How do you develop a healthy teaching and preaching diet for your church?

On one level, this is quite simple, especially if your leaning is towards systematic expository preaching and if you believe that the church family needs to hear the whole counsel of God. My practice in pastoral ministry has been to try and ensure that over time, the church covers as much of Scripture as possible.  So I would tend to switch between an Old Testament book and a New Testament book and within those subdivisions cycle through the different genres.

In other words, the programme like look as follows

• Pentateuch book
• Gospel
• OT historical book
• Pauline epistle
• Prophetic Book
• Gospel
• Apocalyptic book (OT)
• General Epistle

I would hope that over a period of time, the church family would be familiar with the story line of redemptive history, have covered all of the Gospels and been exposed to the other Biblical genres.

However, alongside this, there are other things that I would be thinking about that might influence the particular timing of which book we might cover next or if we want to break off from a book series to deal with a particular topic or theme.

As well as covering all of the books of the Bible, we want to be thinking about two other things. Doctrine and application. We want to help the church family to be able to articulate clearly what the believe on the essentials and we want to also tackle important pastoral and ethical issues.  This means that we might be alert to pressing needs  or we may be aware of a specific controversy.   For example back in 2006, when there was a significant issue around atonement, I was asked by the elders of the church where I was a member to spend 5 weeks going into depth on penal substitution.

Even though it is true that if we work through Scripture we will find that all of those things are touched upon, depending on the speed we are working through things then it might take us another 10 years before we get to a book that particular homes in on a specific doctrine or ethical issue and we may realise that for various reasons we’ve not been given it the attention that it needs.  But furthermore, for all kinds of reasons, including our own limitations and what a congregation can cope with in any one sitting, we may find that although Scripture touches on specific issues that we haven’t really drawn the application out when we’ve preached.

It might be helpful to review back the preaching in your church using the kind of matric I’ve shown below.  Where a particular doctrine or application is touched upon in the sermon you might highlight it as amber, where it becomes a significant focal point, then you might highlight it in green.  Then for each doctrine or application, you will highlight to show if it has been touched on (amber), emphasised (green) or not mentioned at all over a period of time (red).[1]

When you look back over a period of time, you may realise that some issues have been barely engaged with at all.  You can then look forward and consider possible books of the Bible, doing a similar exercise, breaking down into teaching sections and highlighting what could be emphasised each week.  This may help you to choose a specific book to cover next.  You may also realise that some topics are still not going to be looked at and in some cases, they may not be suited to teaching just from the passage, there may be things you want to pull together from different parts of the Bible. In those cases your options are as follows:

• Some topical sermons
• Some specialised seminars and workshops at a different time
• Encouraging the church members to engage in further reading for themselves.

You may find it helpful to develop  a matrix like the example shown or alternatively, you may find that this is a useful image to have in your head when talking through options as elders or planning out your teaching series.

All of this emphasises content, but you will also want to think about tone as well. If Scripture is given to encourage, correct and rebuke then we would expect all of those things to happen.  Different seasons may require a particular emphasis but if all the church hears is rebuke then that will be unhealthy but also if they just hear encouragement and never challenge that will be a problem too.

I would encourage church eldership teams to review the overall teaching programme together at least annually and preferably quarterly.

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[1] Please note that the categories here are as examples only.  You will want to flesh out the detail for yourself.