Article

The 5 Hour Sermon: A Covo Preacher’s Guide

Phil Thompson

The most common question I get is this: how on earth do you do it? Let me share an overall approach that will help my fellow covo preachers navigate the time constraints that surround effective sermon preparation.

We planted in the best year for church planting ever—2020. And as a result, we chucked the typical church planter’s playbook and started with a Sunday morning gathering in a location where people could spread out and distance themselves. But starting with a Sunday gathering placed immense pressure on our fledgling core team of 21 right out of the gate. Every week, we scrambled to prep for Sunday in addition to all the normal activities of outreach and discipleship and pastoral care.

In addition to this reality, I remain called to serve as both the primary preaching pastor as well as a long-term, co-vocational employee with parachurch ministries. This means that, besides my work commitments, I have a 10-hour window every week that I can devote to pastoral ministry while still leaving sufficient time for my family and myself. And the 10-hour window must be sufficient for sermon preparation as well as all other pastoral responsibilities on my plate for the week.

The most common question I get is this: how on earth do you do it? Let me share an overall approach that will help my fellow covo preachers navigate the time constraints that surround effective sermon preparation.

First, you need to have support.

Covo preachers will always struggle so long as they see themselves as solo preachers. If you’re going to make it, you’ll need a deep bench of support to sustain the rough and tumble of weekly preaching on a shoestring time allotment. Here’s my support system that gets me through each week.

1. The Holy Spirit. It may feel cliche to say this, but I say it with utmost brutal honesty: preachers with a meager supply of time need a massive supply of power. All preaching and all ministry serve in the mysterious realm where we wrestle with spiritual powers and rely on spiritual power to see even the slightest results. But there’s a sense in which bivo/covo/part-time pastors feel this necessity all the more. Think of the salesman who draws most of his income from commissions. God provides for him just as much as the manager at the plant who draws a weekly salary. But the salesman feels a palpable sense of desperation every week for the same results. For this reason, the part-time preacher needs to regularly fling himself on the Spirit. Quite often, I find myself praying on Sunday mornings, “God, I’m exhausted. I know this is the Word You have for our people, but I feel my work and my capabilities are utterly inadequate this morning. Please do what I cannot.”
2. A Strong Plurality. We launched our church with three elders. We’re now adding a fourth. These men execute with strength in their lanes. One (full-time) handles pastoral care, counseling, and groups. The other (minimal time) handles Sunday mornings, events, and deacons. The newest elder (minimal time, lay) will handle finances. This frees me up to focus on preaching and vision while still maintaining some time for pastoral care, usually over coffee or lunch. Without these guys, seasons of strain would have broken me long ago.
3. A Deep Well. I know there’s a lot of discussion over the value of seminary education for church planters. And not every guy is going to decide to do what I did. I finished my PhD three years into our church plant. Admittedly, that’s a little insane. But here’s the win: a robust array of seminary education will make the normal weekly preaching grind 10x easier. Due to all the time in the classroom and in the books, I have an excellent lay of the land when it comes to the metanarrative of Scripture, the content of various books of the Bible, major doctrines of the Christian faith, aspects of church history, and much more. This deep well means that I spend very little time in commentaries or other secondary research. Having at least an MDiv will equip the average planter with a deep well for preaching and teaching.

Second, you need to have a system.

Plenty of guys are dependent on the Holy Spirit, have a strong elder team, and have a solid seminary education behind them, but still flounder when it comes to sermon preparation on a tight schedule. Most often, this happens because they lack the sermon preparation system that will deliver quality results on a tight schedule. I’ve refined and tweaked my system over the years to force myself toward greater and greater efficiency without sacrificing quality in the least. So here’s my system:

1. Read, re-read, and mark (Sunday night and Monday early morning). Spend one focused hour reading, re-reading, and marking up the text. Pray the text. The goal is to gain familiarity, notice unique features, and develop three to five key questions that will help me discover the “burden” of the text—the pressing issue that needs to be brought to bear in the lives of your church. Bryan Chapell’s concept of a “fallen condition focus” is helpful here in trying to discern the core aspect of human sinfulness that the passage addresses. Put all your energy into finding this.
2. Reflect, respond, and record (Tuesday through Thursday). From there, continue to read and listen on occasion throughout the week as you wake, as you commute, while you wait in line, as you take breaks, and before going to bed. Allow your sermon preparation to be a devotional balm for your soul every day. Ponder the text, pray over the text, respond to your questions, and take notes whenever you can. Sometimes my best illustrations hit me while I’m turning over one of my key questions while I’m in the shower. My goal is to feel the weight of the passage—which I’ve already discovered—for myself and my congregation during this time. I generally lose track of this time. But it probably amounts to around an hour or two. But because it overlaps with the things I would be doing anyway, I don’t usually quantify it.
3. Write and check (Friday morning). I get up early and write a manuscript of five full pages in MS Word using the native 12-point font (roughly 35 minutes of content). Sometimes I push this to Friday afternoon/evening after my work is done for the week. Worst case scenario, I can push it to early Saturday morning, but I usually have some buffer here to avoid stress. It usually takes me about two hours to move from my previous elements to a sermon manuscript and to do some quick quality control work with two commentaries. I prefer one expository commentary and one devotional commentary for this.
4. Annotate, slides, and review (Saturday and Sunday). My remaining one to two hours fall sporadically over the weekend, particularly on early Sunday morning. I’ll move my sermon manuscript over to my Rakuten Kobo e-reader and mark it up with highlights, underlines, and scores for slides. Whether on an e-reader or in printed form, I keep the font small in order to ensure limited reliance on the manuscript. I’ll also create a simple slide deck and read over the manuscript a couple of times, not necessarily out loud. During this time, I may cross out material or note changes in the margins.

By this point, I’ve had time to discover the burden of the text, feel the burden of the text, recount the burden of the text in writing, and prepare to convey the burden of the text to the people of God. And all this can fall within about five hours on a normal week. When a passage is more difficult, I can push as high as seven or 10 hours (usually ballooning in steps 1 and 3). But more often than not, strong support and a strong system will lead you down the 5-hour sermon preparation path.

And who knows if a great support structure and strong sermon prep system might help those of you without covo time constraints as well?