One of the biggest time drains in bi-vocational sermon prep is not the studying. It is the deciding. Walking into Monday without a plan means you spend the first hour just figuring out what to preach. That hour is one you cannot afford to lose.
Planning your preaching calendar 2 to 3 months in advance is one of the highest-leverage habits a bi-vocational pastor can build. It costs you two hours once a quarter and saves you time every single week.
Why Planning Ahead Works
Ray Gilder, Bivocational Ministries Specialist at the Tennessee Baptist Convention and a bi-vocational pastor himself, puts it plainly: a sermon needs time to cook. The longer you wait to decide what you are preaching, the more pressure builds, and the less time the text has to work on you before Sunday. (Source: Lifeway)
When you plan ahead, you also start accumulating material naturally. You read something on Tuesday that connects to a passage you are preaching in six weeks. You hear a story that illustrates a point you have not written yet. These things only happen when you know where you are going.
The Case for Preaching Through Books of the Bible
Topical series require high creative energy. You have to pick the topic, find the texts, build the structure, and come up with a fresh angle every week. When you are bi-vocational, that creative tax is one you cannot afford to pay repeatedly.
Preaching through books of the Bible solves this. The text gives you the structure. The passage tells you what comes next. You still need to study, but you are not reinventing the wheel every seven days.
9Marks has written extensively on the benefits of expository, book-by-book preaching for congregational health. When a church hears the whole counsel of Scripture over time, it develops theological depth that topical preaching alone rarely produces. (Source: 9Marks)
For bi-vocational pastors, the practical benefits are just as significant. Pick a shorter book like Philippians, Colossians, or 1 John. Break it into 8 to 12 sections. Map those sections onto your calendar. You now have your series planned for the next two to three months, and all you have to do each week is dig into the next passage.
How to Build Your 90-Day Preaching Calendar
Set aside two hours at the start of each quarter. You do not need a full outline for each sermon. You just need enough of a framework that when Monday comes, you know exactly where you are going.
For each week, write down:
- The passage or text
- A working title or main theme
- One sentence describing what you want the congregation to leave with
That is it. The rest gets filled in during the week. The calendar is not a straitjacket. It is a starting point that saves you from starting from nothing every Monday morning.
Account for special Sundays in advance. Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, and any significant dates in your church’s life. Build those into the calendar so they do not sneak up on you.
Batching Your Research
Once you have your series mapped out, do your background research in one session rather than starting fresh each week. Read the introduction to the book in a good commentary. Understand the historical context, the author’s purpose, and the major themes. You only have to do this once per series, and it makes every individual sermon easier to prepare.
SermonForge’s research on pastor time management found that batching research across a series can cut weekly prep time significantly because you stop re-reading the same background material four times. (Source: SermonForge)
Get the Free Toolkit
The Bi-Vocational Pastor Sermon Prep Toolkit includes a 90-day preaching calendar template you can fill in and print, along with the other tools covered in this series. It is free.