Do You Rehearse Your Sermon?

The Saturday (of a pastoring, preaching week) chapter in Frank Honeycutt’s Sunday Comes Every Week is about Rehearsing.

I was once teaching in Naples FL, but my teaching was on Saturday. We stayed for Sunday to hear the interim pastor/preacher and all I can say is that it was one of the finest crafted sermons I’ve ever heard.

Afterwards we talked and he told me that on Saturdays he rehearses his sermon at least twice, and sometimes three times. From the pulpit. Aloud.

My own form of rehearsing is to mumble my way through it a few times, though I have at times rehearsed it aloud to time the sermon.

How about you? Do you rehearse? Why or why not? What have you learned from rehearsing?

Poor pronunciation and delivery can sink a sermon or lead listeners to places in the imagination that are unintended and preventable. … Still, sermon rehearsal—listening to your proclamation privately, perhaps with the assistance of a recording device, or in front of a trusted friend—can literally save a sermon from the derailment experienced by all pastors on occasion as a result of haphazard oral preparation and poor word choice.

Similarly, Saturdays work on the sermon (this can be brief; Saturday was my “play” day with our kids) revisits your work that has been gestating since Fridays morning time at your writing desk. Even Jesus’s bones needed “time in the tomb” prior to resurrection. Consider this time in your sermon preparation process something of a Holy Saturday in a homiletical Triduum.