A Purposeful Church Schedule including Inductive Journaling
“What shall I cry? (Isaiah 40:6). That is the question which comes before every preacher’s mind as he prepares the sermons he is to deliver each Sunday. What am I supposed to talk about? How am I ever going to get a message together? Maybe you have heard about the pastor who never prepared his sermons during the week. On Sunday morning he’d sit on the platform while the church was singing hymns and desperately pray, “Lord, give me your message, Lord give me your message.” One Sunday, while praying this prayer a choir member leaned over and whispered into his ear, “Pastor, here’s your message: You’re lazy!”
Like many other pastors, I preach 3 times a week (sometimes more!). I believe in the centrality of preaching in this church-age and thus I don’t want to take any of those times away. But when I first became the senior pastor at Faith Baptist Church of Palm Bay, I was particularly burdened for our Sunday evening and midweek services. Both were on the schedule but lacked exuberance, purpose, and attendance. The Sunday evening service felt like a repeat of the Sunday morning service or even a lesser version of it. The midweek service was meant to be a prayer service but lacked intentionality and focus. I knew something had to change!
Through prayer and counsel, I worked with faithful members of our church to come up with a plan. Gradually God led us to our current service schedule.
- SUNDAY AM – Expository studies through books of the Bible
- SUNDAY PM – Theological discussions for growing disciples
- WEDNESDAY – Inductive, verse-by-verse, journaling studies
While we’ve kept our same service schedule, we have a different purpose for each of these times. I believe it’s been through prayer and purpose that we’ve seen growth in all 3 of those services but most especially during our Sunday evenings and midweek services.
SUNDAY MORNING
It is my desire that the people that hear me preach on a regular basis hear “the whole counsel of God.” Nehemiah 8 tells us of how Ezra preached through the book of the Law, “giving the sense” (v. 8) as he goes through it. Even our Lord gave us this example in Luke 24, when he began with Moses and all the Prophets and proceeded to “interpret to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). I believe that as an ordained minister of the Gospel I am obligated to teach the whole New Covenant message and all the mystery unfolded. The best way that I know to teach it all is to take it the way it comes – book by book and verse-by-verse and that’s what we do on Sunday mornings.
There are plenty of “hot topic” issues that I could choose to preach on from Sunday to Sunday. As a committed follower of verse-by-verse exposition I choose not to do that. This keeps me from “hobby-horsing” or getting on my “soap-box.” Does this mean I am afraid to talk about “hot topics”? Of course not! I will apply a point just as heavily as the Scripture teaches. But when I preach verse-by-verse through the Bible I get to the social issues of the day when the Bible does. This allows me to correlate my concern and energy about these issues to the Bible’s concern and energy about them.
On Sunday mornings my purpose as the preacher is to herald the whole truth of Scripture. One day I’d love to be able to say I’ve preached through every book of the Bible.
SUNDAY EVENING
On Sunday evenings I have a different purpose. I believe our congregations need to be deeply rooted in right doctrine. Our culture is bombarding us with all kinds of complicated questions, “What is man? What is purpose? Where did we come from? Who is God?” and so on. My desire on Sunday nights is to dig deep into theology. God does not bypass the central processing units which reside between our ears to bring us to Christ. Instead, God wants us to think deeply and be ready to give an answer.
The Bible informs us that, “For as he thinks within himself, so he is.” (Proverbs 23:7). What you do is wrapped up in how you think. Too many times we try to make it all about our actions. The truth is, what we believe is what we will do. It all starts with our thoughts.
On Sunday nights my purpose as the preacher is to help people think biblically.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT
Most recently we moved to our inductive studies on Wednesday night. This was a move off our traditional prayer time. Prayer times at our church have now been moved to Sundays at 5:00pm before the evening service. We did this in part because of the tremendous growth we’ve seen in our Awana program. Presently we have more visitors joining us on Wednesday than we do during our Sunday services. For years we had spent time on Wednesday night praying for visitors and now God is answering that prayer. This past Monday I led two of those visitors to the Lord in my office after they first visited us on a Wednesday night. I look forward to their baptism in a few weeks.
We began our new midweek format in the Fellowship Hall but the growth we’ve seen has pushed us out of that room and into the auditorium. We call this our “journaling” time together. Folks are encouraged to purchase journaling Bible’s and follow along with me. We also print out journaling pages that correspond to the text we are in that evening. This format is intentionally less formal and more interactive. My desire as the preacher is to show folks how to read the Bible on their own. So far, we’ve made it most of the way through Philippians and all the way through James utilizing this method.
Here’s a sampling from last Wednesday of what our new midweek services are like. I share this here in hopes it will be an idea other pastors may want to try in their congregations. I trust it will be a blessing to you.
On Wednesday nights my purpose as the preacher is to help people read the Bible on their own.
IN CONCLUSION
I’m burdened to really look at my preaching from a different perspective than what is so commonly put into practice in pulpits across our nation. Preachers are not professors in a classroom, imparting abstract truths. Preachers are shepherds and fellow strugglers unpacking a text to understand what Gould would have us to do with this truth. Those sermons that are built on God’s Word will certainly impact practice life issues, but they will also be deeply theological. They will deal with the nature of God, the meaning of grace, the work of the Spirit and so much more. The Bible is God’s revealed truth in the form of both doctrinal truth and applicational truth.
I love our 3-service schedule not because it’s tradition in our circles but because I truly believe we have a unique purpose for each of our gatherings.
Caleb Phelps serves as the pastor of Faith Baptist Church of Palm Bay in Palm Bay, Florida.
Editor’s Note:
When Caleb mentioned the Wednesday night inductive method on FaceBook, it caught my eye. I thought the approach is one that could be useful for others to adapt so wanted to introduce it to our readers. There are many ways to teach and preach the word of God. I am thankful for the new technology that allows us to bring fresh approaches to that task. The most important step of discipleship is getting God’s people actively pursuing a relationship with Christ based on the Bible and developed through personal Bible study. It is vital to get Christians excited about personal Bible study and this approach is one way to do it.
So far Faith Baptist of Palm Bay has been using the inductive journaling method for the Epistles of James and Philippians. Here are links to the sessions for those two series: