What is a preaching calendar?
A preaching calendar is a church's plan of what will be preached on each Sunday of the coming months, usually a whole year: the date, the series, the passage and who is preaching. It is sometimes called a sermon calendar or a preaching plan. It does not hold the sermons themselves. It holds the decisions that come before them, so the week can go to the study instead of to working out what Sunday is about.
What goes in a preaching calendar
One line for each Sunday, and a few columns. Most churches start with these:
- The date. Every Sunday of the year, and any other service you preach at, such as Christmas Eve or Good Friday.
- The series, and which week of it this is. "Philippians, week 3 of 6" tells everyone where the Sunday sits.
- The passage. The book is often known months ahead; the exact verses usually get settled six to eight weeks out.
- Who is preaching. Essential once more than one person shares the pulpit.
- The fixed days. Easter, Mother's Day, the Fourth of July, the Sunday the clocks change: the days that change who is in the room or what the Sunday has to be.
- A title and a big idea, added later, when the passage is settled.
- Notes. Anything the preacher or the team needs to remember about that Sunday.
A church with several ministries planning alongside often adds a few more: when a draft or a title is due to the worship and communications teams, a status for each Sunday, and the campus if that varies. The sermon series planning template goes through the columns one by one.
What a preaching calendar is not
- Not a lectionary. A lectionary assigns readings to dates. A preaching calendar assigns your church's plan to dates. Churches that follow a lectionary still keep a preaching calendar, with the readings in it.
- Not an order of service. The order of service is the songs, the readings and the people for one Sunday. The preaching calendar is the year of Sundays it sits inside.
- Not the sermon. It says what Sunday is about. Writing the sermon is still the week's work, and the calendar's job is to give that week its time back.
Who uses a preaching calendar
The preacher, first. A pastor who preaches most Sundays uses it to see the year whole: the balance of books and themes, where the series fall, and which Sundays are spoken for before anything is planned.
A teaching team, when several people preach. The calendar becomes a schedule of people as well as passages: who preaches when, who is away, and whether one person is carrying more of the year than anyone meant them to.
Everyone who builds from the preaching. The worship leader choosing songs around a theme, the person designing series artwork, the kids ministry and small groups running something alongside. They rarely edit the calendar, but they plan their own work from it, which is why the most useful preaching calendars are the ones the whole staff can see.
A simple example year
Here is the shape of one possible 2027, at the level a preaching calendar is usually first sketched: series and dates, not titles. It is 52 Sundays, January 3 to December 26.
| Sundays | What is preached |
|---|---|
| January 3 to February 7 (6 Sundays) | Philippians, start to finish |
| February 14 to March 14 (5 Sundays) | A series through Lent, toward the cross (Ash Wednesday is February 10) |
| March 21 | Palm Sunday |
| March 28 | Easter |
| April 4 | Left open on purpose, the week after Easter |
| April 11 to May 30 (8 Sundays) | Acts 1 to 8, with Pentecost on May 16 inside it |
| June 6 to August 29 (13 Sundays) | Summer in the Psalms, with two Sundays held for guest preachers |
| September 5 to October 24 (8 Sundays) | A fall series as ministries restart |
| October 31 to November 21 (4 Sundays) | A short series ending the Sunday before Thanksgiving |
| November 28 to December 19 (4 Sundays) | Advent (Christmas Eve is a Friday) |
| December 26 | Left open on purpose, the Sunday after Christmas |
Notice what is decided and what is not. Every Sunday has a home, the fixed dates went in first, and three Sundays are left open so the year has somewhere to put a surprise. The passages for each week, the titles and the big ideas are still to come, and that is right: they get settled a couple of months out, when the preacher is close enough to the text to know. How far ahead to plan your sermons goes into that split.
Start from a calendar that is already filled in
If you would rather edit a year than invent one, there are five free 2027 preaching calendars: expository, topical, youth, children's and the church year. Every Sunday is dated and given a title and a passage, with the holidays and awkward weeks marked, in Excel or CSV. No email address, no form.
To build one from a blank page, the whole method is in how to plan a preaching calendar for a year.
Preach Plan is a preaching calendar for pastors and church teams, if you want one that the whole team can share. A spreadsheet or a sheet of paper works too. The calendar matters more than where you keep it.