When the preaching team consisted mostly of me, myself and I, this is something I never really did. Then as the team grew and our desire to find ways to involve the congregation in the what and why of our teaching programme, someone showed me a series outline from their former church in South Africa. I unashamedly copied their good idea.

The series outline serves the same purpose both for the congregation as a whole and others who are preaching in the series, who do not work for the church. The aim is to explain the why of the series – why this topic at this time. Sometimes those reasons are calendar driven because we are approaching Easter or Christmas for example. Other times the reasons are pastoral & contextual in nature – a focus on sexuality, relationships, apologetics. And other times it is simply because it is time to preach this book of the Bible to discover what God might say to us through this (often neglected) part of His word.

I typically add the commentaries that I have access to (digital or print) so people can see my sources and know what they can borrow from me if they need to. Then I often add links to The Bible Project videos. I do this because, while not always agreeing with everything, I think they give excellent summaries of the structure of books or insights into key terms so that in less than ten minutes someone has got a pretty good handle on the topic in question.

There’s a lot more that could be done, but for me a simple introduction into explaining the why of a series, the how of a series (showing the breakdown with reasoning) and then some simple ways people can begin to read and prepare or learn more is an exercise that I’ve found helpful to do whether or not anyone else has found it helpful to use!

Here’s an example of our current series: