by Barney Wells, DMin
Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence

This past week saw an important series, the Major League Baseball World Series, completed. My team (the Cards) didn’t even make the playoffs, but at least an NL Central team won. That’s a corny segue into a blog post about the value and methods of preaching sermon series, and a good example of what not to do in a sermon introduction.

Preaching a group of related sermons in a series can be helpful to both preacher and congregation. For the preacher, the series approach has these advantages:

  • You know what you are going to preach for the next several weeks, so no mid-week (or Saturday) panic about “What am I going to preach.”
  • Some of your study is simplified. If you are preaching a series through a book, such as a New Testament epistle, you can do the background work on the historical, cultural, and literary context for the entire series once, so the exegetical work for each sermon in the series is already partially done. If you are preaching a series on a theological topic like “The Holy Spirit” or “Workplace Ethics,” your reading and study is focused on one topic and each book or article you read may provide material useful in more than one sermon.
  • The sermon series also allows/forces you to deal with texts or topics you might not otherwise prefer to preach, but which naturally arise out of the book of the Bible or theological topic you are addressing in the series. It is good self-discipline to be sure you are “declaring … the whole counsel of God” and not riding your favorite hobby horse or avoiding an uncomfortable text or topic.

There are also advantages for the congregation, such as:

  • When preaching through a book of the Bible, the congregation gets to see how the message and the arguments of the entire book fit together. Rather than seeing Scripture as a collection of “fortune cookie” aphorisms, they understand, for example, that 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 is part of the same message, the same letter, as Chapters 6 and 11 and 15 (and all the others).
  • When preaching a series through a shorter book, the congregation can hear the entire text of book read over the course of a few weeks. For some, the experience of reading through an entire book of the Bible, or hearing it read from the pulpit, may be a rare or entirely new experience.
  • A topical series, especially on various aspects of a particular theological topic, can help the congregation grasp the theology more clearly and firmly than if they have to piece together their understanding from a random sermon now and then.

These are just some of the reasons that a sermon series can be a great blessing to both the congregation and the preacher. There are lot of ways you can put together a sermon series, and in next week’s post on the Sermon Crafting Blog, we will look at some of the main ones and how to craft them.