If you’re a pastor, one of the most important things you can do in your congregation is to be intentional about your preaching. You’ll never have more time to influence your people than when you stand before them every week at the pulpit. Part of this, is learning to plan and develop a preaching calendar. Imagine having sermons planned out for months (or a whole year) at a time. Imagine how much less stress you’d have and the blessing that your church leaders would receive by being able to intentionally plan the service around the series that’s coming up.

A few months ago I wrote an article for Ministry Magazine called “Planning a Preaching Calendar for a Multi-Church District.” In that article I share the entire process I went through to develop a preaching calendar. If you have one, or many churches, you can use the same process to help you. Out of everything that you could do as a pastor, I believe that learning to plan a preaching calendar is in the top three in terms of importance.

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Here’s a video review of the GoGoStand. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. Below are my thoughts:

What do you think? What do you use for a stand?

Up until about 3 months ago, I pastored in a relatively small church. If you pastor in a small church, you know well that the pastor does a little bit of everything. You’re the web guy. The preacher. At times you’re the janitor. If someone gets sick, you’re the one that is expected to go for the visit. If someone needs a Bible study, the church members look to you. In one way or another you oversee lots of little things.

I used to think that being part of a larger church would require about the same amount of energy and time, and certainly not more. Now that I’m part of a larger church, I’m seeing that I was wrong. Before I share more, let me first delineate some things that I’m no longer doing:

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Back in the day I put out this post. It was on the subject of how to discover songs that are being sung in churches all over the world. The idea is that you could search #sundaysetlist or even #worshipset in the twitter search and you could find lists of songs that were sung in a particular worship set.

Well, after seeing the tweet below from Allan Martin, I decided that we should start a new hashtag: #sabbathsetlist

Sometimes Seventh-day Adventist churches have unique needs and even unique songs that are sung in their churches, and there’s lots of pastors and worship pastors who could use some fresh ideas for what to sing. So…from my perch at the Pioneer Memorial Church, I’m going to begin doing this. Allan Martin from the Arlington Seventh-day Adventist church already said he’s in. We’d love it if you’d jump in as well.

When you send the tweet, we’d love to see three things:

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I’m beginning to appreciate the value of theology a little more.

In the past, I’ve generally not been good friends with theology. I’ve always felt like it was someone else’s work. I could do it, but I preferred to hang out in the realm of practics. I even wrote a a blog post two years ago in which I boldly pronounced that “I’m not a theologian, or a philosopher. I’m a mechanic.” In saying that, I was trying to communicate that I like to deal with “practical” stuff–preaching, discipleship, implementing certain systems in the church, and would rather not deal with the stuff of theology. I think I’m changing, though.

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It’s easy to distort mission work as simply being faithful to a command–I do because He told me so. I think this is what saps so much spiritual vitality from what we do. This is what devolves an honest Christian into a legalist. Lesslie Newbigin, in his book The Gospel In A Pluralist Society, shares a refreshing–and I think a true take–on what biblical mission work is about:

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I don’t know if you saw my tweet the other day, but I lost my Kindle.

I seriously felt a little depressed. It’s interesting how you can get attached to certain devices.