Do Less: Pt. 1 on Sermon Prep
This is part 1 of 3 in a series on sermon prep from Jeff Martin.
I will never forget a moment during my first year of being a lead pastor. I was sitting with my mentor when he asked, “How long do you spend in sermon prep each week?” I proudly said, “20 hours.” I thought that number was a badge of honor. I thought that it showed how seriously I took the task of rightly dividing the Word of God. I thought he would surely be impressed with my pastoral sensibilities.
He was not impressed. Instead of patting me on the back and telling me how proud he was, he said, “We have to get that down to 12-15 hours.” The first thing I remember thinking was, “How!?” The rest of this series will discuss my answer to that question. But before we get to the how, I want to consider the “why” behind his advice.
Why You Should Do Less Sermon Prep
My mentor had rightly diagnosed how I was thinking about sermon prep. In my mind, the sermon was the most important thing I did all week. Since the sermon is so important, prepping it should get the lion’s share of my time each week. Therefore, I needed to devote substantial amounts of time to being alone in the study with just my text and my commentaries. This was how I thought I would best pastor my people.
While much of my thinking was good and true, my mentor saw a glaring omission–my people. He said, “As a pastor you need to be with your people. And if you could find an extra five to eight hours in your week to be with them, I promise you, that’ll go a lot farther in your ministry than wordsmithing a sermon to be just right.” Now that I’m nine and a half years into pastoring this church, I can confidently say that this is some of the best advice I’ve received in all my ministry.
There are many reasons for why pastors, especially new and young pastors, need to spend more time with their people. Here, we want to briefly introduce four of those reasons.
Spending time with your people will help you know what to speak to them in your sermon.
Spending time with your people will help you know how to speak to them in your sermon.
Spending time with your people will help you shepherd them in a deep way.
Spending time with your people will help you shepherd them for a long time.
We’ll cover the first two reasons in another article in this series. Here, let me offer a few brief comments on the last two reasons.
Spending time with your people will help you shepherd them in a deep way.
While the Sunday sermon is the time when you shepherd the broadest swath of your congregation, it is not always the deepest. Marriages, funerals, the birth of new babies, hospital visits, these are the moments where you may only minister to one or two church members, but for those one or two members, these are some of the most important moments of their lives. Most sermons will be forgotten, but the fact that you were there with your people to celebrate in the best of times and to suffer through the worst of times will never be forgotten. If you want to care for your people in the deepest way, spend less time alone in your study prepping a sermon and more time out among your people.
Spending time with your people will help you shepherd them for a long time.
Tim Keller once said,
I don’t believe you should spend a lot of time preparing your sermon, when you’re a younger minister … You’re not going to be much better by putting in twenty hours on that sermon. The only way you’re going to be a better preacher is if you preach often. For the first 200 sermons, no matter what you do, your first 200 sermons are going to be terrible. And, if you put in fifteen or twenty hours in the sermon you probably won’t preach that many sermons because you won’t last in ministry, because your people will feel neglected. In most churches, the pastoring sets up the preaching.
People will endure mediocre preaching from a pastor they love and they know loves them. However, most people won't endure even great preaching if they don't love the pastor or feel the pastor loves them. So, if you want to shepherd your people for the long haul, dial in the amount of time you spend preparing your sermons and spend more time with your people. Love them well and they will love you. Then eventually, your preaching will become more desirable to them as a result.
