Planning Your Preaching Calendar – Part 2

Here are the basic steps I follow when planning my preaching calendar:

1. Develop a spreadsheet. I’ve attached a copy of my personal preaching calendar that you may use as an example. Basically I set mine up to show 52 Sundays and their corresponding Wednesdays.
2. Add key holidays, vacations, special services, revivals, etc.
3. Add community, denominational and school events such as Spring Break. This helps you recognize when attendance will be lower or higher. You will not want to preach key sermons on low Sundays.
4. Consider the different types of literature or topics you will be preaching and scatter them appropriately throughout the year.
5. Consider whether you will preach a special series around certain holidays such as Christmas or Easter.
6. Launch new series when you have natural high attendance. This will give your visitors a reason to return and stay the course.
7. Meet with the rest of your team and work week by week through the calendar so that you can recognize how your plan fits against departmental events such as Vacation Bible School, D-Now, Etc.
8. Modify your plan with the new information you have received.
9. By this point you will recognize times when you will need guest preachers, worship leaders, etc. Go ahead and schedule your special guest so that you don’t wait to late.
10. Rest well, knowing that you have a plan.

Planning Your Preaching Calendar – Part 1

I realized early in my ministry that I wasn’t doing God, myself or my congregation a favor to be stressing out on Saturday night trying to come up with something to say on Sunday morning. We’ve all had to develop those Saturday night specials when things get hectic, but as a pattern of ministry I have found it extremely rewarding to plan my preaching a year in advance. As the year draws to a close I try to set extended time aside to prayerfully consider what God would have me preach in the next 12 months. Keep in mind we are not to be presumptuous in our planning, we are not promised tomorrow. But if the Lord wills to leave us here, I want to have a plan. I also want to keep that plan submitted to the Lordship of Christ and the direction of the Holy Spirit. Plans change, but that is no excuse to avoid planning all together.

It seems wise to avoid thinking out the details because they will inevitably change as each actual service approaches. But it is prudent to plan the broad strokes for several reasons.

1. Planning allows you to be sure that we do not get into a rut or develop “hobby horses”. Planning helps us to give the congregation a balanced diet of truth.  The steady diet of my preaching is pure exposition of a book of the bible. In my opinion expositional preaching keeps us honest. We can’t avoid the hard stuff as so many are in the habit of doing. But I want to be careful as I choose the books from which to preach that I keep a balance of Gospel narrative, Pauline Epistles, Wisdom Literature, Prophetic writings from the Old Testament, etc. I’ve also recognized that it is helpful to do an occasion series in systematic theology to build up the congregation in a particular doctrine of the faith.
2. Planning allows the rest of your team to work with you in communication a consistent truth on any given Sunday. I provide my preaching plan to our graphics department and our worship department so that they can plan their ministries accordingly. In doing so, each aspect of our service is Word driven.
3. When you plan preaching you can also more effectively plan your study. I know I will be preaching through James, Nehemiah, a study of the End Times and 1^st Corinthians in 2010. I know what the general outlines of those studies will look like. As I hear or conceptualize a useful illustration, I can go ahead and store it in an appropriate file that I will pull as I approach that section of the series. So every conversation, newspaper article, blog post, sermon, book, etc. is an opportunity to gather material for something I will be teaching in the coming year. So any given sermon isn’t made in a day or a week, but throughout the year.
4. Last but not least it is one less thing to stress out about. It breaks my heart to hear a Pastor say, I’ve preached everything I know to preach and it must be time for me to move on. We are to give them the whole counsel of God, over and over, in season and out, with great patience. Give them the hard stuff, the deep stuff, the easy stuff, the convicting stuff – preach the Word! All of it, over and over. Then one day Jesus will appear and He will take it from there.

When it Rains it Pours…

When it rains it pours, according to the old proverb. Last week Pastor Johnny Hunt of First Baptist Woodstock and the current president of the Southern Baptist convention announced that he was beginning his battle with prostate cancer. According to Baptist Press,

Hunt is the third SBC leader this year to disclose a prostate cancer diagnosis, following O.S. Hawkins in August and Jack Graham in June. Hawkins is president of GuideStone Financial Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention. Graham, a former SBC president, is pastor of the Dallas-area Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano.

Yesterday I heard about Frank Page, the former SBC president (2006-2008) who lost is 32 year old daughter Melissa. This news came after receiving a link to an article about Matt Chandler the Pastor of the over 5,000 member Village Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Plano, TX. Chandler had a seizure which caused him to fall and receive a serious injury on his head. Tests have shown a large mass in the frontal lobe of his brain.

I am reminded that Paul taught us in Ephesians 6:18 (NASB95)
¹⁸ With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints,

As we lift up all the saints, pray specifically for God’s grace, presence and wisdom for those mentioned above.

A Pastor’s Greatest Encouragement

Having preached the Gospel for over 14 years I have benefited repeatedly from thoughtful, creative and generous encouragement. This past week one of our visiting families did some research and left outside my office door a case of Diet Sundrop, a bag of Snicker minis and a hunting magazine. The thought and gesture was quite encouraging and kind. Others have written well thought out notes that highlight different things they enjoy about my sermons. But I think the greatest encouragement that I have ever received is when I have talked with a member of Capshaw who is wrestling over how to make application of the Word to his life. Nothing makes my work and study more profitable that to know that it is being heard and obeyed as far as it is in keeping with the Word of God. John said it best of his congregation in 3 John 4 “I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth.”

 

The Founding of Capshaw Baptist Church

I walked over to the brick building behind our Church today. Often in my spare time I’ll rummage through old records and try to discover something of the Church’s history and foundation. In a box in the corner among other discarded items I found an old book that contained the first recorded minutes of the Church’s history.

The work that we know as Capshaw Baptist began in 1917. For some time the Pastor of the Fairview Baptist Church, J.E. Hamrie at the invitation of some of the citizens traveled down to the Lax school house to hold services every 3^rd Sunday night of each month. After the congregation grew to some size they expressed interest in constituting a Church.

A special service was called for May 19^th, 1917 to discern whether funds could be raised to construct a permanent meeting place for the assembly of believer’s at Lax as well as the entertaining the possibility of formally constituting a Church in the area.

Leaders from area Baptist Churches as well as the Baptist state office were called to form a Presbytery (An assembly of Church Leaders that would gather to make major decisions). Pastors represented in the first meeting were from Southside, Mt. Zion Baptist, Fairview, Albany as well a State worker from Phil Campbell, AL, among others. A rally of the Baptist’s of that region was held for the purpose of raising the funds necessary to plant a church in the Lax community. That night hymns were sung and stirring sermons were delivered by L.L. Hearn and W.M. Ware. Then a collection was taken that amounted to over $6,000.

Following that meeting the Church took the name of the Lax Missionary Baptist Church and adopted articles of faith that remain our standard of teaching to this day. Pastor Hamrie supply preached until a regular Pastor could be found.

I am told that the foundation of the original Church stood directly across Capshaw Road at the intersection of the Baptist Camp Road. Since that time the community has been renamed to Capshaw and the church followed suit becoming the Capshaw Baptist Church. Most of the names of the charter members can be found on roads today including Balch and Dupree. Some of there descendants still faithfully attend Capshaw Baptist.

Those original documents are priceless to me. I have since moved them from the old brick house to our offices. Sunday after I incorporate them into a sermon I’ll have the locked away in our safe.

This is the story of how the great commission of our Lord Jesus Christ came as far as Capshaw. I wonder where we will send it from here.