Build a Thriving Preaching Life in 2025: Introducing the Compelling Preaching Pathway
Preaching growth is an ongoing project with infinite choices:
Do I work on more captivating introductions?
Better exegeting my congregation?
Building a preaching community for feedback and support?
Or trying to get my sermons done so I can actually have a day of rest?
In our work with preachers, we’ve found most grow along a similar sequence.
The immediate triage of a preaching life marked by stress, insecurity, or burnout often reveals a need for a reliable process and clear scheduling priorities.
Once sermon prep and the calendar are working together, preachers can find space to focus on spirituality as a beloved child of God first—who happens to be called to preach. An element of this connection to God is connecting with others who can support the difficult, beautiful work of preaching: holding us in prayer, offering feedback and encouragement, and sharing the joys and challenges along the way.
Then we can work on sermon fundamentals—clarity, organization, storytelling, etc.—picking up where homiletics classes or lay training left off, filling in gaps, and building new skills.
And with effective sermons well understood, it’s play time! A more robust toolbox of preaching techniques frees the preacher to experiment with new methods and exercise their voice in new ways—confident and excited to break out of any preaching ruts. Longer term planning, creating contingencies for emergencies, and other big picture ideas happen here.
At this point, it’s a matter of continual iteration. Keep what works, Grow in areas of interest. Adjust as life circumstances or call change.
We’ve organized this progression into Backstory Preaching’s Compelling Preaching Pathway.
With five stages based on the progression described above, the Pathway describes the pillars of a thriving preaching life.
Preachers can locate their preaching needs and desires within the pathway and develop a personalized plan for growth.
Where would you want to begin?
Reclaiming Life
Maslow taught us that humans will struggle to learn and grow if their basic needs for food, safety, and belonging aren’t met first.
For preachers, growing in skill and spirit is near impossible when each week feels like a race against the clock to Sunday morning.
The first step on the pathway, then, requires taming the schedule to reclaim Saturday nights with loved ones or to enjoy a true, protected Sabbath!
Not every preacher struggles with sermon prep encroaching on their personal time, but even those who have a pretty solid routine have to go “back to the well” to create and re-create a sermon prep schedule when life throws curveballs.
When my life shifts and throws off my routine, whether it’s a conference for one week or a change in my health for all time, I need to know how to adjust my sermon prep so I can feel ready and confident on Sunday, and still do the work without sacrificing time with my loved ones, hobbies, or kettlebells!
Beyond taming the calendar, preachers need a process that doesn’t have to be re-created every week.
I want to be routine about the how so that I can pour my creativity into the what. Decision fatigue is real.
Like a lot of preachers, I can happily procrastinate the more challenging, generative aspects of the process with exegesis, spending too much time heading down fascinating rabbit trails.
Reclaiming life, then, includes knowing how to narrow interests so I focus my research and recognize when I’ve spent enough time on the topic. Ideally, I could head directly to the best sources for reliable answers to keep the process moving forward.
We’ll know we’ve reclaimed our lives when we have time to find joy and delight with the people we love and engage the interests that fill our spirit—all while finishing our sermons on work time rather than personal time.
Deepening Connections
Preaching is too often a solitary exercise in a faith that trumpets community as its literal foundation.
I rely on myself too much for ideas, editing, and keeping up my own flagging spirits when preaching feels plain hard, and now, even dangerous.
I need other preachers who get it.
Plus, if I’m honest, I need to deepen my connection to God.
The needs of ministry very often—too often—feel more urgent than praying. I always figure that when I skip my scheduled time with God, God understands. After all, if I’m doing God’s work, surely God is compassionate enough not to get annoyed when I don’t show up and knows I at least pray during worship.
Isn’t all that good enough?
For our all-loving, forbearing God, sure.
But for me? Not if I don’t want to burn out before the end.
And given the increased stress of preaching in our current climate, burn-out is a higher risk than ever.
The thing that will keep me in the game is feeling connected.
To God.
To other preachers.
To myself.
To grow as a preacher, I need a community to turn to and be nurtured by. I want sermon prep itself to feed my spirit. And I want to regularly tune into God’s presence surrounding me in every moment and place.
Strengthening Foundations
We’ve reclaimed our lives and connected with God and others. We have space to breathe and relax. And we’re not feeling so isolated,
With these foundational needs met, we now have bandwidth to develop our preaching skills.
But talk about choices!
There are so many skills that contribute to a compelling sermon, from deeply knowing your audience to clear drafting to incisive editing, authentic delivery, and engaging our listeners after the sermon.
Where even to start?
How about at the beginning: what exactly defines an effective sermon?
With that definition, I can take the elements and work on them one at a time.
This makes my growth organized and eliminates the feeling of overwhelm.
Plus, I can apply a new skill with every sermon and see the effect, providing its own momentum and energy.
Cultivating Creativity
With a solid foundation of skills in place, it’s time to play!
Feeling energized by the momentum of skill development and the affirmation of listeners, we’re ready and confident to explore.
It’s time to take risks in our preaching, like maybe writing the entire sermon as a story, or preaching from notecards with visual (picture) notes instead of words.
Perhaps we experiment with storytelling or delivery.
At this stage, we can move from week-to-week sermon attention to longer term planning—thinking about seasons of sermons, sermon series, sermon-adjacent studies, and more.
And we can create a plan for the inevitable vicissitudes of life to avoid being crushed by a last-minute disaster.
With an ever-expanding toolbox of techniques, we can test the theory that there is no bottom of the well for sermon messages or illustrations or ways to offer Good News so that listeners experience it for themselves, right then and there.
This stage is a playground where we expand, increase, and magnify the Lord!
Sustaining Growth
And finally, we don’t want this growth and expansiveness to end.
There is always more!
More confidence in and ways of using our voice.
More depth to our authenticity, compassion, and courage.
More influences and perspectives to be added to our preaching repertoire that would reveal the gospel in surprising ways.
By grace, the last sermon we give will be as filled with excitement, holy awe, and humility as the first.
Of course, it helps to have a plan that evolves.
Life shifts. People enter and leave. Our call changes. Pandemics happen. Something transforms our faith and we are not the same. Everything is fluid.
We will weave in and out of these stages for a lifetime, doubling back, going deeper, emerging with greater clarity of skill.
Growth is never linear, so while we present this stages in a logical sequence, the intention is that these stages are cyclical.
Did you recognize yourself along this Pathway?
Is there a stage where you long to experience growth?
Want to Explore the Pathway Further?
If you’re interested in exploring this Pathway further, we invite you to join us in The Preacher’s Haven, our new (free) private Facebook group for preachers.
This week, we’ll be sharing more about the Pathway and engaging conversation around these ideas.
Next week, we’ll run a 5-day Challenge to build a thriving preaching life, with each day focused on a stage of the pathway.
It’s a great way to get intentional about your growth as a preacher this year.
After the challenge, the group will continue to be a place of conversation, inspiration, and support—helping deepen your connection to God and other preachers.
I hope you’ll join us.