I had a really interesting conversation this last week on the subject of what proportions of sermons here should be on which parts of Scripture. (I said that I try to aim at 1/3 each of Old Testament, Gospel, and rest of New Testament - after using some weeks for the occasional topical series).
I posted on Monday some distinctions to help us think through the sense in which the 4 gospels are the most important part of the Bible to read, and the senses in which they are not. (They make up just 4 out of 66 books of the Bible, and roughly 10% of the Bible in terms of word count - does that mean that 1/3 of the preaching programme is too much, or does their central place in the canon warrant it?).
That conversation and that blog post together made me want to go and check. It's time to look at our 10.30 services here. (They're the ones where I do most of the preaching, and where I have most control over what we cover.) I'll discount the year 2014, because the sermons are based around our Bible Tour, which is distorting things towards preaching on the Old Testament; I have a plan to redress that balance during 2015. So it would skew my figures to include 2014 part-way through a lop-sided two-year programme. We started the 10.30 service in January 2012, so that's two years worth of preaching to look at.
The results were interesting. I'm not quite managing my 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 target, but not far off. Out of 87 Sundays, the results were as follows:
- Old Testament: 21
- Gospels: 32
- Epistles: 30
- Topical sermons: 4
We could do with slightly more Old Testament to balance things out. I'd like to be doing one topical series (3-6 sermons each) per year, so we could do with a few more of those too. But that's assuming my equal-thirds target is about right.
I also noticed that my Old Testament preaching had been weighted towards the Pentateuch. That's deliberate - this is a church that has not had a lot of Old Testament preaching before, so I want to lay the foundations before we look at parts of the Bible that assume them. But it still can't be right. I need to find ways to preach from other parts of the Bible such that the foundations are explained as they are needed. Preaching through our Bible Tour texts is helping with learning how to do that, so in 2016 we need some sermon series on later parts of the Old Testament. (Currently, I quite fancy 6 weeks in Jonah, but I've got a year to change my mind).
Over to you: Pastors / elders / preachers with responsibility for choosing the preaching programme — what kind of proportion of Sunday time do you think should be spent in the different parts of Scripture.
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