Last week’s “How to Plan Your 2010 Preaching Calendar” Webinars were a great success and I’ve enjoyed hearing from so many of you about how your planning is going.  Here are my answers to more of your frequently asked questions.

Q: Once I have my preaching calendar together, who should I share it with?  Should I share it with other leaders in my church?

A: You want to share the entire preaching calendar with everyone in leadership that it will help to do their jobs.  In other words, you definitely want to share it with your Worship Leader, Pastors on staff, Creative Team, and anyone else you think will find it helpful in doing their job.

Once you have the calendar together, you can intentionally give your people a sneak peek from time to time about something that’s coming up.   For example, in a message where one point is about dealing with relationships, you may want to mention that they don’t want to miss the _________ series that we’re doing in February that’s all about relationships.

There is no reason to make the calendar secretive, but if you place it in the hands of too many different people too early it can become confusing as blanks are filled in, titles are changed, etc.

Q: I noticed that you have 2 open dates/standalone messages planned in the first half of your calendar, but none in the last half of the year?  How many should we aim for?

A: Really this just depends on how the calendar comes together as you’re planning.  For us, as we looked at our Big Days and the timing of holidays and special weekends, it just so happened that we filled in each week from June through the end of the year.  There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to how many open dates.

The goal in planning the preaching calendar is to seek God’s will about what to teach and when to teach it, and sometimes as you go through that process there will be weeks that just don’t seem to fall into place.  Those are good to leave as standalone messages.

Also, you may consider the weekends before your Big Days (most notably Easter) to be standalone weekends where you can specifically teach about and challenge your people to invite their friends the following week.

P.S.- If you missed the “How to Plan Your 2010 Preaching Calendar” Webinar, you can listen to a replay of the audio at: www.ChurchLeaderInsights.com/preachingreplay