Customer Reviews

Planning Your Preaching: A Step-by-Step Guide for Developing a One-Year Preaching Calendar

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The book is a solid addition to the new or veteran pastor's library. Rummage goes through the various types of sermons and their applications, along with some nuts and bolts of how to incorporate special days, holidays and the ordinances/sacraments into your preaching calendar. He even includes some very good skeletal outlines and suggested passages of scripture for occasions. Rummage gives a lot of attention to the expository message, and how it can be incorporated into the various facets of preaching. He gives a very good overview-review of the exegetical process as well.

It's an easy and quick read, and a book to refer to over years. Most everyone who has ever preached with any regularity knows the pressure of Sunday morning looming large. Rummage makes the case that a good portion of the battle is deciding what to preach, and if you give some careful attention to your master calendar up-front, sermon preparation can be joyful work rather than a constant attempt to beat deadlines.

This book is so practical and so helpful that it is destined to be a godsend for busy pastors. Stephen Rummage is a professor of preaching as well as a practitioner of preaching, and he writes about how pastors can stop stressing over what to preach and plan their sermon schedules a year in advance. He recommends taking a week long retreat and bringing along your personal and business calendars as well as some basic Bible tools (a topical Bible, a Concordance, a Bible Dictionary, a one volume commentary, etc).

He suggests a balanced preaching planner that takes into account holidays and special days in the life of the church. He strongly encourages expository preaching as a way of feeding the people of God the whole counsel of God. The pastor should plan to preach a doctrinal series, a series through a Bible book, and a series that ministers to the problems people are wrestling with. He also suggests annual sermons explaining baptism and the Lord's Supper.

He also gives suggestions for which scriptures to preach from on certain holidays as well as series ideas. I liked his pastoral series "Peace in the Valley" where he has sermons with titles like Peace in the Valley of Despair, Peace in the Valley of Grief, etc.

I give this well written primer for pastors my highest recommendation.

Rev. Marc Axelrod

I'm a little late to the party on reviewing this book, but hopefully what I have to say can add to the already excellent reviews gathered here.

A little background information so you'll know where I'm coming from: I'm 27 years old and I'm the lead pastor of a new church plant in Springfield, Missouri (Milestone Church). Though I have an extensive preaching background, this last year was the first time I've had to preach week in and week out for 12 consecutive months (a couple of weeks off notwithstanding). Here's what I learned: it's difficult and it's hard work, even for those of us who have been gifted for it and called to it.

I've read a shelf full of preaching, exegetical, and homiletical books in the last 10 years. Though I have a solid understanding of these underlying principles, that knowledge alone didn't fortify my weakest area: organization. I am dreadfully inept at organizing, planning, and managing my time effectively.

Enter Stephen Nelson Rummage's book, "Planning Your Preaching." I purchased the book last week hoping it would give me a better game plan for sermon preparation than the one I had cobbled together over the past year, and it did not disappoint.

Rummage's chapters on determining what you need to preach on and the mechanics of planning are worth the price of admission alone. Chapter 2 presents helpful guidances and a worksheet for those who are wrestling with what to cover over the course of the next year in their preaching and can be tailored for any congregational size, makeup, or spiritual maturity level. Chapter 3 gets down to the actual nuts and bolts of planning out the preaching calendar once your strategy has been outlined: taking a retreat to plan, what to bring along with you in order to plan most effectively, reviewing your preaching from previous years, determining this year's series, creating your calendar, and leaving room to review and modify occasionally throughout the course of the year. His detailed analysis of this process is invaluable and something I plan on revisiting annually.

Another indispensable piece of wisdom in "Planning Your Preaching" comes in the final chapter in the form of Rummage's recommended weekly schedule for sermon preparation. It's likely that most who read this book won't use his schedule precisely; Rummage doesn't necessarily intend for you to and it can easily be modified to fit your individual time tables and office schedules. What is truly helpful about the schedule are the principles that undergird it.

That being said, the book isn't perfect. Rummage isn't the most engaging writer and you may find his illustrations and examples to be a bit hackneyed and even irrelevant at times. Also, Rummage spends a fair amount of space defending the one-year preaching calendar, a questionable task to take on given the likely readership of his book. Finally, for anyone who has read their fair share of preaching books, much of "Planning Your Preaching" will be recapitulation of what you've already read and digested from other authors (Chapell, Robinson, Eswine, etc.) who give much more in-depth and penetrating looks at the topic than space will allow Rummage to do here.

If, however, you're looking for a solid book on the organizational side of preaching, there's much to be gleaned from this "Planning Your Preaching." Highly recommended.

I did my M.Div. at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in historic Wake Forest, NC. While there I took preaching classes (homiletics) from Dr. Stephen Rummage, who is now the preaching pastor at Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Rummage taught us much about the benefits to expository preaching, to ministry, and to life. He was one of the most gracious men I have ever met, you know, the kind that would never say a negative or derogatory comment. I remember one class, right after a chapel when I think the visiting speaker actually read a couple of verses from the Bible to which he then gave us "7 Things. . . " a collection of his personal opinions. One seminarian asked, "Dr. Rummage, was that an expository sermon?" To which, he replied, "Well brother . . . (pregnant pause) it was biblical! . . . but that just wasn't an expository sermon." Besides pouring a dash of his rhetorical skill into our eager minds, Dr. Rummage left us with one great resource before he left the Seminary for the pulpit (his true calling), that is Planning Your Preaching: a step-by-step guide for developing a one-year preaching calendar.


This week/weekend I have been working on putting together a preaching calendar for the remainder of this year. While what I preach from week to week is definitely not set in stone-and the Spirit usually has a way of redirecting my path-it is definitely a stress reliever to have a plan. A plan that is flexible enough to allow for freedom, but organized enough to give meaning, purpose and help. Before I even met Dr. Rummage I was already a convert to the expository method. My problem in expository preaching, however, is that without putting together a plan, I can't see the forest (big picture) for the trees (the details). That's where this book comes in. It gives the unorganized a little organization. It also gives direction to different Scriptural texts that are appropriate for different holidays and special emphases.

Though it has been a while since I've seen him in person, Dr. Rummage's contribution in Planning Your Preaching is one that I've read, re-read, lent out, and given away. If you're a preacher, or you know one, you should buy this book.

This book is a wonderful way to learn or re-examine your preaching calendar. There are a lot of helpful tips and several plans to help you get started.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book and picked up a ton of pointers and many others helps. This is not the first book that I have read on this topic, but I can say that it is the best one that I have read thus far. Pick it up and enjoy a breath of fresh air as you learn to plan your preaching.

Rummage starts by doing a pretty good job of making the case that sermons should be planned for well in advance. It's something that I have always wanted to try, so it was not a hard sale for me.

Where he really shines is in laying out how the annual plan should be laid out. The directions are concise and logical. His suggestions for topics that should be covered annually is also well founded.

He does give some ideas for various things to cover on an annual basis that involves some level of doctrinal sensitivity. While he freely admits his background and does his best to cover things in a sensitive manner for the benefit of people who may not believe as he does, from time to time his own doctrinal positions come to the forefront.

He is a big advocate of expository preaching and so spends a good amount of time advocating that position. As it happens, I also like expository preaching, even if I tend to get bogged down doing a lot of topical work. But, if you feel strongly that topical preaching is on the same plane or even superior to expository preaching then this book may not be for you.

All in all, I think that this is a good resource and one that I'm happy to finally have in my (Kindle) library.

Rummage has done an outstanding job writing about a topic few preachers prepare for or even give a lot of thought to. Until you're in the day to day work of being a pastor, you can't appreciate the practicality this volume affords. In this book, Rummage lays out a plan that can be adapted to any situation and gives hands on "real world" advice on how to use that plan once you've done it. He takes the time to cover areas that all pastors should cover including expository, doctrinal, and pastoral sermons along with sermons for special days of the year. He even gives a great historical background of the liturgical, lectionary style of using the scriptures without having to endorse it but instead, advocates its ideals as perhaps a way of being creative in your own planning. All in all, it's a book I would say deserves to be in any pastor's library. It's affordability would make it a great gift for someone you know who's about to enter the pastorate also. I'm already beginning to enjoy the benefits of many of this book's ideas. Thanks Stephen!