The Rev’d. Caroline Penhale is a Backstory Preaching Mentor and the Shepherd of the Backstory Preaching Collective/+ community. Ordained in The United Church of Canada, she serves as a Vocational Minister and offers executive coaching for clergy and lay leaders. To find out more, please visit www.clearmoment.ca.
Peaceful productivity: don’t these two words sound beautiful together?
As preachers, wouldn’t we love to feel productive and peaceful week by week?
Imagine feeling on task, in flow, and engaged in all the steps of sermon prep each week.
Imagine feeling calm because you know what you said you would do, for how long and when.
Imagine feeling peaceful because you’ve left some margin in your schedule, created a bit of buffer, and said no, when possible.
Peaceful Productivity takes planning
Remember the adage “fail to plan and plan to fail”? When it comes to having a schedule that supports our feeling both peaceful and productive, it holds true.
I recently facilitated a scheduling session for the Holy Week and Easter Start-to-Finish Workshop in the Collective+ community. The workshop guides participants through crafting their Holy Week and Easter Sermons in advance over two weeks so they are free to focus on the activities of Holy Week when they arrive at Palm Sunday.
This kind of productivity requires intention and planning, however.
3 Steps to a Realistic Sermon Prep Schedule
So I guided participants through a process to make space for sermon prep for multiple sermons, encouraging them to do three things in the following order:
Claim blocks of time for sermon prep each day of the week, one day at a time.
Include buffer zones, factoring in time for things like commute times and lunch breaks. So they added this next layer to the week’s schedule.
Scan over the week in front of them and find things that did not need to be there. What could be eliminated? What could be postponed?
I noticed initial resistance to the last step.
We are so accustomed to saying yes, to doing just one more thing, making just one more visit, attending one more meeting, that we forget that it’s perfectly acceptable to say no when necessary.
However, once each preacher had cut a few events or tasks from their schedule, the energy shifted. It was as if they already had more energy for the week ahead—and all they had done was align their schedules with their priorities as preachers.
This all sounds simple enough, but I suspect we don’t regularly engage in this kind of weekly planning as preachers.
We don’t remember to put sermon prep in our schedule day by day and week by week—at least not on our own.
Sometimes planning is best done in community
In community, however, something changes. There is greater accountability.
The preachers who showed up to that group to plan the coming week brought intentionality and supported each other in creating schedules that will leave them feeling peaceful rather than frazzled.
Could they have done it on their own? Yes, of course.
Yet, the power of community seemed to be a potent element of that planning session.
I liken this to physical exercise. For many of us, we know we should exercise regularly. Some of us might even already know what exercises to do. However, booking appointments with a trainer or committing to a group fitness class increases the likelihood that we will exercise. So, if group fitness and personal training work for getting fit, it follows that group planning could work for aligning our schedules.
Your challenge this week, preachers, is to grab a preaching buddy and support each other in aligning your schedules with your top priorities.
Discern what you need to add, what you need to eliminate and what you could shift to create a schedule that best serves you and your preaching life.
If you are looking for more ideas on how to align your schedule with your priorities, the (free) Peaceful Productivity Challenge is a great resource. Make use of it on your own, with your preaching buddy or as part of a group.
And if you’re interested in a preaching community, we’d love to have you join us in The Collective/+.
May you feel more productive and more peaceful as a result of your planning in the weeks ahead.