How should a pastor decide what to preach next, and how far ahead should he plan?
Matt Smethurst and Ligon Duncan discuss the pastoral wisdom behind planning a preaching calendar, from choosing books of the Bible and balancing the Old and New Testaments to determining the length and pace of a sermon series. They explain why planning ahead doesn’t quench the Spirit, how expositional preaching protects pastors from their hobbyhorses, and why the goal isn’t simply filling Sundays with sermons but faithfully feeding God’s people over time.
Resources Mentioned:
- Prepare Your People for Sunday (The Everyday Pastor, ep. 16)
- When Pain Is Real and God Seems Silent by Ligon Duncan
- The Treasury of David by C. H. Spurgeon
- The Message of the Old Testament by Mark Dever
- The Message of the New Testament by Mark Dever
If you’re ready to go deeper, Southern Seminary’s PhD program is where that begins. Visit sbts.edu/phd to learn more.
Transcript
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
0:00:00 – (Matt Smethurst): If you’re ready to go deeper in theology, Southern Seminary’s PhD programs were built for you. With flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person. Southern makes serious doctoral level theological training accessible to the pastor called to bring the depth of God’s word to God’s people. Study with faculty committed to strengthening the church and bring that depth back to the people you, you lead.
0:00:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more. Because some might say, well, isn’t that quenching the Spirit to plan ahead like that? Well, I think you and I would share the conviction that the Spirit is just as present in the planning as he is in the delivering. Welcome Friends to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. My name is Matt Smethers. I’m a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, and
0:01:02 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m Lig Duncan at Reformed Theological Seminary,
0:01:05 – (Matt Smethurst): and for many years he was the senior minister of First Pres. In Jackson, Mississippi. So you have a lot of experience with preparing to preach God’s Word week in and week out. And that’s what I want to talk about with you for the next few minutes. So we’ve done an episode on preparing sermons, we’ve done an episode on delivering sermons, but we’ve heard from a lot of folks that they love more material on preaching. And one of the things that often comes up is how to plan a preaching schedule, a preaching calendar.
0:01:36 – (Matt Smethurst): So let’s just start with establishing what is the pastoral aim of planning a preaching calendar.
0:01:44 – (Ligon Duncan): When I came to First Pres. The congregation was used to expository preaching that was mostly textual, occasionally topical, and then a little bit less frequently, short book studies. And the folks that were on the pulpit committee, and I think many of the elders at the church as well, I think wanted to see us move more in a expositional, through Bible books sort of approach to preaching. That was a common shift in the old Southern Presbyterian church. In the 19th century, 40s, 50s, 60s, even into the 70s.
0:02:26 – (Ligon Duncan): A lot of the expository preaching by evangelicals was more textual. So you would pick a text, you wouldn’t necessarily be working through a book of the Bible. So when I came, I knew that there was a desire that we did Bible books. I wanted to do Bible books. I had been influenced by my homiletics professor, Robert Rayburn, who was a very good preacher and who encouraged us to preach through Bible books.
0:02:51 – (Ligon Duncan): I’d been influenced by the stillite circles in Scotland. Mr. William still at Gilkhamston Church in Aberdeen, a very famous Scottish evangelical, had really encouraged evangelical pastors in Scotland to preach through Bible books. They had sort of, in the course of thinking about how to do ministry, they had been influenced by looking at the 16th century reformers and you know, Zwingli, you know, picks up with the Gospel of Matthew in Zurich, and it’s a, you know, it’s a rousing success. People are just riveted. They’d never heard the Bible preached through before. And you see you get a lot of the 16th century reformers doing things.
0:03:31 – (Matt Smethurst): By the way, William still has a book called the Work of the Pastor, which I read a few years ago.
0:03:35 – (Ligon Duncan): Well worth people’s time. Mr. Still was eccentric, he was a bachelor and you know, he had his quirks, but man, did he have tremendous influence for good on the Scottish evangelical movement and has a lot of thoughts about the rhythms of pastoral ministry, what the focus of pastoral ministry ought to be. A lot of wisdom to be learned from Mr. Still. By the way, there’s a fesh rift from Mr.
0:04:02 – (Matt Smethurst): Still called something like a fancy word for a volume in honor of someone that’s true.
0:04:09 – (Ligon Duncan): Called Dying to Live, which is also well worth it. It’s got contributions from people like Sinclair Fergus, who was very much influenced by Mr. Still in his early days. And so all of that to say, Matt, that impacted me. I wanted to preach through Bible books. I had already done that as an assistant pastor and then as an interim pastor, I had preached through Bible books. And so when I came to first pres.
0:04:40 – (Ligon Duncan): I wanted to preach through Bible books. And I’m not sure this is the most scientific way to do it, but I thought, okay, if they’re not used to long series through a Bible book, maybe I ought to pick a short Bible book and preach through that and let em know, okay, this is not gonna kill you to work all the way through a Bible book. So I picked Colossians and I just. Okay, it’s fairly short. It mirrors a lot of the material in Ephesians, but it’s shorter than Ephesians.
0:05:11 – (Ligon Duncan): It’ll get. Let me think. Had I ever preached through an epistle to that point, I’m not sure I’d ever preached all the way through an epistle. And so it gave me the opportunity as a young pastor to preach. No, I had preached through Jude for sure, but that’s even shorter. Right. You can be fairly detailed and preach through Jude in four weeks.
0:05:32 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, Jude was actually the first book I preached.
0:05:34 – (Ligon Duncan): Oh, really?
0:05:35 – (Matt Smethurst): In two sermons.
0:05:36 – (Ligon Duncan): I mean, interestingly, I preached through Jude at first prayers before I was the pastor Because I had been asked to come in and fill the pulpit for four weeks. And I thought, I’ve got four weeks. I guess I’ll preach through Jude. I later came back and did it again. And then I’ve participated in some series on Jude with other people. So anyway, I picked Colossians for the morning services. We had three main preaching times every week at first Brez. And this is again, something that would have been common 50 years ago that is not common now. So we had Sunday morning, We had a separate Sunday evening service, and then we had a Wednesday night prayer meeting that really had an exposition. And then.
0:06:18 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes.
0:06:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah.
0:06:19 – (Ligon Duncan): So I picked Colossians for Sunday morning, the first book of the Psalms for Sunday evening. And then. Let me see what I picked for. I’ve got my list here. Oh, and we started through the Shorter Catechism on Wednesday nights. And so that gave me something that was more topical and theological to do. And I didn’t have many things in my bag. I am thinking back now. I had preached through Hebrews. I had preached through Jude before I came to first Perez. I had preached through the Book of Revelation, believe it or not, in Yazoo City before I came. But it was a one chapter a week series. It very, very hit the high points kind of thing of revelation. So I didn’t have many things in my bag to pull from. I was gonna have to prepare as I went on, which I loved, because I learned a lot of Bible.
0:07:13 – (Ligon Duncan): You know, I’d read the Bible a lot. I’d studied the Bible, I was teaching seminary students the Bible, but I learned a lot of Bible. Baptism by fire, Very much so. So that’s how I did it. And that wasn’t very scientific, Matt. But I think it was good to start with a shorter series on Sunday morning. Our Sunday evening crowd were sort of the. They’re the true blue. They wanted you to preach the Bible.
0:07:38 – (Ligon Duncan): Not everybody that was there on Sunday morning necessarily wanted a deep exposition. And so you had to win more people over on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, they wanted meat, so throw the meat to them. And they were coming back because they wanted meat. How did you think about that when you started preaching? What did you start preaching through here when you first came?
0:07:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, well, I’m only four years in as a primary preaching pastor, and I just want to commend my congregation. They love God’s Word. In fact, I would say that’s the number one thing in membership interviews and other conversations. When we say, what’s drawing you to River City Baptist? It tends to be expositional preaching. And I have people tell me more often they wish I would preach longer than shorter, which just shows the caliber of the kind of people we have. So I love the fact that.
0:08:29 – (Matt Smethurst): And I have guest preachers come and other members and elders in the church preach from time to time as a way of trying to build the ministry of the church not into me, but into the word of God and around the word of God. I started with the Gospel according to Mark. I broke it up. So I did the first eight chapters, who Jesus is. And then I did a couple little series in Ruth Philippians, and then I came back and did Mark 9, 16, what Jesus has come to do.
0:09:01 – (Matt Smethurst): I’ve also done Judges. So I did that in the fall of 2024, which was a presidential election cycle. And I just thought, hey, it would be a good thing for us to be reminded week in and week out that no human deliverer ultimately can satisfy or save. And then in the spring of 2025, I did first Peter again, because I was thinking, we’re going to have a new presidential administration. When I planned it, I didn’t know who that would be, but I just thought, hey, good reminder that we want to be the best possible citizens we can be on this earth, but we also want to remember where ultimate citizenship is and what it means to live in exile.
0:09:41 – (Matt Smethurst): A church in exile is not a church in retreat. And so wanting to think about how we will simultaneously be offensive and attractive to the watching world if we’re faithful to Christ and preached through Malachi and did a little topical series, and then am now starting in Acts. So that’s. Yeah, I’ve tried to vary up the genres, vary up the testaments, and think pastorally, not just about, okay, what are going to make for good kind of conference messages, but what’s going to actually be helpful for shepherding, feeding, discipling, my people. And that’s really the burden behind this podcast episode.
0:10:23 – (Matt Smethurst): I think the value in planning a preaching calendar is to. Because some might say, well, isn’t that quenching the Spirit to plan ahead like that? Well, I think you and I would share the conviction that the Spirit is just as present in the planning as he is in the delivering. And so we want to always be open to the Spirit’s leading if we need to. Course. Correct. But planning ahead is a way to serve your congregation so that they know what’s coming and can be reading ahead. I mean, one of the things that just warmed my heart, Lig, was to see some members of the church on their own initiative.
0:11:04 – (Matt Smethurst): Before this series, I’m doing in Acts plan some acts read throughs the night before the first sermon. Nothing that I. It wasn’t my idea, but they’re just. I’m getting photos from living rooms of church members of member initiative reading through to whet their appetite.
0:11:21 – (Ligon Duncan): And I am seeing more and more churches post their sermon texts and titles on their websites ahead of time, or blast them out to the congregation on text or email, or put the bulletin on before the service to let people know, hey, this is what we’re going to be reading. This is what we’re going to be preaching. Use that in your family. Use that in your private devotional time to prepare to hear what you’re going to hear on the Lord’s Day.
0:11:50 – (Matt Smethurst): And we did an episode on how to prepare your people for Sundays to get the most out of Sundays. And so listeners can check that out. So, yeah. So the point of a preaching calendar, and expositional preaching in general, is the primary diet is faithful feeding. Over time, you’re wanting to shape your congregation’s instincts, not merely fill Sundays. I often say to my people, you know, we don’t remember 99% of the meals we’ve eaten in our life, but they’ve kept us alive.
0:12:22 – (Matt Smethurst): And God uses faithful, forgettable sermons to beautify his bride.
0:12:27 – (Ligon Duncan): To hop on your theme of not quenching the spirit by planning. And I would not in any way want to denigrate a pastor pausing because of some event that has occurred and addressing it through the text of scripture, whatever. I’m not criticizing that at all. Or even textual preaching. I think certainly as a younger man, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to do textual preaching because I might have leaned into.
0:13:01 – (Matt Smethurst): Can you define that? Because when I think of textual and expositional is the same thing. But I think you’re distinguishing.
0:13:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, I mean, it can be, right. I mean, if you’ve got a text, let’s say you decide you’re gonna Preach on John 3:16, but it’s not part of a series through the Gospel of John. You just wanna Preach on John 3:16, and you can expound that text faithfully. But if I do that, and then next week I do Romans 8:32, and then the next week, what Spurgeon did. What Spurgeon did. Exactly. And I think Spurgeon was a lot more spiritually mature than I was at the age of 19.
0:13:32 – (Ligon Duncan): He was more spiritually mature than I am now. I would trust Spurgeon to make those choices in ways that I didn’t trust myself. And so what I would say is, remember, because the Spirit is the inspirer of the word, he is choosing what the congregation is hearing. If you preach through Bible books, because he inspired the Bible books. So all of us are gonna have some kind of a planning, whether we’re picking texts that we’re gonna work through or there are themes that we’re working through and Bible.
0:14:08 – (Ligon Duncan): What I like about Bible books is it’s really clear to congregation, meaning preaching. Preaching through Bible books. It’s really clear to the congregation. I’m not on my hobby horse. I’m just. When we get to that uncomfortable passage that they think the pastor’s stepping on my toes, I didn’t pick. That’s just where we are. It’s where we are in the text. I wasn’t. Oh, I’m gonna get you on this. It’s just we’re there in the text as we work through the book. And especially if you’re doing a tough book like 1 Corinthians, it’s really nice for your congregation to know I haven’t been planning to stick my finger in your chest and pick on you about something. It’s just we’re working through the book together. And yes, Paul is going to address all manner of uncomfortable issues, but it’s the Holy Spirit setting the table by my preaching through a Bible book. And I like that for me, for one, because I learned things that I didn’t know before I started my preparation for the passage.
0:15:22 – (Ligon Duncan): And I must say, the book I’ve preached through most over the course of my ministry is the Book of Hebrews. And I’m still learning stuff as I preach through Hebrews, having preached through it four times now. And so pastors are going to learn things even if they repeat Bible books. I know pastors that have preached through Romans three times, they’re still learning stuff. If they’re faithful ministers, they’re learning stuff. And there’s an excitement about that that I think helps you as you preach to a congregation.
0:15:55 – (Ligon Duncan): I tell people the main thing that I have going for me in preaching is I have a voice that’s loud enough for everybody to hear, even the people that are hard of hearing. And I’m excited about what I’m talking about because I’m learning. And I think that helps a pastor, especially no matter how short a series is, you gotta have some energy to get through a Bible book series. And I think one of the things that gives you that energy is the excitement about what you’re learning from God’s Word and conveying that to the people.
0:16:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, I just wanna commend you mention that your humility in this regard is an example to me. So even within the last week, I asked you to preach Psalm 88 at our church here in Richmond. That’s a classic sermon of yours. In fact, it was even put into a book. It’s called When Pain is Real and God Seems Silent. Excellent sermon, excellent book. And yet you told me you were working hard on that passage.
0:16:54 – (Matt Smethurst): You know, you weren’t just going to microwave what you had done before. You kind of had a new and improved version. I thought to myself, did he come up with a way to give Psalm 88 a happy ending? But I asked you what it is you were changing and you said, I wanted the application to be richer and deeper. And yeah, that just speaks to, I think, your insatiable desire to continue learning God’s word, even when it’s a passage that some might think, oh, he’s mastered that. That’s one of his canned sermons.
0:17:24 – (Ligon Duncan): Right. And I really do, and especially now, Matt, when I have to go around preaching one off sermons. I mean, that’s one of the things I really miss as a pastor of being able to preach through Bible books. And I’m so, so wish I could do that. I’ve been trying to think, how could I get back into doing more of that now? But what I do try to do is not just preach canned messages, even if it’s a passage I’ve preached several times before.
0:17:51 – (Ligon Duncan): I try to learn something new. I try to study, I try to improve the outline, the application, the transitions, the introductions, the illustrations. I try to monkey with something.
0:18:04 – (Matt Smethurst): The earth, wind and fire references, depending
0:18:07 – (Ligon Duncan): on where I am, update some of those. Exactly right. Yeah. The young people are going, what? The who? I never heard of them. Is that an oldies group? Yeah, so. And that’s edifying to me. And so this last week, I was looking at spurgeon on Psalm 88. And, you know, I don’t always have time if I’m on a Psalm to read through all that Spurgeon has in treasury of David because he has mounds of quotations and outlines and commentary. And so it’s usually one of the last things that I get to read.
0:18:44 – (Ligon Duncan): So I had never read through Spurgeon treasury of David on Psalm 88. And I started looking through it and it was amazing. And so I even shared a couple of quotes with you that I had come up with. And so I love that. And we all get to do that when we’re Preparing sermons. And that’s good for all of us to do.
0:19:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. I think the ultimate answer to the question why expository preaching is because God knows what your people need more than you do. And I love that you mentioned that. When we just pick and choose texts that we’re most excited about or familiar about, the problem with that, among other things, is that it makes the current knowledge of the preacher the ceiling for the church.
0:19:35 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s true.
0:19:37 – (Matt Smethurst): But trust me, I’ve had to study many texts. Even in my short four years as a lead pastor, I’ve had to study many texts that I otherwise wouldn’t have chosen to study. I mean, Mark is a simple, in many ways, straightforward gospel. But three weeks in a row, in Mark, chapters nine and ten, you’re dealing with hell, divorce, and money. Welcome to expository preaching or Acts, which I just started the first two sermons in Acts. The first one is this kind of line drive down the middle of the plate passage about taking the Gospel from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth, and the ascension and enthronement of the risen Christ. And then the very next week, the defection of Judas and casting lots.
0:20:22 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome to expository preaching. But we trust God knows better than we do what our people need. So let’s talk about, as we’re planning a preaching calendar. First question is how long is too long for a given series?
0:20:35 – (Ligon Duncan): And I, you know, I’ll tell a story on myself after I did Colossians, I think the next. Let me just look on the list. Yeah, the next book that I did was Matthew, and it took me about two and a half, three years to get through Matthew. And I had people.
0:20:56 – (Matt Smethurst): And you went from start to finish?
0:20:58 – (Ligon Duncan): I did. From. Yeah, from start to finish on Sunday mornings in Matthew. And we had people join the church. And instead of saying, oh, I joined in March of 1997, or I joined in June of 1998, they were saying, yeah, I joined in Matthew 4, or I joined in Matthew 10. Well, I joined in Matthew 15. And I’m not sure that’s the best thing, but my people persevered with me through it. Now, I think that was the first time I had ever preached through a gospel.
0:21:28 – (Ligon Duncan): And it was exhilarating to do. And the. The content is varied enough that people don’t feel like it’s the same old thing every week. It’s refreshingly different every week when you’re working through the Gospel of Matthew. But I wonder if I went too long. I was in a place in Jackson, Mississippi, where the congregation doesn’t turn over as quickly as it does in other places. Now, Even so, after 10 years, I think maybe 50% of my congregation had turned over. So people.
0:22:06 – (Ligon Duncan): More than half of the people who would have heard me preach Colossians 10 years later weren’t there. And so you had a lot of people who had not heard me do those expositions. And I do think a minister needs to think through how long am I gonna have people. You know, I think of our friend Mark. Mark has people cycling through Capitol Hill Baptist Church at a pretty frequent rate because you’re in D.C. and people are there for the government and then they’re gone, or they’re there for an NGO and then they’re gone, or they’re, you know, whatever.
0:22:40 – (Ligon Duncan): All of us, I think, need to keep an eye on how quickly is my congregation turning over. How much of the Bible am I covering for a reasonably large group of my people? Because if you do, like, who is the Puritan who preached for 20 years on job? You know, if you do that, all your people is ever. That’s all they’re ever gonna hear is Job. So you have to think about, yeah, I’m expounding the Bible, but they’re only getting a tiny slice of the Bible. So I wanted us to be in the New Testament and in the Old Testament, I wanted to make sure that we were in the Gospel somewhere.
0:23:19 – (Ligon Duncan): So one of the things we did, Matt, Derek and I, especially after Derek came, we. We sat down together and we tried to plot out what we wanted to try and preach through and what we wanted to try and read through. So we had a plan for our scripture reading as well as a plan for the preaching. So that books that we knew that we weren’t going to get to preach through, at least we could read through them and there would be some short, really short introductory comments to those readings to help people get into the word that way. So we had a plan for reading and a plan for preaching, and I liked that. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten the right answer on what’s the right length of a sermon series.
0:24:07 – (Ligon Duncan): There’s no question I know Matthew a ton better now than I would have known it if I’d never preached through it. You know, like you started off with, we preach forgettable sermons. My guess is not a lot of my people remember that Matthew series. But hopefully it was edifying to their souls. And it, you know, it got down into their. Into their bones, even if they don’t have specific memories. Of it.
0:24:36 – (Ligon Duncan): So that’s a judgment call. What are your thoughts on length? I mean, as you look at your congregation, my guess is your congregation is more mobile than my congregation was back in the 1990s. By the way, I think 1st Pres. Jackson is now much more. There’s more movement in and out of the congregation in 2026 than there was in 1996. What’s your feel for that with your congregation, and how do you approach length?
0:25:04 – (Matt Smethurst): I typically take it one pericope, one thought unit at a time. But I also think that there is value to slowing down and lingering, but also kind of speeding up and doing larger chunks because the reality is both are serving different purposes. So here in Richmond, Virginia, you can learn things about Richmond from the air, looking down at the whole city that you can’t learn from walking down Broad Street. But you can also learn things about Richmond from walking down Broad street that you can’t learn from an airplane.
0:25:37 – (Matt Smethurst): And I think it not only builds muscles in the preacher, but it’s also good for the congregation to have the pace varied. And how do you make that call? Well, some of that’s going to be based on the life of your congregation in a particular season. Some of it’s going to just be based on what book of the Bible you’re looking at and letting the text, as it were, set the pace. But like you, I loved preaching through a gospel, so the Gospel of Mark, and I found it so exhilarating to preach the Gospel from the Gospels and to see how much actually Paul is just echoing Jesus in the way that he unfolds doctrines like justification by faith alone. It’s all there in the Gospels themselves.
0:26:24 – (Matt Smethurst): Any other advice for preachers as they’re trying to think through what to preach over the course of the coming year? Any kind of lessons learned?
0:26:34 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, my guess is because the stats that I’ve seen even in my sort of theological neck of the woods, for churches that have two separate services, that’s increasingly rare. So it’s probably 15, 20% of PCA churches have separate services on Sunday morning, Sunday evening. So you’re going to have to. Most of you are going to have to plan for what am I going to do on the Lord’s day? Morning is going to be typically the time that you do that.
0:27:03 – (Ligon Duncan): Again, I do think a balance of Old Testament and New Testament. My guess is if you only have one sermon a week to your people, you probably ought to slightly favor shorter series than longer series so that you can cover a little more ground for the People that you have there get them into more parts of the Bible.
0:27:28 – (Matt Smethurst): So true. Can I just give an example of that? So take Ephesians 6 chapters. The first imperative doesn’t show up until chapter 4. So if you’re going too slowly, then you could be only hearing indicatives from the Apostle Paul for months, if not years on end.
0:27:47 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m trying to see how long I
0:27:49 – (Matt Smethurst): did and then only imperatives. And so I do think, yeah, we should let, in many ways, the text itself dictate the speed.
0:27:58 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, I can’t find exactly. Oh, there it is. Okay. It was fall 20 and then part of 2006, so I don’t know how long that ended up being. Not super long, certainly compared to my Matthew series. Now, after Matthew, I did Romans for a long time. You could say something similar about Romans, because Certainly the first 11 chapters are heavy on indicatives, and you don’t really get into the imperatives until 12 to 15.
0:28:31 – (Matt Smethurst): And I don’t wanna imply that each book has one correct speed. I mean, one thing our friend Mark Dever did is he started by preaching one sermon that was an overview of the entire book. And then over the course of his ministry, he’s come back to many books and preached it relatively quickly in large chunks. And then he comes back a third time, if the Lord allows, and he preaches it really slowly.
0:28:58 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. And by the way, that series that he did through the whole Bible has now been bound in one volume by crossway. And I can’t. Is it still the message of promises made?
0:29:11 – (Matt Smethurst): Promises made, message of the Old Testament, message of the New? Something like that.
0:29:15 – (Ligon Duncan): So it’s all bound together now. And then he did an introductory message on the whole Old Testament and an introductory message on the whole New Testament. And when Mark did that, I heard him do at least one of those sermons in person. And I tried to do it myself, and I was just not good at it. Like Mark, Mark has a real gift for overviewing and summing up.
0:29:42 – (Matt Smethurst): And just to be clear for listeners, what we’re talking about is Mark Dever preached 66 sermons, one overview sermon on every book of the Bible. So when you’re starting a sermon series, it would be good just for your own study to read his overview sermon on that book of the Bible.
0:29:59 – (Ligon Duncan): And I did that in Sunday school as a youth director, and I think I did a decent job of it. But it’s one thing to teach a lesson, it’s another thing to preach a sermon. And I think Mark just had a gift for that. So I do Think pastors need to give themselves permission not to be the best guy to do every different style of preaching or delivery that you can do. Be who you are. And I just decided this is a really good idea. I want to point my congregation to reading Mark’s sermons.
0:30:34 – (Ligon Duncan): You know, we sold tons of copies of those books when they were in two volumes and commended those to people. But I was not great at doing that. At first prayers and maybe even our structure, my sermons were usually closer to 35 minutes than the 50 or 60 minutes. So Mark had a little more room at Capitol Hill Baptist to do that than I would have had at first prayer is. And so it made it harder for me to do a good job of that.
0:31:04 – (Ligon Duncan): I really liked doing that in the Sunday school context. And my agenda in a Sunday school context again was I wanted all of my senior highs to have a good overview of the Bible before they went off to university and sat in a religion course and had somebody poking at the Bible or trying to show contradictions or problems or whatever else. I wanted them to be aware of kind of the content of every Bible book.
0:31:30 – (Ligon Duncan): Now, another trick now, Matt, that I think we have to factor into sermon planning is members, even committed members, are going to church less frequently than they were 30 years ago. So I could count on a significant majority of my congregation being in church almost every Sunday 30 years ago. And now I’m told the average in evangelical context is about two Sundays out of the month. And so I think we do have to factor that into sermon planning as well.
0:32:08 – (Ligon Duncan): If you only have one shot a week and your people are coming two or three times a month, you need to think through that for planning as well. And so I love that I had the luxury of a lot of people coming on Sunday night. I had. Maybe when I started at the church, I had maybe three and a half thousand people on the rolls, maybe, I don’t know, maybe 1600 people actually coming every week, and then maybe 500 on Sunday evenings.
0:32:46 – (Ligon Duncan): And gradually the rolls came down, the attendance went up. We never. My goal was to get to the point where attendance was slightly larger than membership. So my members are pretty frequent. And then we’re having visitors as well. Never quite got there. And then Sunday night attendance went up. But you can’t assume that today in the healthiest of churches. So I do think people need to factor that in in sermon planning.
0:33:14 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a good word. As a reality check. I think we would also both agree that’s also a point of teaching and discipleship. With travel, sports and all the rest. I mean, I think we want to be very clear with people on the front end when they’re considering membership that regular attendance on Sunday mornings is required. The way we say it is. Sunday morning is required. Sunday evening, which is our prayer service, is expected.
0:33:40 – (Matt Smethurst): And other stuff such as home groups, Sunday school, one on one discipling relationships, that’s encouraged. But that’s why we have enshrined in our church covenant we will commit to the ministry of attendance regularly gathering with the whole church for worship and fellowship, because no one can faithfully follow Jesus alone.
0:33:57 – (Ligon Duncan): Right. And that’s good. And let me amen that lest what I just said seem like I’m sort of completely conceding to that. I think in the churches that are represented, probably in the circles that are listening to the everyday pastor, we want our people to be more frequent than maybe the general population of evangelicals would be. And we want to find ways to encourage them in that area. And by the way, good expository series are one of the ways to encourage them to do that.
0:34:29 – (Matt Smethurst): Because you’re on a journey together.
0:34:30 – (Ligon Duncan): You are. And that you want them to, oh, I want to know what’s coming next week because we’re excited about the truth. We’re learning from God’s Word. He’s setting the table for us, and we want them to be desirous of hearing what he has to say next. I certainly have had that experience where, oh, I can’t wait to hear what the pastor is going to do with that passage next week, because that’s a great passage.
0:34:57 – (Ligon Duncan): I can’t wait to hear what God has to say to me through His Word as the minister brings that word. And of course, I got that experience because I had Derek was preaching regularly. And so if we’re in Mark, Derek preached through the Gospel of Mark just like you did. And, oh, I can’t wait to hear what he does with Mark 9 when we get there. And so I got to have that experience along with the congregation. And that’s one of the things that can help nudge people into greater regularity, that maybe don’t bring that habit with
0:35:29 – (Matt Smethurst): them to your church and dealing with those tough texts. We’ve said this before on the podcast, but it’s a way of teaching people how to read their own Bibles. Well, it’s a way of serving them. And so I just think, to sum up this conversation, thoughtful planning is an act of pastoral love. Yeah, it’s an act of helping your people, not just providing good sermons in the moment, but hopefully whetting their appetite so that they’re looking forward to and anticipating what God has for them on a given Sunday.
0:36:00 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good.
0:36:01 – (Matt Smethurst): We hope this conversation of the everyday pastor has been encouraging to you. Please share it with a friend or leave a review so that we can help others, and particularly pastors, find fresh joy in the work of ministry.
Matt Smethurst serves as lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He also cohosts and edits The Everyday Pastor podcast from The Gospel Coalition. Matt is the author of Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel (Crossway, 2025), Before You Share Your Faith: Five Ways to Be Evangelism Ready (10Publishing, 2022), Deacons: How They Serve and Strengthen the Church (Crossway, 2021), Before You Open Your Bible: Nine Heart Postures for Approaching God’s Word (10Publishing, 2019), and 1–2 Thessalonians: A 12-Week Study (Crossway, 2017). He and his wife, Maghan, have five children. You can follow him on X and Instagram.
Ligon Duncan (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is chancellor and CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary and the John E. Richards professor of systematic and historical theology. He is a Board member of The Gospel Coalition. His new RTS course on the theology of the Westminster Standards is now available via RTS Global, the online program of RTS. He and his wife, Anne, have two adult children.