Pick the book before the theme: how to plan a year of preaching

Why a preaching plan is set a year out, what the lectionary is and which year begins November 2026, five series with the Sundays each needs, and the commentary you may reproduce free.

A preacher who decides on Thursday what he will preach on Sunday preaches his favorites. He returns to the same eight passages, the same three doctrines, and the same two applications, and after four years the congregation has heard a thin slice of Scripture explained very well.

The fix is calendar work, and it happens once a year in an afternoon.

“Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.” (2 Timothy 4:2)

What a year of preaching adds up to

The Pew Research Center scraped 49,719 sermons from the websites of 6,431 US churches, all delivered between April 7 and June 1 of 2019, and measured them. In The Digital Pulpit the median sermon runs 37 minutes. Split by tradition, the median Catholic homily runs 14 minutes, the median mainline Protestant sermon 25, the median evangelical Protestant sermon 39, and the median sermon in a historically black Protestant church 54. Pew notes the sample skews urban and toward larger congregations, so read it as a picture of churches that post their preaching rather than of every church in America.

A horizontal bar chart of median sermon length in minutes from the Pew Research Center's Digital Pulpit study. Catholic homilies run a median of 14 minutes, mainline Protestant sermons 25, evangelical Protestant sermons 39, and sermons in historically black Protestant churches 54. A dashed reference line marks 37 minutes, the median across the whole sample. A second column converts each figure to teaching hours across 48 Sundays: about 11, 20, 31 and 43 hours a year. — The right-hand column is the reason to plan. A median-length evangelical sermon is about thirty-one hours of teaching a year, and the gap between traditions is the difference between eleven hours and forty-three.

Take the evangelical figure. Thirty-nine minutes across forty-eight Sundays is a little over thirty-one hours of teaching in a year, which is roughly a semester of a graduate course. Nobody would teach that course by choosing each week’s topic the night before, and a preaching plan is the same decision made once instead of forty-eight times.

Plan on one page: the book or section, the number of Sundays it needs, the Sundays already committed to Advent, Holy Week, and Easter, and the two or three weeks held open for a funeral, a hospital week, or a visiting preacher. Publish it to the elders. Then publish the next quarter of it to the congregation through the content calendar, because families plan travel and hospitality around what they can see.

The lectionary, described honestly

Half the churches in America work from a lectionary and the other half have never opened one, and the second group usually assumes it is a denominational rule rather than a tool.

The Revised Common Lectionary is a three-year table of readings assembled by the North American Consultation on Common Texts with the International English Language Liturgical Consultation. A trial version appeared in 1983 and the final form was published in 1992. Each year is labeled A, B, or C, and the year turns at Advent rather than in January. The liturgical year that begins on Sunday 29 November 2026 and ends at Advent 2027 is Year B, and Year B opens in Mark. The Gospel appointed for Advent 1 is Mark 13:24-37 and for Advent 2 Mark 1:1-8.

Two ways to use that. Follow the table as your plan, which hands you four readings a week and a three-year path through most of the Bible. Or ignore the table for most of the year, preach consecutively through books you have chosen, and consult it for the four Sundays of Advent, Holy Week, and Easter, where its readings are the historic ones anyway. The second is what most churches preaching through books already do without knowing the name for it.

Whichever you pick, the preacher remains responsible before God for the text he proclaims. A table of readings is a calendar and not an authority, and the ideas below are prompts for your own reading and prayer. Do not paste another man’s voice into your pulpit.

Five series, with the work stated

Genesis 1 through 11, eleven to fourteen Sundays

Creation, fall, flood, and Babel set the stage for promise. Preach consecutive units rather than themes. Keep Christ in view as the Last Adam without allegorizing every tree into a cheap trick. This series pairs with the Genesis reading plan if the groups walk the same ground on Wednesday.

Psalms of lament, six to eight Sundays

Teach the congregation how to pray when God feels far. Pair each psalm with a New Testament reading that shows Christ’s own cries and the Spirit’s help in weakness. Do not resolve every lament in the last five minutes; several of them do not resolve, and a congregation that learns this from the pulpit will not panic when their own prayers do not.

The Pastoral Epistles, sixteen to twenty Sundays

1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are not leadership seminars. Walk elders and aspiring men through character, doctrine, household, and the public work of ministry. Announce at the start that the series will name the qualifications plainly, so nobody hears an accusation in week nine.

Isaiah’s Servant songs, four Sundays into Holy Week

Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52 through 53 prepare Holy Week with a theology of atonement older than your hymnbook. Set them in the four weeks before Palm Sunday so the congregation arrives at Good Friday already carrying the Servant’s silence.

Acts and the ordinary means of grace, twelve to sixteen Sundays

Trace preaching, baptism, fellowship, prayers, and the Lord’s Day gatherings of the early church. Resist turning Acts into a fundraising roadmap. Where the narrative describes rather than commands, say so out loud.

Count the Sundays those five series need against the Sundays a year actually has.

Three panels on a shared scale of Sundays. The first sorts fifty-two Sundays by what claims them: four for Advent, two for Holy Week and Easter, three held open for a funeral or a visiting preacher, and forty-three left for consecutive series. The second gives the length of each series: Genesis 1 to 11 needs 11 to 14 Sundays, Psalms of lament 6 to 8, the Pastoral Epistles 16 to 20, Isaiah's Servant songs exactly 4 before Palm Sunday, and Acts 12 to 16. The third stacks the five shortest figures into one bar of forty-nine Sundays, which runs six Sundays past the forty-three available. — Five series at their shortest is forty-nine Sundays and the year has forty-three to give, so the plan is the choosing rather than the listing. Two or three of these fit in a year, and the Servant songs are the only ones pinned to a fixed date.

Six single-text prompts

Romans 12:1-2. Living sacrifice, renewed minds, and the church’s resistance to the pattern of the world.
Hebrews 10:19-25. Why we gather, how we draw near, and what forsaking the assembly costs.
Ephesians 5:22-33. Household order under Christ the Bridegroom. Preach the gospel beneath the commands.
John 21. Restored ministry after failure, and love for Christ shown in feeding his sheep.
Psalm 23. The Lord’s shepherding in life, in death, and in the presence of enemies.
Matthew 28:16-20. Authority, baptism, teaching, and the promise of presence to the end of the age.

Turning a prompt into an outline

Read the whole book or psalm aloud before you chase a theme. Aloud is not a flourish; it catches the seams in the argument that the eye skips.
Mark repeated words, contrasts, and the main verb of the unit.
Ask what God requires of the hearer, and what Christ has done for the hearer.
Write one sentence that could carry the whole sermon. If you cannot write it, keep studying.
Only then gather illustrations, hymns, and pastoral applications, and hand the hymn choices to whoever sets the order of worship early enough to be useful.

Commentary you may reproduce without paying anyone

Copyright on older American works has expired, and the line moves every January. As of 1 January 2026, works published in the United States before 1931 are in the public domain, according to the copyright term chart maintained by Peter B. Hirtle at Cornell University Library. That covers Matthew Henry, Calvin’s commentaries in their older English translations, Spurgeon, and most of the classic reference shelf.

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library, hosted at Calvin University, puts a large part of that shelf online to read free, including Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening. The practical consequence: a quotation from any of it can go in the bulletin, on a handout, or into a study sheet with no license, no fee, and no permission request. A quotation from a commentary published last year cannot. Check the copyright page before you print, and see what a bulletin may legally carry for the same rule applied to hymn texts.

Berean, our Bible study app, carries the lexical and commentary work. It is in development and not yet available.

Sources

Pew Research Center, The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons, dated 16 December 2019, based on 49,719 sermons from 6,431 churches delivered 7 April to 1 June 2019. Checked 29 July 2026.
Consultation on Common Texts, The Revised Common Lectionary. Checked 29 July 2026.
The Lectionary Page, Calendar of the Christian Year, 2026. Checked 29 July 2026.
The Lectionary Page, Advent 1 and Advent 2, Year B, Revised Common Lectionary. Checked 29 July 2026.
Peter B. Hirtle, Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, Cornell University Library, last updated 1 January 2026. Checked 29 July 2026.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library, hosted at Calvin University. Checked 29 July 2026.