With the expansion of technology, you have an extraordinary opportunity to further your sermon content beyond Sunday morning. The thought process used to be (and still in some places is) preach one message on Sunday morning, a different on Sunday night and yet another one on Wednesday night. The people who came to all three were the super spiritual people of your congregation. But times have changed and thought processes have changed.
Is it good to end up preaching three different sermons every week, or is it better to hone in on one message and have everything throughout the week point people back to that one thing?
I think the latter.
As Andy Stanley expresses in his book Communicating for a Change, if you have a three-point sermon, make it into a three-part series. This will force you to focus everything in your message on one big idea.
Instead of letting your sermon content be forgotten as the week goes on (people do forget your message, by the way), you can do these five things to further your sermon content throughout the week.
1. Sermon Based Small Groups
Instead of always having your small group content be unrelated to the message—like the old Wednesday night Bible studies—you can have them focus in on the sermon from Sunday. Some churches do this all the time and some do this for major sermon series.
There is an art to doing this because you don’t want it to simply be a rehashing of the sermon. You want the questions to focus in on the application of the material that was presented on Sunday. Imagine if your congregation was confronted with the call to action of your message in a more intimate environment where they had people who would hold them accountable. That is the benefit of utilizing sermon based small groups.
2. Mid-Week Blog Post
As you were preparing your message, there were probably things you came across in your study that you didn’t include in your sermon. What if you could use that material to further your message throughout the week? I believe you can. If you have a blog (which you totally should) or your church’s website has blog capabilities, you can put your unused material to work.
If you shared two stories in your original message, but had a couple more that you decided not to use, you could craft your blog post around one of those unused stories.
It’s important—just like with the sermon-based small groups—that you don’t just rehash your sermon content. Come up with a new way to get to your bottom line. Use a different story to illustrate the need for everyone applying that truth to their lives. Take a look at this as an example.
If you don’t feel comfortable writing out an article, do a video blog—a short video where you share the same content as you would a blog post.
If you decide to do this in written form, be sure to have someone else look over your article and make grammatical edits where needed. One thing is for sure: Writing a sermon and writing an article are two very different things. In one you’re not at all concerned about grammar because it is written to be spoken. In the other you’re surely concerned about grammar because it is written to be read.
