctoral level students in ministry are not reading well. Due to extremely busy schedules–Edwards wrote often about the challenge of time management!–they are not able to read as much as they know they should. And by and large they are not reading well in the sense of the right material.

If it’s true that one of the top concerns of U.S. pastors is getting more people in the door to pay the bills, you can imagine how that affects what they read and study: church growth.

Edwards’s reading program comprised of three things:

  1. Reading as many books as he could find on theology and his world.
  2. Read the Scriptures a lot! [To this day I would still say the best reading practice is reading through the Scriptures every year in Canonical order.]
  3. Read and rewriting his own writings.

This third one helped Edwards develop as a writer, but also as a preacher. First, as someone said, writing makes you exact. Yet, many preachers do not write out their sermons. Second, the habit of writing forces you to think hard about your topic. That includes more research.

You don’t have to be wired as a scholar like Edwards; you just need to practice writing stuff down, anything that pertains to your pastoral ministry.

And our Lord will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as you read and write!

Randal

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Wasting Precious Time During The Sermon?

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I recently had the privilege of evaluating a young pastor-in-training who preached in two venues in our faith-family.  One thing that discouraged him was that he ran out of time and couldn’t preach some of the more important sections of his preaching portion.  Do you ever get to the end of your allotted teaching time and feel you don’t have sufficient time for key theological insights and application?  One thing I’ve noticed is that we don’t always economize time like we should.  For instance, there are two ways to approach contextual information.  One is to ask, “How much context do I need to provide in order for my listeners to get the big picture?”  I find most pastors asking that question.  Another is to ask, “How much contextual information do I need to give them in order for them to understand my preaching portion?”  The second question usually results in a significant paring of the contextual data I give in the sermon.  Economy of time takes place when I only give what is absolutely necessary in order to make sense of the preaching portion.  Preaching is too important for me to waste time.