Evaluating Sermons

I eval­u­ate a lot of ser­mons. I don’t just mean that I lis­ten to ser­mons and decide whether I like them or not — every­one who goes to church does that. I mean that I pro­fes­sion­al­ly eval­u­ate ser­mons and give for­mal feed­back to the preach­er. Some I eval­u­ate in my role as a min­istry train­er and oth­ers I eval­u­ate in my role on a preach­ing team (before one of us preach­es we preach the ser­mon to each oth­er and get feed­back on how to strength­en it).

So I’ve thought about this a lot. Most ser­mon eval­u­a­tion forms you find on the inter­net and at sem­i­nar­ies are not very help­ful because they mea­sure too many things.

These were the top hits when I googled for “ser­mon eval­u­a­tion forms”
Calvin Sem­i­nary’s (30 ques­tions)
The Ortho­dox Pres­by­ter­ian Church’s Form for Min­istry Interns (41 ques­tions)
Reformed Bap­tist Sem­i­nary’s (35 ques­tions).

Do all the things these long forms ask about mat­ter? A lit­tle. But using that to eval­u­ate a ser­mon is like eval­u­at­ing your church’s state­ment of faith based on its gram­mar. It sort of miss­es the point. Of course you want a state­ment of faith that is gram­mat­i­cal, but if its con­tent is sketchy then every moment spent improv­ing its gram­mar is wast­ed time. Sin­ful­ly wast­ed time.

In the same way, focus­ing on the super­fi­cials of a ser­mon when the under­ly­ing con­tent is bogus is ridicu­lous. I real­ize that’s not the intent of these forms, but that is what they encour­age.

So this is the form I use:

Point­ers (what should I change?)

Keep­ers (what was so good I should be sure not to take it out)?

That’s it — two ques­tions. I some­times do it on a 3x5 index card. Keep­ers on the front, point­ers on the back (a tip I got from Earl Creps).

And this is the grid I’m putting it through:
1) Was Christ pro­claimed clear­ly?
2) Was the ser­mon Bib­li­cal­ly sound?
3) Was it inter­est­ing?
4) Did it ask me to do some­thing appro­pri­ate in response?

I try to nev­er give them more than three point­ers and three keep­ers, and I try to be as spe­cif­ic as pos­si­ble.

There are lots of oth­er aspects of a ser­mon I could nit­pick, but if the per­son is preach­ing an inter­est­ing, Bib­li­cal­ly sound ser­mon that exalts Christ and chal­lenges me to obey Him then they’re doing fab­u­lous. Why would I nit­pick them at that point? To demor­al­ize them? To clone my habits (“at this point I would have told a joke — you should tell a joke”)?

Any­way, this post prob­a­bly was­n’t rel­e­vant to most of you. But for those of you who have to eval­u­ate preach­ing on a reg­u­lar basis, I hope I’ve giv­en you some food for thought.

And to those in my min­istry, now you know what I’m try­ing to do when I pre­pare a ser­mon: pro­claim the good news of Jesus in a way that is faith­ful to the Bib­li­cal text I’m work­ing with in an inter­est­ing way that chal­lenges you to whole­heart­ed­ly respond. From time to time, be sure to let me know how I’m doing. 🙂