On a Sunday that is followed by another Sunday you are also preaching. That one test rules out more dates than anything else, and it is the one nobody applies. A pastor decides in October that his church has to hear something hard. He reads the guidance, he prays it through, he preaches it carefully and it goes well. The Sunday after is a guest speaker booked in August. The Sunday after that he is away. The subject lands, the room fills with questions, and the man who raised it is not in the building for a fortnight.
Deciding when to preach a difficult sermon is a calendar question, and it is the half of the problem almost nothing is written about. The published guidance is about the message itself — tone, courage, humility, handling the text honestly — and it is good guidance. It does not tell you which Sunday to put it on, or what has to be true of the Sundays either side. This is written from a pulpit and from the other side of building Preach Plan, a preaching calendar for pastors and church teams. The method below needs nothing but the year in front of you.
Why does the published guidance stop short of the calendar?
Because it is written about the act of preaching rather than the year the sermon sits in. The pattern is consistent. Lifeway Research sets out five keys to preaching on controversial subjects — represent other views fairly, do not denigrate them, avoid dogmatism where Scripture is not dogmatic, and be clear about where interpretation ends and opinion begins. Its sharpest line is about handling the text: “Our temptation regarding scripture is to hammer nails where God has placed hinges.”
Ginger Gaines-Cirelli's four tips at the Lewis Center, written in 2018, start from the pastor's relationship with the congregation. Lane Sebring's ten recommendations at CareLeader, from 2017, cover research, humility, prayer and offering a forum for questions afterwards. Between three pieces from three quite different corners of the church there are nineteen recommendations, and not one of them concerns the date. A preacher can follow every piece of it and still deliver a careful message into a fortnight of his own absence.
What makes a Sunday wrong for a difficult subject?
Four things, and each of them is visible on the calendar months in advance. None requires a judgement about the subject itself, which is why they can be checked in August for a sermon you have not written yet.
| Test | Fails when | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Are you preaching the following Sunday? | A guest, a holiday or a conference sits in the next slot | The response arrives a week late and you are not there for it |
| Is it the last Sunday of a series? | The hard subject is the closing message | The series ends on its most contested note and has nowhere to resolve |
| Is it a high-visitor Sunday? | Easter, Christmas, a baptism or a launch Sunday | Half the room has no context for you and will not be back to get it |
| Is the congregation being asked for something else that month? | A giving push, a building vote, a staffing change | The two read as connected whether or not they are |
The fourth is the one that surprises people. A message on generosity three weeks before a building decision is heard as part of the building decision, and no amount of saying otherwise from the platform undoes it. The subject was fine and the month was wrong.
Why does the Sunday after matter more than the Sunday itself?
Because a hard subject produces its response on a delay. Very little comes back on the day. It arrives as emails on Monday and Tuesday, as two conversations in the car park the following Sunday, and as a question from someone who was away and heard about it secondhand. Being in the pulpit that next week is what lets you answer it in a sentence rather than in another sermon.
This is the practical reason to protect the week after rather than the week before. A Sunday you can move, or one you deliberately left open, is worth more behind a hard message than in front of it. Where those Sundays belong in the year is set out in the Sundays you leave empty on purpose. If the slot behind your date is already committed to a guest, the honest options are to move your sermon or to move the guest, and moving the guest is usually harder. Check what else shifts before you do either; moving a series shows you what it lands on.
What happens when the hard text arrives in sequence?
The date was chosen in August by arithmetic, not in October by judgement. This is the case almost nobody plans for. Preaching through a book, you do not pick the Sunday a difficult passage falls on — the pace does. Set a chapter a Sunday in Romans in August and you have quietly assigned a date to every hard text in the letter without once thinking about any of them.
The fix costs an hour and happens at the outline stage. When you mark the book's stopping points, mark the two or three passages you already know will be difficult in your room. Then look at what dates they land on, and check them against the four tests above. A movement that runs one Sunday longer so that a hard passage does not fall the week before you are away is a better calendar, and it is free to arrange in August. How to count a book's Sundays in the first place is in how many Sundays a book of the Bible takes. The general method sits in planning a preaching calendar for a year.
Who needs to know before Sunday?
The people whose own work the sermon changes, and they need telling in the week rather than on the day. That is a short list and it is nearly always the same one.
- Whoever plans the music, because a triumphant closing song after a hard message reads as though nobody told the band.
- Whoever is on the door, who will meet the responses first and should not be hearing the subject for the first time as it is put to them.
- Your elders or leadership, so that they hear it from you before they hear it from someone in the car park.
- The guest preacher in a nearby slot, if there is one, so that he is not walking into a room still working through something he knows nothing about.
Sebring makes the related point that others belong in the preparation itself. The narrower version: four or five people's work changes because of that Sunday, and each of them can be told a week out at no cost.
A method you can use this afternoon
This is the whole free version. It needs the year on a sheet of paper and about twenty minutes.
- Write out the Sundays you have left. From October 4, 2026 there are thirteen, and four of them are already spoken for by Advent, which begins on November 29.
- Mark every Sunday you are not preaching — holidays, guests, conferences, the Sunday after Thanksgiving on November 26. Mark the Sunday before each of those as unavailable too. That is the test that gets missed.
- Mark the high-visitor Sundays and the last Sunday of each series. Those are out as well.
- Mark any month in which the congregation is being asked to decide or give something. Cross the whole month, not the week.
- Look at what is left. It is usually fewer dates than expected, and that is the useful part — you are choosing between three good Sundays rather than fifty-two.
- Pick one, then go back and protect the Sunday behind it. Leave it open, or put something on it you are willing to move.
- Tell the four people in the list above, a week out.
In September this is twenty minutes of arithmetic. In the week of the sermon it is not possible at all: the guest is booked and the month is what it is.
Where a tool helps, and where it does not
None of the above needs software, and the judgement the sermon requires is not something a tool should touch. Ministry Pass has its own guidance on preaching these subjects and a library of series to go with it, which Preach Plan does not have.
What paper does not do is hold the consequences. The four tests are all questions about other entries in the calendar, which means answering them by hand requires looking in four places and remembering what you found. Preach Plan keeps the year in one object: every Sunday with its passage and its speaker, what a move lands on before you commit to it, and every year you have already preached in the same search. It will not tell you whether to preach a subject, write a point, or supply the claim the message is making. Those are yours, and that limit is in the code rather than in a promise.
Preach Plan shows the Sundays either side of any date before you commit to it, so a hard message is not booked into the week before you are away.
Start the free trialCommon questions
When is the best time to preach a difficult sermon?
On a Sunday you are followed by another Sunday you are also preaching, that is not the last week of a series, not a high-visitor Sunday, and not in a month when the church is being asked to give or decide something else. Those four tests usually leave a handful of dates in a year, which makes the choice easier rather than harder.
Why does the Sunday after a hard sermon matter?
Because the response arrives on a delay. Most of it comes as emails on Monday and Tuesday and as conversations the following Sunday. If you are in the pulpit that week you can answer in a sentence. If a guest has that slot, he either fields something he was not prepared for or visibly avoids it.
Should a difficult sermon go at the end of a series?
Usually not. The final week of a series carries the landing, and a contested subject in that slot means the whole series ends on its most divisive note with nowhere left to resolve it. Placed in the middle, the same message has the remaining weeks to sit inside, which is a materially different experience for the congregation.
How far ahead should a hard subject be planned?
The date should be set six to twelve months ahead, even though the message itself will be written in its own week. The date is the part that collides with guests, holidays, series endings and giving campaigns, and all of those are settled long before the sermon is. Planning the date early costs nothing and cannot be done late.
What if the difficult passage comes up in an expository series?
Then its date was set by your pace rather than by a decision, and it is worth catching at the outline stage. When you mark the book's stopping points, mark the passages you know will be hard and check what Sundays they fall on. Adjusting a movement by one week in August is free; discovering the collision in February is not.
Should you tell the congregation in advance?
Practice varies and it is a judgement about your own room rather than a rule. Naming it the week before lets people bring someone, or decide not to. It also removes the sense of being ambushed, which is a common complaint afterwards. The people who definitely need telling are the ones whose work changes: music, hosts, leadership, and any guest preacher in a nearby slot.
How many hard sermons should a year contain?
There is no defensible number and any figure offered would be invented. What the calendar can tell you is how many dates actually pass the four tests, which is often three or four in a year. That is a constraint worth knowing before you promise a series on several contested subjects in a row.
What do you preach the week after a hard sermon?
Something you are willing to move, or nothing scheduled at all. The value of that Sunday is flexibility rather than content. If the response is larger than expected you want the freedom to address it; if it is smaller you carry on as planned. A slot already committed to a guest gives you neither option.
Does a guest speaker ever suit a difficult subject?
It can, when the guest has genuine standing on that subject and has been briefed properly. What does not work is an unrelated guest landing in the week after, because he inherits the room's questions without the relationship that makes them answerable. Book the guest deliberately or keep him clear of it.
How do you plan a difficult sermon without it dominating the year?
Set the date early and then stop thinking about it. Most of the weight these sermons carry comes from being unplanned, so that the decision is relitigated every month until it happens. A date in the calendar, with the Sunday behind it protected and four people told, converts an open question into an entry.