But, I want to make clear, when you are writing that sermon on a Monday morning, you are actually completing the third step in your sermon writing process.
Here are the first two steps that make the third possible:
First Step in Sermon Writing
The first step is crafting your sermon series. If you signed up for my newsletter, you received an e-book I wrote called 8 Steps To Writing A Captivating Sermon Series. In that, I talked about how to create and capture sermon series ideas that flow out of your devotional study. That’s the first step.
Second Step in Sermon Writing
The second step is deciding what passage you are going to preach. From that passage, you must answer one simple question, “What is this sermon about?”
The reason most senior pastors take an entire week to write their sermon is they are dragging out the process of trying to (a) find the right passage to preach and (b) answering the question, “What is this sermon about?”
When you go into your Monday morning sermon writing session, you want to have checked off both of those steps the week before. Otherwise, there’s no possible way you’re going to find a passage, figure out what it is about and THEN write a sermon, all in five hours.
On Monday you’ll want to open a file in Microsoft Word that already has the document prepped. For me, that means the passage is already copied from Bible Gateway, I have jotted down some different ideas about how to introduce the sermon, as well as some illustrations I know I’ll want to use.
Additional Tips for Maximizing Sermon Writing
Now there are two other practices you’re going to want to implement as soon as possible.
The first is setting up an Evernote account to collect sermon illustration ideas. If you don’t collect “sermon fodder” in Evernote, you’ll end up telling personal stories for illustrations, and as much as you think this works, it doesn’t. It gets old, and boring. No matter how much we think people like laughing at our humorous, self-effacing stories, they don’t.
The second is becoming an active reader. You and I can listen to a senior pastor preach three times or less and note either the presence or absence of a rich reading life, can’t we? Let’s commit to creating quality, deep content going forward. This is why I suggest doing all your reading on a Kindle. That way you can highlight quotes, go to your Kindle Highlights page when you’re done, click your Evernote Web clipper extension on Google Chrome, and save your Kindle highlights into Evernote for future use.
4. Pick Your Writing Path
There are two broad ways people approach writing, so it should come as no surprise that there are two ways senior pastors approach the sermon-writing task.
“Write First, Edit Later”
The first way people write is in one mad dash—beginning to end. This is the way Bill Hybels says he writes his messages. I challenge you to find any pre-determined “outline” in any of the messages Hybels has written. That’s because he doesn’t know what he’s going to write until he starts writing, and they usually end up being brilliant.
“Edit as You Write”
The second way people write is by adding one building block at a time. That’s my writing style. I like to begin by picking a passage, identifying the main idea, creating an outline and then filling in the blanks with rich material. When Andy Stanley articulated his Me, We, God, You and We sermon structure, he tipped his hand that he’s an outline first kind of preacher.