I enjoy preaching and most of the time I enjoy preparing sermons. I have, however, always found preparing a preaching schedule a stressful activity.

I remember coming home from living in Africa for a while and finding my first few visits to a supermarket overwhelming. I couldn’t handle being told to buy ketchup, I needed to be told precisely which ketchup to buy and exactly how many loaves of bread to buy because I would just become stuck in an aisle trying to work out what to choose. The paradox of choice paralysed me not freed me.

I feel something similar happening when trying to work out what we should preach on next at Grace Church. There are SO many possibilities. There are always dozens of equally valid and helpful themes that would be worth preaching on. There are 66 books in the Bible and they’re all the Word of God, so which one should we do next? And I don’t think I’ve ever had helpful instruction in how to work through the larger books so they are a) not avoided and b) engaging for the church from start to finish. I’m no Martyn Lloyd-Jones so 366 sermons on Romans is unlikely the way forward for us!

Asking others for their thoughts was simultaneously helpful and unhelpful. No two people in the church thought the same thing. So few sermons, so many possible answers.

Last year I set myself the task of trying to improve this situation and first created a preaching framework – this isn’t a series planning but more the principles of the preaching diet for the church and how it works over time.

Our reality

The reality for us as an international Church is that we’ll probably have a 75% new church every 3-5 years or so due to turnover of people. As a result we’ll inevitably need to regularly return to certain themes and topics (although perhaps not from the same source material or angle). However we want to demonstrate the value of faithfully preaching the Bible and showing the presence of Christ in the Old as well as the New Testament. Faithful preaching of the Bible is an essential hallmark for Grace both in Stockholm & the wider Swedish context but also as we seek to plant other churches on solid foundations.

Books or themes?

We’ll strive for a combination of preaching through books of the Bible, with some themed series. We trust the God of the Bible to speak to us through His Word, wherever and whenever we dive into it. We, of course, have the freedom to return to a previously preached passage or book but we can simply keep working our way around the Bible, filling in what we haven’t yet explored and combining it with more familiar territory.

Breaking down the year

We only have a single service on a Sunday so 52 Sundays equals 52 sermons. At an average of 40 minutes per sermon that means we have just under 35 hours preaching time for the whole year! That’s not much for a year.

There are several other dynamics to factor in. 8 weeks of summer absences, several weeks for Christmas & Easter and we’re looking at 38 Sundays where we can count on more than half the church being present.

The General Framework

10 weeks: Old Testament (not including Psalms)
10 weeks: New Testament (not including Gospels)
10 weeks: Jesus
8 weeks: Summer of Psalms
8 weeks: Themed series (probably 2 x 4)
3 weeks: Easter
3 weeks: Advent & Christmas

It’s important to say that it doesn’t have to be 10 weeks in a row of any one book but broadly speaking this would allow us to dive into the whole library of Scripture in any given year. 

Some additional comments.

• Jesus is the centre of our faith and He is the most appealing & attractive figure in world history, let’s not minimise that! Lots of room here for variety – preach through a gospel, or focus on parables, or healings, or confrontations just for starters! Of course you can preach Christ from everywhere, I’ve read Keller and Clowney, but I am convinced that time in the Gospels with the person of Jesus will always be of benefit to us.
• The New Testament is obviously highly relevant to church life so it feels appropriate to be learning regularly from the epistles (having fairly recently done Acts we won’t return there as a whole book for a while).
• When it comes to the OT we’ll probably rotate Pentateuch, history, wisdom & prophetic books to allow for further variety in material.
• Without wanting to diminish the value of the Psalms by placing them in the summer, they do work as stand alone sermons and make it easy to have visiting speakers or give to prospective speakers. By doing 8 a year it will only take us 18 years or so to cover them all!! For 2024 I’ve simply started at Psalm 1 and then the next Psalm from the next book (Psalms is divided into 5 books) and then rotate through. So for example 2024 would be Psalms 1, 42, 73 (72 having already been preached on), 90, 108, and then back to 2, 43, 74 and so on…
• Although 2 x four week series in a year might not seem very much they can work effectively for casting vision or addressing key issues but as I’ve suggested there’s nothing particularly to stop some of our book based preaching to also work to a theme (assuming that theme is present in the text).

None of these numbers need to be exact each year. One book (or section of a book) might well fit in say 8 weeks or less and we’re able to move or extend a series. We’re allowed to be flexible within the constraints that we have.

So there you have it, that’s the framework and the ingredients to a balanced diet of preaching. Some structure, some flexibility, room to move as the Lord leads, yet trusting in what He has given us will be exactly what we need.