A little Jeopardy-style question for you. I will give you the answer and you come up with the question.

Answer: Three.

Question: Is it…

  1. The number of endings most preachers’ sermons have?
  2. The number of stories told in most sermons?
  3. The number of sermons you should be working on in any given week?

The answer is #3, though #1 is also often true (let’s be honest).

You might protest: Three! Are you kidding me? Most weeks one sermon is plenty for me to work on… and that’s when I don’t have a wedding or a funeral!

Hear me out. I’m not saying you need to have three finished sermons, just three sermons.

This blog post is going to scare you if you’re a last-minute sermon writer… but there’s room for you too. 

I want you to begin working three weeks ahead:

  1. One sermon in the batter’s box, ready to preach. This sermon is at least a detailed outline, needs some polish, but it essentially ready to preach if you had to. Think fully-formed living creature.
  2. One sermon in the on deck circle, ready to bat next. This sermon is where your sermon is most weeks by Wednesday or Thursday. You have a rough outline and the central theme or idea, but it needs some shape and structure.  Think skeleton with organs and muscles, but no skin.
  3. One sermon in the bullpen, warming up. (I know I’m mixing metaphors.) This sermon looks like that moment in the week when you move from lots of good ideas about the text to whiteboarding a central theme with ideas for stories and supporting material. Think skeleton.

If you’d rather use a cooking metaphor:

  1. One sermon ready to be served at the table.
  2. One sermon almost plated in the kitchen.
  3. One sermon in recipe form with all the ingredients at hand.

First, the “why” and then the “how.”

Why three sermons? Three reasons. (Notice a pattern here?)

  1. All the great preachers of our day work like this. (A little peer pressure to get you motivated.)
  2. Creativity thrives with constraints. All great artists know it. And you do too, even if you’re a last-minute sermon writer: Deadlines (another form of constraint) make things happen.
  3. The crock pot works. You know what I’m talking about. Have you ever gotten a great sermon idea, drawn from a text, about six months before the text comes up? Slow-cooked sermons are the best.

Now the how.

This week I’m guessing you have a little more to do than write Sunday’s sermon: counseling, meetings, annual report, parochial reports, and visits to make. And that’s before the unexpected hospital visit makes its way on your calendar.

But it can be done.

  1. Set aside one day this week. Or one half a day. Or two hours. Set your intention to make this important.
  2. Find a space where you won’t be interrupted. Create the conditions to do your best work. 
  3. Look three weeks out and work backwards to this week. (I know it seems counter-intuitive, but it works.) Start with the most difficult thing: a sermon that has no urgency… it’s three weeks away!

Eventually this gets easier. Once you get three in the hopper, you’re only adding one more each week and moving the other two up.

And if life happens and you get out of the rhythm, you can press restart at any time using the formula above.

Now get in that bullpen. Coach is counting on you.