“He who fails to plan is planning to fail.”

Winston Churchill

An Approach to Annual Sermon Planning

As a Senior Pastor, I try to spend the end of each year planning the next year’s Sunday sermons.

It helps both my brain and heart to begin the next calendar year with an annual sermon plan in hand.

Sermon plans made this far in advance are, of course, tentative and always subject to change.

When global or national tragedies occur or a cultural situation confounds, it may be in the best interest of the church body to apply God’s Word to the situation at hand. Other times teachable moments or happenings in the life of the church body may demand a change of course.

Sometimes, I simply sense God leading a Sunday or series in a different direction.

With all that said, it’s also true that God’s Word is always applicable to daily life!

In fact, I could share countless stories of past times when advanced sermon planning like this provided just the right truths at just the right time—regardless of what was happening in the church, community, nation, or world.

As Protestant Reformer Martin Luther wrote, “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me. The Bible is not antique or modern. It is eternal.”

“A Spreadsheet is a friend of mine”

I currently do my annual sermon planning in Numbers on Mac—though any spreadsheet program will work just fine. I use a spreadsheet so I can see the whole year’s plan in front of me at one time.

The headers of my spreadsheet from left to right are as follows: Date, Text, Title, Theme, and Special Emphasis/Days.

Example of sermon spreadsheet column headers**

** To simplify this current blog, I haven’t included the info from the Theme or Special Emphasis columns, but for those who are curious… The Theme column gives our Worship Pastor an idea of the upcoming sermon content for worship planning purposes. In the Special Emphasis/Days column, I include all the special days of the year such as New Year’s Day, Sanctity of Life Sunday, Valentine’s Day, Palm Sunday, Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day, Graduate Recognition Sunday, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, the 4th of July, Vacation Bible School, summer camps for our kids and teens, mission trips, Veteran’s Day, as well as significant historical dates in the life of our church, dates of emphases within the Southern Baptist Convention—and so on. I feel like it helps my intentionality to keep those dates in mind as I am planning.

THis blog was published in December 2023, so what you’ll see HEREIN is the majority of a sermon plan for 2024.

1. I start the planning process by putting all the Sunday dates on the spreadsheet. From a big-picture standpoint, I approach the year in thirds (generally speaking)—January to Memorial Day; Memorial Day to Labor Day; and Labor Day to the end of the year. I try to pay attention to the natural, ebb-and-flow rhythms of the year and align the preaching plan with real-life the best I can.

2. Next, I add to the spreadsheet info on specific dates and annual holidays I want to keep in mind as I plan. I start with dates of the Easter and Christmas seasons then add the list of special days I mentioned above in the Special Emphasis/Days column. Early in the planning process, I also add the dates we’ll observe the Lord’s Supper under the special days header so I can keep those in mind, as well.

3. With all that laid out, I pause to prayerfully review the sermon passages and themes from the previous year to get them fresh in my mind. Sometimes a series from a previous year can shape a series for the following year. For example, I was once part of a sermon planning team that envisioned three years of Christmas sermon series in one planning meeting. It was a Trinitarian approach with the first year focused on God the Father, the second year focused on God the Son, and the third year—you guessed it—focused on God the Holy Spirit.

Getting the previous year fresh in mind is also helpful when preaching through a longer book like Genesis if you have chosen to preach it in several smaller series as you move along. (See the fall Genesis series below.)

4. Then I prayerfully seek the Lord’s guidance for the coming year. I often start with a blank piece of paper in front of me and simply brainstorm possibilities in list form. It is also at this phase of planning that I check the Notes on my phone for any thoughts I had during the current year for the next year that I wrote down so I wouldn’t forget. (If you don’t have a “Sermon Seed Plot” Note on your phone—or someplace else you won’t lose it—I highly recommend making one!)

As I think about the coming year, I let my mind wander through a series of questions such as: How has God been moving in and through our church over the past year? What challenges or opportunities is the church facing or may we face in the coming year? Are there areas in which the spiritual lives of our attendees need to be strengthened or encouraged? Were there any spiritual formation gaps left unaddressed the previous year that need prioritized? And so on.

4. As a general rule, I try to intentionally balance the sermon plan with passages and series from both the Old and New Testaments. I also tend to shift back and forth between expository sermon series (passage-by-passage through a Bible book or sub-section of a book) and theological/topical series (exploring how a topic is addressed throughout scripture or arranged around a theme such as Easter, Christmas, discipleship, etc).

Below is the tentative sermon plan for 2024 at First Baptist Church in Clinton, MO.

You’ll notice some dates are missing due to special set aside Sundays on the church calendar (such as our annual Celebrate Recovery Birthday Celebration, the Gospel Quartet coming during Olde Glory Days, etc), stand-alone sermons, or personal reasons in my own life such as vacation time.

If you are reading this and regularly attend FBC Clinton, I pray this info whets your appetite for where we’re headed in 2024. If you’re reading this as a fellow minister, I hope this provides a measure of iron sharpening iron as you work through your own sermon planning.

Series #1: HERE IS YOUR GOD

We’ll kick off 2024 at FBC Clinton with a three-week series through Isaiah 40.

A. W. Tozer said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

I like to start each year with passages dealing with God’s greatness, faithfulness, and kindness. Helping people refresh their view of God is a wonderful way to help people start a new year.

Series #2: WERE YOU THERE? (EASTER SERIES)

I sensed a leading from the Lord to do a longer, seven-week Easter series this year. I tend to go back and forth every other year between a longer or shorter series approaching Easter. (Same for Christmas.)

This year’s Easter series is biographical-expository in approach. Each week we’ll do an in-depth look at a different character in the Easter story.

The way my vacation dates fall for 2024, I opted to extend the Easter series a week beyond Easter Sunday rather than do one-week stand-alone message. The final doubting Thomas sermon will address concerns skeptics often have with Jesus’ resurrection and seems like a helpful follow-up to the Easter Sunday Celebration and conclusion to the series.

Series #3: FBC CLINTON DISCIPLESHIP PATHWAY SERIES

As I am writing this December of 2023, it’s worth mentioning that I only became the Senior Pastor at FBC Clinton in the first quarter of 2023.

I’ve spent a lot of this first year asking questions about our church and community and doing my best to listen.

It’s been said that the first task of leadership is to understand the current reality.

Throughout the year, I’ve been working through a list of potential initiatives I believe will help our church reach the lost and multiply disciples even more effectively than we have in the past.

Our church’s mission statement is “Loving people into a growing relationship with Jesus.”

What I think will strengthen our mission most right now is to flesh out that mission statement into a strategic, clearly defined process of moving believers toward maturity and multiplication.

I am excited about this sermon series and what it can mean for strengthening our church’s mission and plan for accomplishing it. With that said, I opted to place this series in the post-Easter time window because I’d like some time before this series with our church ministry leaders to do some vision-casting for the series itself.

Series #4: WHEN YOU PRAY SERIES

For me, summer is the hardest “third” of the year to plan. People tend not to be as consistent in attendance between Memorial Day and Labor Day because of vacations, the weather being beautiful, and so on.

I typically aim to preach more topically during the summer so that if people miss a message or two they will be able to jump right back in and not have missed a crucial aspect of a passage-by-passage study.

This summer’s series is a hybrid of sorts with me moving sequentially through the Lord’s Prayer but also covering some other issues related to prayer.

(I’m still thinking through how the Sunday service might look different the final week of the series, but the final message will be walking through a version of Dick Eastman’s prayer plan from his book The Hour That Changes the World.)

Series #5: IN THE BEGINNING (Genesis 1-2)

Once people settle into their regular fall schedules, attendance tends to be a bit more consistent. I love launching into a longer passage-by-passage expository series each fall.

This fall, the plan is to start preaching through the book of Genesis.

Since the whole book of Genesis is 50 chapters long, I intend to preach through the entire book spread out over several shorter series. This will give each new narrative section of Genesis a new series launch with a fresh feel to the branding of the series.

Some preachers probably have the skills to preach one multi-year series without it feeling like an endless grind, but I’ve found breaking longer books into smaller series feels better to me—and the congregation.

SERIES #6: 2024 CHRISTMAS SERIES

Well, alright, so I haven’t planned the Christmas series for 2024 yet.

I like to finish the current Christmas series before thinking about the next year. I typically plan the Christmas series sometime during the summer months. I don’t know why I do it that way. Perhaps, in the heat of summer, it just blesses my soul to think of cooler weather and Jesus’ incarnation.

*Empty space for our 2024 CHRISTMAS series to be filled in during the summer months*

Well, that’s how I approach using each December for annual sermon planning.

There are no doubt countless ways to accomplish the same thing, this is just what works for me. I’ve also benefitted from reading the book Planning a Year's Pulpit Work by Andrew Blackwood.

If you’re an attender of First Baptist Church Clinton, MO, I hope you’re as excited as I am for 2024. If you’re a fellow preacher and there is anything I can do to encourage you as you minister the Word, please reach out! If any of this has been helpful to read, let me know by leaving a comment below.