Preaching Calendars

How many of you who are preachers use preaching calendars?  Preaching calendars are nothing more than a document that helps you outline your message presentation for the time period of a year.  Since 2003, I’ve used preaching calendars to greatly reduce my stress and time wasted on planning messages.  It takes a little time to set up the calendar but once you do, you will wonder how you got along without it.  A great audio resource for jump starting your creative thinking in this area is from the group “Church Leader Insights”:

This audio presentation (available in MP3 or standard CD) is about an hour long and gives you the impetus to get going with putting together a preaching calendar.  Along with this resource, you can also get some additional ideas from Church Leader Insights’ free podcast service.  For the month of November, this group is offering a podcast designed to go along with the audio file above to give you more reasons and ideas for doing this.  The podcast is about thirty minutes long and it’s free just by downloading it here.

I also recommend a book by Stephen Rummage called “Planning Your Preaching” to give you a great background on this topic.  The book is where I first heard about preaching calendars so I decided to give it a try in 2003.  I will say at first it was rather difficult to consider given the fact I had never really thought about planning out an entire year of preaching.  Once underway though, the process took a few hours in a coffee shop to set up the skeleton of what would later become my first preaching calendar.  These days, I do everything on line and store the file on Google documents so my worship leader can access the calendar for his planning and also leave feedback if he wishes.

I would like to collect others’ preaching calendars to see what we’re all doing.  If you’d like to send me a copy of your preaching calendar (if you use one), do so by sending it to “scottc@minister.com”.  I’ll send you my latest copy in return.  I’d just like to see if there’s better ideas than what I’m using to prepare this.

If you’re not using a calendar at present, now would be a great time to consider giving it a try for 2007.  The resources above are all reasonable and well worth the investment.