Pastoral Planning for Word-Ministry

Plans sometimes change, but thoughtful intentionality is key.

“If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.”

I remember hearing it as a teenager, and I’ve repeated the warning to others as an adult. This mantra reinforced the need to plan for the upcoming football game against another difficult team. It motivated planning an exercise regiment that would lead to physical progress over time. And it compelled the discipline of setting aside time to complete each task (for school or work) as part of an overall goal of achieving success.

Another oft-repeated proverb has to do with accomplishing a larger project by finishing smaller tasks one-at-a-time.

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Pastors can think of the overall word-ministry of their church as an elephant-sized project that will have a massive impact on those who participate in it. But the practical implementation of the whole effort occurs by preaching individual sermons and teaching individual lessons. And in order for these individual word-ministry efforts to have the greatest impact, they ought to fit together as harmonious and intentional parts of whole.

Benefits of a plan

There are numerous benefits to planning and tracking the word-ministry of a local church. Here are just a handful:

• You’re not scrambling for a text or topic late into the week.

• You’re able to ensure that your preaching or teaching includes a variety of biblical genres and topics.

• You can inform your congregation or group about what Scripture text they can read ahead of time in order to be good listeners.

• You can get a better grasp of your whole preaching series and better understand how each sermon should contribute to it.

• You’re able to organize other aspects of church life according to the preaching and teaching content (such as songs that fit the sermon, small group studies that compliment the preaching, and/or book recommendations that might address further curiosities among your hearers).

• You’re able to evaluate the variety and substance of the previous months or years, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and make new plans to meet perceived needs.

One pastor friend of mine does his sermon planning with a pencil and a legal pad. He arranges a grid with various headings (date, series, title, Scripture text, preacher, and themes), and then he proceeds to fill in all the blanks underneath for a few months at a time. This method may work well for tactile folks and those who are less interested in digital tools.

The method is less important than the discipline of planning itself.

At present, I have three places where I work with the preaching and teaching schedule of FBC Diana.

• An excel/numbers spreadsheet

• A Logos sermon planning tool

• Our church service planning software (Planning Center)

These three tools represent three phases of my word-ministry planning.

Sketching a plan

The spreadsheets here are two I’ve made using the numbers app for Mac. Microsoft excel can do the same thing.

This first one is the next quarter of our Sunday morning preaching schedule.

This second one is the next quarter of our Sunday evening preaching schedule.

These spreadsheets are the place I begin to sketch out the initial planning of the main word-ministry of our church. The considerations are many. What book of the Bible are we preaching next? What are the passage sections for each sermon through the book? What topics should we make sure to cover this year? Is there a topical series that we want to insert somewhere? What does my family schedule look like? How should the holiday or community or church events affect the plan?

The details on these spreadsheets are subject to change, and they often do move around a bit, but the tool makes it easy to copy and past content as needed.

Solidifying a plan

The radial calendar here is from my Logos software, which includes a sermon planning tool.

About once a quarter, I upload the content from my spreadsheets to the Logos sermon planning tool. If you have Logos, then you may find this tool to be a great help in organizing both your planning and your actual sermon notes. But this step in the process is not necessary. Your spreadsheet (or legal pad) can serve as your single planning platform.

Whatever tool you use, the point here is that you ought to make a less changeable plan as the date of execution gets closer. Many of the benefits of planning depend on the reliability of the plan itself. If it’s always changeable (even on the day of execution), then it’s not really a plan.

Executing a plan

As I mentioned above, we use Planning Center (specifically the “services” app) to plan the details of each church service. There are other ways of doing it, but we find Planning Center to be both user friendly and inexpensive (we are a small church, and they set the fee scale according to size and usage).

Here is an example of what a typical Sunday morning service looks like for us.

This tool not only allows us to plan the services each week, it also enables us to plan other aspects of the service (besides the preaching) as well. Much like we plan the preaching schedule, we also plan songs and Scripture readings about four months at a time. This practice allows us to design the entire church service according to an overall plan of ministry. Once again, the tool or method is less important than the intentionality.

Evaluating your plan

It is good leadership practice to evaluate how well your plans are working. For our church, the pastors meet once or twice a month for the purpose of discussing pastoral care, administrative tasks, and word-ministry. As part of each of these meetings, we review the most recent church service, and we practice giving and receiving godly compliments as well as giving and receiving godly criticism. And no feature of the service is off-limits; we want to critique anything that deserves criticism in order to learn and improve.

Here are examples of the sorts of questions we ask:

• Review Opening and closing

  • Was it informative and appropriate? Did the service leader provide a good transition from announcements to the actual service?

• Review Prayers

  • Were the prayers loud, clear, on topic, appropriate length, and theologically accurate?

• Review Songs and singing

  • Were the songs congregational, theologically accurate, understandable, and broadly categorized? Was the language of the song lyrics accessible?

• Review Preaching

  • Was the preacher faithful to the text, logical, and understandable? Was his material presented well? Was it accessible for unbelievers, applied broadly, and Jesus-glorifying?

• Review Lord’s Supper administering

  • Was the ordinance explained well, appropriately fenced, and pastorally led?

• Review Congregational fellowship and guest engagement (before and after)

  • Did members stay? Did they initiate conversations with guests? Was anyone acting strange or isolated?

Conclusion

If you’re like me (a small church pastor with no paid staff), then finding the time to sketch, solidify, execute, and evaluate a plan for the entire word-ministry of a church can be tough. But the ministry of the word and prayer are our highest biblical priorities (Acts 6:1-6). And planning for a thoughtful and intentional word-ministry is surely a critical aspect of that responsibility. Thus, we would do well to devote some of our pastoral time to planning.

May the Lord bless our efforts. May He grant us joy in doing good. And may He produce much good fruit from our investments.