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5 Steps in My Sermon Preparation Process
Steps in the Sermon Preparation Process
Over the years I’ve come to depend on a five-step process of sermon preparation. Certainly this is not the only way to do things. But as I have heard other men whose peaching I admire describe their process, I’ve been encouraged by similarities to mine. That should be no surprise. Given that we share convictions and goals, our processes naturally are similar.
The steps in my sermon preparation process are (1) text work; (2) secondary reading; (3) homiletical structuring; (4) writing; and (5) familiarizing.
Text Work
This step involves me sitting down with my Bible and a notepad. I read and reread the text dozens of times, observing things that help me understand what God is saying and why he is saying it.
I want to do three things during this step. First, I want to determine what I call the primary claim of my text. This term grows out of our understanding of the nature of Scripture, that God greatly desires it to accomplish an effect. So I ask, What is this text’s greatly desired effect? What claim does God want to make on the reader through his word? Getting clarity on this primary claim sets the course for all subsequent sermon preparation. Eventually it becomes the sermon’s primary claim. There should be a one-to-one correspondence between the primary claim of the text and the primary claim of the sermon.
The Heart of Preaching
Mike Bullmore
Mike Bullmore’s The Heart of Preaching explores the functional centrality of the gospel in the life of a preacher, helping pastors shape their character, content, and mindset toward a gospel-centered life.
To be fair, even though this is the first thing I look for, finding it requires some close text work, which brings me to the second thing I do: describe the development of the author’s argument. This looks different for different types of biblical literature, but all Scripture is rational discourse, and all rational discourse has an argument, whether that argument is discursive, narrative, or poetic. My goal is to discern and then be able to describe the movement and development of the text. That understanding invariably provides greater insight into the text’s primary claim.
Third, I make significant exegetical observations. Please notice that word significant. I must recognize that I cannot say everything I learn about my passage in my sermon. Commentaries can be more or less exhaustive; sermons can’t. I know I have limited time, so I must limit what I include. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that my text has a hundred exegetical properties—lexical, grammatical, syntactical, contextual, structural, and so forth. There’s no way I can say something about every one of those properties. I must make choices. I shouldn’t include something simply because I find it interesting or because it might show how smart I can be.
So how do I decide what gets included and what doesn’t? What makes an exegetical observation significant? My main criterion is its contribution to advancing the text’s primary claim. We can think of this as the heuristic value of an observation—that is, its lightshedding ability. The things I choose to include should turn the lights on in my passage and help make sense of the things I don’t have space to include.
I’ve found it helpful to think about biblical passages like thermal photographs—the kind of photos we find in scientific magazines, where there might be a picture of the human body that shows the hot spots in red and the cool spots in blue. There are hot spots in every text that are much more useful to the advancement of my primary claim than some cooler secondary or tertiary sections.
This, then, is what I do in my text work, and throughout the whole process I pray and ask God for illumination. I typically spend six to eight hours in this step of sermon preparation. How do I know when I’m done? First, I have a confident grasp of the text’s primary claim, such that I can explain it in a single clear statement.
I allow no fuzziness. Getting this statement right guides the rest of my preparation. If I don’t have it right, I feel as if I am slogging through mud.
Second, I have some likely lines of development for my sermon’s argument that are informed by the development I observed in the text.
Third, I have a collection of notes that capture the most significant observations. Early on in my preaching, I gathered far more than I could use. But over time, I learned to more quickly and confidently identify the useful, significant parts.
Fourth (and I realize this is a bit subjective and perhaps a bit personality-dependent), I’ve begun to feel the beginnings of a fire in my belly. I’m becoming eager, despite my awareness of my frailty, for Sunday to come.
Secondary Reading
I can describe my second step more briefly, which is appropriate given its lesser importance relative to the first step. One of the mistakes preachers often make, especially young preachers, is to spend far too much time reading commentaries. So let me explain what I do and why I do it.
First, what do I do during this step of preparation? After doing my own work in the text, I now add to and strengthen my understanding by consulting the work of others. I typically try to read from just two or three commentaries. Also, I occasionally read a sermon someone else preached on my text. I find it helpful—in fact, necessary—to read one rigorously exegetical commentary to make sure I haven’t mishandled any portion of my text and to strengthen my conviction regarding the conclusions I have drawn. I also find it helpful to read another one or two commentaries that are more doctrinally and/or pastorally inclined simply to expand my understanding of the passage’s doctrinal and pastoral implications. I read the appropriate sections of these commentaries, underlining some things and taking some notes.
Second, why do I do this secondary reading? Let me suggest three reasons, the final one being the most important. As I’ve already alluded, one reason is to clarify and possibly correct my understanding of the text. Am I guilty of some common lexical error? Have I failed to grasp the significance of some syntactical construction? Have I missed some significant contextual observation, either from the surrounding text or from the Bible as a whole? While it’s very important to do our own work carefully and thoroughly first, we can all benefit from those who have labored over God’s word with a kind of expertise we might not have.
A second reason to read commentaries is to benefit from other ways of expressing things. I don’t recommend excessive use of quotations in preaching, but there are times when we discover a way of saying something that is particularly helpful or poignant. Certainly we ought not to be quoting others or using their original ideas without crediting them, but sometimes an apt quote or even a way of saying something is useful. However, this is an area where we can be tempted to rely on commentaries in an unhealthy way. So I want to be clear: In the list of reasons to read commentaries, this one is near the bottom. Nonetheless, there can be some value here if we use our secondary reading judiciously and honestly.
What, then, is the main reason to read commentaries? I believe it is simply to engage in a conversation of sorts with someone who has thought carefully about your text. When we engage with others thoughtfully about a text, we gain the ability to articulate our understanding of that text. In the back and forth, we are sharpened in our ability to put that understanding into words. Just think of the privilege we have in reading commentaries. We get to engage in conversation with the likes of John Calvin on the book of Hebrews, Martin Luther on Galatians, or D. A. Carson on the Gospel of John. We must see our commentaries not so much as books but as people, fellow believers with whom we have the privilege of engaging in thoughtful consideration of what we are preparing to preach.
It varies a bit from week to week, but I typically spend two to three hours in this secondary reading.
Homiletical Structuring
Having done my text work and my secondary reading, I’m now in a place to begin to organize what I’ve found into a coherent, unified sermonic argument.
I typically think of this step in terms of drafting the basic flow of the sermon. I’m simply giving shape and order to the set of ideas I collected in the previous steps. I’m aiming at absolute clarity at this point. I’m not filling out the substance of the ideas. Instead, I’m putting them in order, thinking of logical sequence and movement.
I’m also thinking of where component parts such as illustrations and applications might fit in.
Brothers, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Learn to love the work.
I resist the impulse to start writing my sermon. If ideas come during this process of organizing, I do try to catch them because they might not come back when I want them to. I typically have an extra notepad or two readily available to catch useful thoughts, but the first order of business is to organize and capture on paper the basic flow of my sermon.
For what it’s worth, when I’m done with this step, I typically have three or four pages. It’s an outline, but not a formal one. It doesn’t have points and subpoints. My goal is simply to have a unified and sequential map of the whole sermon from start to finish. I aim to be ruthless in deleting things that don’t contribute to the advancement of my sermonic argument, and I resist the desire to create holding places for cherished ideas that really don’t fit in the flow. The purpose of this step is to ensure focus, unity, and force. Its purpose is to eliminate, not accommodate, meandering.
If I’ve done careful and conscientious work in the first two steps, I usually am able to accomplish this third step in one to two hours.
Writing
For many, writing is the most tedious step of the preparation process, so they’re tempted to be negligent here. This also used to be my least favorite step because it was so intensive. But now it’s one of my favorite parts. I regularly experience the direct help of God, carrying me along, even to the provision of words and phrases. I’m not claiming here that I receive inspiration of the sort that the writers of Scripture experienced, but I am saying that there is a kind of help from God that moves me along and gives me a confidence that is deeply encouraging. If we pray throughout our preparation, and particularly at this step, that God would grant skill and give us the “tongue . . . of a ready writer” (Ps. 45:1 KJV), then we should expect some spiritual activity to take place.
After forty-plus years of preaching, I still write out a full manuscript. I would strongly urge you, especially the young preachers among you, to do the same, even if you don’t take your full manuscript into the pulpit. The discipline of writing helps me to achieve both clarity and precision.
I’ve said it already but it’s worth repeating: Preaching is an act of love, and one of the best ways I can love my people is by being clear. Writing helps me with that. It forces me to think progressively, making sure that my thoughts follow. Writing also forces me to complete my thoughts, not leaving them to the inspiration of the moment in the pulpit, which can so frequently end in fuzziness or outright confusion.
I know that there are times when the Spirit of God calls us to linger on things spontaneously, but if we are asking God for help in the process of writing, the Holy Spirit will help us then to put thoughts and words together clearly and coherently so that God’s purposes will be achieved.
I write faster now than I did in the first few years of my preaching. Now I typically spend right around three hours writing. I share that to encourage you, especially you younger preachers. You will get better at this; you will be able to do the same quality of work in less time as you mature and gain experience.
I find that if I’ve done good work in the previous steps, the writing is easier and even joy-giving. But if I haven’t done good work in the previous steps, then this step of writing is an exercise in frustration. If that keeps happening, I sadly begin to dread sermon preparation and am tempted to discouragement.
Familiarizing
This final step is the most idiosyncratic. I do whatever is necessary to be sufficiently familiar with my material so that when I’m in the pulpit my primary attention is given to the people I’m preaching to and not to my manuscript. My goal is freedom in my preaching, so I need to find out what it takes to achieve that.
In one sense, I’ve been familiarizing myself with my material throughout the preparation process. But I need to get familiar with the flow and movement of my sermon as it’s represented by my manuscript, which I have constructed so that it is easy for me to get in and out of it. I use various sizes of type. I use a system of arrows, dashes, and dots to represent various levels of importance. I use boxes, underlining, and all sorts of things to make it easy for me to make use of my manuscript without being tyrannized by it.
Similarly, you need to decide what to take into the pulpit with you. Some take an outline. Some take various forms of notes. Some take a full manuscript. You must make sure that whatever you take with you is put together in such a way that you can easily access it.
Here’s what familiarizing typically looks like for me. The last thing I do before I go to bed on Saturday is carefully read through my manuscript. I might make an adjustment or two here or there, but this is not the time for any significant editing. Rather, this is the time to get familiar with what I’ve carefully put together. Then, with my final thoughts for the day on my sermon, and my spirit asking God for both the gift of good rest and for a heart rightly prepared for the coming task, I go to sleep.
On Sunday morning I get up early so as to have plenty of time to once again read through my manuscript, praying along the way for God to help me remember and to speak clearly what he has given me to say. When I finish going through the manuscript, I get down on my knees, put my face in my Bible, and pray again for God’s help. The combination of my work and the promise of the Spirit’s help gives me the confidence I need to get dressed, eat my breakfast, and then head off to church in a peaceful state of mind.
I typically allow two hours for this step. But let me say again, this step is different for every preacher. Each of us needs to find out what is necessary to gain the level of freedom and confidence he desires.
A Concluding Word
So, brothers, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Learn to love the work. It is a happy labor, and being organized in it will contribute greatly to both your pastoral faithfulness and your personal sanity. Yes, it can be daunting to think about all that must be done, but you will find that once you begin the work it does turn into a happy labor.
This article is adapted from The Heart of Preaching: The Functional Centrality of the Gospel in the Life and Work of the Preacher.
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