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Right now many of you are working on closing out the year as 2006 comes to an end. You’re throwing your Harvest Party (Holy Ghost Weiner Roast), gathering testimonies for the Thanksgiving service, taking up your yearly missionary offering, and preparing the hotest Christmas cantata from the late John W. Peterson to draw people in for Christmas. After it’s all said and done you’ll probably retreat to your office, sit back in your chair, and let out a big sigh of relief. News flash: 2007 is coming (unless the good Lord returns, that is). If you fail to plan, you plan to fail and if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time and all those clichés that communicate the truth that nothing will get accomplished if you don’t set goals.

Take some time over the next month, sit down with your leadership, and lay out a plan for what ideas you want to communicate in your worship services over the fifty-two weekends in 2007. Set aside the other plans you have to make, like your church softball league, the Easter program, and your all-church picnic, and think of Bible passages you want to teach from and the topics you want to cover. Here are some ideas to get you started in planning out the 52 sermons for 2007.

1. Is there a felt need in your congregation that needs to be addressed?
   Think about some of the issues the members of your church are dealing with. If there are a couple areas that are overwhelming your people and are the topic of discussion in many of your counseling sessions, consider tactfully preaching on the subject. If you do this too much, you’ll constantly be reacting to the congregation and possibly be seen as using the pulpit as a soapbox.
2. Are there any passages of Scripture or areas of the Bible you haven’t preached on in the last few years?
   Pastors are commissioned to preach the whole counsel of God. If you’ve camped in the Epistles, Psalms, Gospels, or the New Testament lately, consider pitching your tent somewhere else for a while.
3. Are there any topics you haven’t preached on in the last few years?
   Is your congregation vitamin eschatology deficient? Give them a good dose of some end times teaching. Are they a little low on forgiveness? Introduce some teaching on that in their diet.
4. Is there a passage or topic you’re passionate about or interested in studying more?
   Do you have a fever and the only prescription is more post-exilic minor prophets? Preach a series on Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Your enthusiasm will be evident when you preach and it will spill over onto the congregation. Perhaps you realize you’re a little rusty on the topic of spiritual gifts. Explore them with your congregation over a period of several weeks.

Message Planning Sheet

I’ve put together a sheet that will help you plan for the next year. The Message Planning Sheet is a downloadable worksheet that lists each week of the year, important holidays, and spaces for you to plan out the series you will preach through and the messages within them. I have provided some sheets as examples of how you can divide up the year in blocks of time between and including the holidays.

Download and print the planning sheet and visualize the year in blocks of time. Insert other holidays or your own church celebrations in the Holidays/Events column to help you visualize other events that are important to your church. Determine roughly how many weeks/messages it will take to preach through each of your series ideas. Start plugging in the passages and topics you’ve decided to preach on into the column marked “Series” and draw solid lines to separate each series. Print up additional sheets, if necessary, and play around with different configurations. There are 52 weeks and many different options and configurations so be creative. Encorporate some of the holiday weekends within a series or plan a series around a certain holiday or culminating with the celebration of that holiday, i.e. Christmas or Easter.

Once the year is filled up with the series you want to preach, begin writing down the focus for each week within each series. Don’t feel obligated to fill in details on all 52 messages because you’ll have plenty of time throughout the year to finalize those details. The most important thing at this point is that you have a basic plan on the ideas and truths you want to communicate throughout the next year.

The message planning sheet contains eight pages and the first page is your worksheet to print and write on. Pages 2-7 are samples of how the year can be divided up and page 8 is a blank template for you to modify in Microsoft Word. There is also a PDF version available for download.

What passages are you going to teach and what topics are you going to investigate with your congregation? Share your ideas in the comments.

2007 Message Planning Sheet

Tags: Preaching, Pastor, Resources