Sermon Templates

One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years has been Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s chock-full of well-researched good­ness. One of the most intrigu­ing stud­ies they cite is The Fun­da­men­tal Tem­plates of Qual­i­ty Ads. If you read the arti­cle (or just the sum­ma­ry in Made to Stick), you learn that if you make an ad using one of a hand­ful of tem­plates, it will be much bet­ter (and per­ceived to be more cre­ative) than if you put a group of peo­ple in a room and tell them to be as cre­ative as they can.

Ever since I stum­bled upon that study, I’ve been think­ing about how it applies to ser­mons. There are lots of ways to struc­ture ser­mons, but only a few seem to work real­ly well.

As a result, I’ve com­piled a list of ser­mon tem­plates. When I’m preach­ing, I try to think through these tem­plates to see if one nat­u­ral­ly match­es my sub­ject, and I use as that the frame­work that I build the mes­sage around.

Tem­plate #1: Clas­sic Expos­i­to­ry Preach­ing
Sim­ply use the outline/plot of the text as your preach­ing out­line. This tem­plate is tran­scen­dent when done well, and painful when done poor­ly. It’s prob­a­bly the most com­mon tem­plate out there.

Tem­plate #2: Prac­ti­cal

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In Acts 2 Peter struc­tures his ser­mon around the answers to three ques­tions.

  1. What?
  2. So what?
  3. Now what?

Tem­plate #3: How To
One of the sim­plest ways to struc­ture a mes­sage:

  1. Tell them why.
  2. Show them how.

Tem­plate #4: Solve The Prob­lem (Andy Stan­ley)

  1. Cre­ate Atten­tion: “here’s a prob­lem that needs to be resolved
  2. Inte­grate Scrip­ture: “for­tu­nate­ly, we’re not the first ones to wres­tle with this”
  3. Clar­i­fy The Sig­nif­i­cance: “here’s why this answer mat­ters”
  4. Apply The Con­cept: “and here’s how to make it work in real life”

Tem­plate #5: Pro­nouns (Andy Stan­ley)

  1. Me (Ori­en­ta­tion): Intro­duce your­self to the audi­ence and to your per­son­al expe­ri­ence of the prob­lem you’re talk­ing about.
  2. We (Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion): Show how the audi­ence has the same (or a suf­fi­cient­ly sim­i­lar) prob­lem.
  3. God (Illu­mi­na­tion): Tell them what the Bible says about how to respond to this prob­lem.
  4. You (Appli­ca­tion): Call for a per­son­al response
  5. We (Inspi­ra­tion): Explain how things would be change if we all respond­ed in obe­di­ence.

Tem­plate #6: Life Change (Rick War­ren)

  1. Estab­lish a need
  2. Give per­son­al exam­ples
  3. Present a plan
  4. Offer hope
  5. Call for com­mit­ment

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Tem­plate #7: The Sto­ry With a Punch (Induc­tive)

  1. Tell an engag­ing, care­ful­ly-cho­sen sto­ry (usu­al­ly fun­ny).
  2. Bring the sur­prise punch­line from the Bible.

Tem­plate #8: The Ques­tion & Answer Out­line (Thomas Aquinas)

  1. Make a bold claim (or ask a tough ques­tion and give an answer)
  2. Antic­i­pate the objec­tions raised by your claim/answer
  3. Answer the objec­tions
  4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 as long as nec­es­sary to estab­lish your orig­i­nal claim.

I hope these serve you well. I should has­ten to add that these aren’t based on research — they’re the byprod­uct of obser­va­tion and of what I learned at a few con­fer­ences. In oth­er words, you can take what the arti­cle said about adver­tise­ments to the bank. You should only take my advice to the lemon­ade stand.

36 thoughts on “Sermon Templates”

  1. Great resource here Glen, thanks! I’ll be copy-past­ing it into a .doc for future ref­er­ence.

    #1 scares me the most; “This tem­plate is tran­scen­dent when done well, and painful when done poor­ly.” I fear that most (read mine) might be done some­where in the mid­dle, not hor­ri­ble, but noth­ing pol­ished. This is prob­a­bly the case for many pas­tors who either preach at a small­er church where their one of many duties is preaching/teaching or for those who are cam­pus pas­tors, find­ing that bal­anc­ing a num­ber of dif­fer­ent hats leaves less than opti­mal time for the craft­ing of ser­mons.

    Any com­ments you might have to make the tem­plate “tran­scen­dent”?

    Bless­ings!

    Reply

  4. @Marc: I was think­ing of Curt when I includ­ed #7. He owns it.

    @Kevin: All I know to say is that expos­i­to­ry preach­ing works real­ly well when a) the right pas­sage has been cho­sen and b) it’s explained in light of real life. It works real­ly poor­ly when a) the pas­sage isn’t a log­i­cal unit and b) it’s mere­ly explained from a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive (“this is what Paul was try­ing to say”).

    There are lots of good books out there, but the most prac­ti­cal help I ever received on this was from Rick War­ren’s Preach­ing For Life Change sem­i­nar. The part most rel­e­vant to your ques­tion is his advice to phrase your out­line as com­plete imper­a­tive sen­tences involv­ing “God” and the pro­nouns “I” “you” or “we”. It keeps you focused and appli­ca­tion­al.

    Mediocre out­line on 1 Corinthi­ans 10:12–14
    “Temp­ta­tion”
    1) Humil­i­ty
    2) Sin is every­where
    3) God helps us
    4) Flee

    Bet­ter out­line:
    “Do The Right Thing: How To Han­dle Temp­ta­tion”
    1) Remem­ber You Are Vul­ner­a­ble
    2) Real­ize Temp­ta­tion Is Com­mon
    3) Believe God Is With You
    4) Flee At The First Sign of Trou­ble

    In the­o­ry those two ser­mons could come out the same. In prac­tice, the first one will often wind up being a col­lec­tion of top­i­cal mini-ser­mons. The sec­ond one keeps the focus on relat­ing the imper­a­tives of the text to the lives of the audi­ence. It’s hard not to preach it right!

    I also high­ly rec­om­mend Bryan Chap­pel­l’s free course Christ-Cen­tered Preach­ing.

    Reply

  5. These are good tem­plates — I real­ly like Quick­e’s 360 Preach­ing as a preach­ing text. Preach­ing is hard and so is putting togeth­er a good ser­mon — and it should be. Do you rec­om­mend Andy Stan­ley books?

    Reply

  6. I’ve liked every­thing from Stan­ley that I’ve read, but I always think of his stuff as sup­ple­men­tary. I don’t know if that makes sense or not. Maybe I should put it this way: his min­istry advice is excel­lent if you already have the right pre­sup­po­si­tions going into it. If you don’t, he’ll help you do wrong with great effec­tive­ness.

    My favorite preach­ing text is John Stot­t’s Between Two Worlds. I haven’t read Quicke — if I see it around I’ll pick it up.

    Reply

  7. Quicke cri­tiques Stott — Stot­t’s approach is pret­ty much a 180 degree mod­el — Quicke com­pletes the cir­cle. It’d be great if Stott (one of my favorite authors) would update his Between Two Worlds book.

    The oth­er preach­ing book I like is Sid­ney Grei­danus’ The Mod­ern Preach­er and the Ancient Text (Eerd­man’s 1988).

    What are Stane­ly’s pre­sup­po­si­tions?

    Reply

  8. Stan­ley’s pre­sup­po­si­tions are quite ortho­dox, for­give any inti­ma­tion to the con­trary.

    I’m a huge fan of Andy Stan­ley. My take on his min­istry advice books is that they are full of good prin­ci­ples that are wise but aren’t Bib­li­cal. By “not Bib­li­cal” I don’t mean hereti­cal or bad. I just mean not sup­port­ed by the exe­ge­sis of spe­cif­ic Scrip­tur­al texts.

    Stan­ley is assum­ing that you’ve been to sem­i­nary (or received some foun­da­tion­al the­o­log­i­cal instruc­tion) and are still itch­ing for prac­ti­cal advice. He gives advice that builds on your pre­ex­ist­ing foun­da­tion, but for those with­out a firm foun­da­tion his advice is the wrong place to start.

    It’s like learn­ing about how to lead a church by read­ing Peter Druck­er’s The Effec­tive Exec­u­tive. Help­ful, but not the only thing you want a new Chris­t­ian leader to read.

    Reply

  10. Hi Glen,
    I’m new to here. I was look­ing for some ser­mon tem­plates and came across your web­site. Thanks so much for cre­at­ing and excel­lent resource, one that I have book marked and will vis­it often in the future.

    Much appre­ci­at­ed,
    Simon

    Reply

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