This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, March 19, 2024
One of the most important things I do every week is prepare the Sunday morning sermon for Wayne Street. Every minister has a process that she or he goes through in order to write a sermon. There is no right or wrong way and what I would like to do is walk you through mine. This is how I go from a blank page to a sermon every 7 days.
A sermon always begins with a passage of scripture. Usually around Thanksgiving, I start working on the next year’s series and I publish them a year at a time. On my excel spreadsheet, I have the date, passage, and other notes about every Sunday of the year. I put that out so that people who are working with the service can have the scripture and they are not waiting on me every week to come up with something. It is a good discipline for me to make sure that every passage has a large amount of prayer and intention on why it landed on the Sunday it did.
Also, having the scripture picked out ahead of time means that I can hit the ground running on either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning. I print off the page of the scripture and have it on my desk all week. I scratch notes on it, make observations and study it to find what lesson seems most important. I write all of that in pencil on the page. Why in pencil? I like mechanical pencils. I know, super theological reason. However, for some reason, I cannot take sermon notes with a pen. I physically cannot do it and I have no explanation as to why.
On a week where everything goes according to plan, I am ready to start writing on Thursday. If I have had the time to do the notes and I have uninterrupted time, it takes me between 45 and 70 minutes to write the sermon start to finish. I type the sermon on a legal size page, 11 font, .9-inch margins at the top and .8 margins on the side. I type out 2 full pages (not counting the scripture page) and between 3-4 inches down on page 3. That is the length of a sermon that keeps me inside my Sunday morning time limit.
Once I have the first draft written, I like to let it sit for a few hours at least and then reread it to make all the editorial, grammar, spelling and punctuation corrections (which there are a ton of those). The error I make most of the time is I type and leave a word out of the sentence. So I make all of those corrections. The next thing I check is to make sure the beginning of the sermon matches with the end. There is nothing worse than getting to the end of the sermon and realizing that there is a whole section of fluff in there that was unnecessary to the point being made. Almost every time, the sermon gets shorter with the second read through. One sermon makes one point. If you try to cram in two points, people will miss both of them.
Once I get the second read through and corrections completed, then I bump the font up to 20 (I’m 49, give me a break). Then I go through and highlight the lines so that I can follow them on Sunday. I highlight every third line yellow and then I alternate every other third line green. What that means is that I will have one line highlighted in yellow, a non-highlighted line, a line highlighted in green, then a non-highlighted line, then yellow and so on through the document. The reason I mark them like this is it allows me to find my place quickly during the sermon on Sunday morning.
I know that some people do not like that I read sermons, but I read every single word. The reason for this is I do two services at Wayne Street Church. If I only did one service, I could get by with less preparation, but since I have to recreate the same sermon twice, that is nearly impossible without a manuscript. For many years, I was the pastor of three churches, so I had to do the sermon three times to three different congregations on Sunday. There was absolutely no way I could recreate a sermon three times. I also suffer from stage fright, so counting on my charisma or commanding stage presence to see me through is a joke. Having the script in front of me allows me to be in the moment, not worrying about where I am going. That helps me slow down and actually speak in English rather than mumbling and going way too fast.
On Saturday, I give the whole thing a read through to get the timing of the points as well as the inflection of the voice, because not only am I making a point, but there are some theatrics to the whole thing. I do all of this preparation because the Word of God is what Wayne Street Church exists to proclaim. Yes, we proclaim it through our actions, but we also want to literally proclaim God’s word in sermon form. The last thing I would ever want to do is be the disconnect in that sacred process.
As to how long this whole process takes, it varies depending on many factors. If I have to write funerals or other public addresses or if there is a lot going on at Wayne Street Church that eats up my attention, or even if I am just not feeling it a particular week, it can take longer. Other weeks, I take one look at the passage and immediately write the sermon as fast as my fingers can type. I really like those weeks.
Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed learning a little more about the struggle that we pastors go through to have a sermon prepared for you on Sunday mornings. I can tell you, sermon writing is hands down my favorite part of my job and I am looking forward to the day when I can focus more on writing for other projects.
For now, that 18-22 minutes of attention you give me on a Sunday morning is a privilege I never ever take for granted. Your time is valuable to you and for you to give me a piece of it so that I can pour into your life through a Sunday morning sermon is the greatest honor you could ever give me.