ChurchHacks.com

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.

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This article is the fourth part of the series Extending Your Sermons Beyond Sunday. Be sure to read the first, second, and third articles, if you haven’t already.

This series is designed to give you ideas on how to help your listeners remember your sermon after they walk out the church doors. We’ve discussed having them leave with an outline, an object, or an action in part one. Part two was about using technology and providing your sermons online, on CDs, and through podcasting. Tweaking your message was the topic of part three. This article will give you ideas on how to expand your church’s ministry to further your Sunday morning teachings.

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This article is the third part of the series Extending Your Sermons Beyond Sunday. Be sure to read the first and second articles, if you haven’t already.

As a reminder, the point of this four-part series is to give you some tips on what to do to help those in your congregation keep the words you speak on Sunday morning on their minds throughout the week. You invest many hours in preparation for your sermon on Sunday morning and you want to have some assurance they won’t forget it as soon as they sit down to Sunday dinner. The first article dealt with ways you can send them home with something. The second article introduced ways you can use technology to increase the shelf life of your message. This article will address the sermon itself and how you can structure and formulate your message to help it stick. Without any further blah blah blah and yada yada yada, I’ll get right into it.

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This article is the second part of the series Extending Your Sermons Beyond Sunday. Be sure to read the first article, if you haven’t already.

Nine seasons of Seinfeld sadly came to a close as Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine sat in a cold, lifeless prison cell as a result of their selfish ways and thoughtless inaction. A small tear ran down my cheek when I watched the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy knowing that this was the end. The telling of such a great tale had been told only to live within my memory (oh, and the books that I tried to read and gave up on. But, whatever.). Those evenings in May of ‘99 and December of ‘03 represent the void that is present in my soul every Sunday morning after hearing good, Biblical preaching, a moment that lasts for about thirty to forty minutes and then ceases to exist outside of our memory.

But soft! The proper placement of ones and zeros on a computer or an optical disc or the reconfiguration of a piece of magnetized tape can capture the essence of Seinfeld, Middle Earth, and a 30 minute message allowing them to exist in my collection forever and ever.

Technological advancements in the last few decades and especially the last few years have changed the way we can capture, store, and distribute media. Take technology by the reins and allow the people in your congregation to relive those moments at their leisure… not a season of Seinfeld, I mean, but your series on Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 6 or your message on Psalm 23. Here are some ways you can use technology to extend the shelf life of your sermons.

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Scenario: you’re at Bob Evans having breakfast with your head deacon/elder and you ask him a question about the great sermon you delivered just two days ago. Beads of sweat appear on his brow and his face becomes flush. It’s apparent that he can’t remember a word you said or if you spoke from the Old Testament, New Testament, or the newspaper. The cinnamon pancakes taste different smothered in awkward tension that now exists between you and the soon-to-be-ousted elder. Ok, maybe it’s not that bad but the reality is that an individual only remembers a small percentage of information he hears and it’s probable that the three points and poem you preached on Sunday exists in his memory between his childhood friend’s phone number and the color of the pizza delivery guy’s shirt from last Friday.

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