In an article at his Preaching.org, Kenton Anderson writes: “Fast food never nourished anyone. Fast food may be better than no food—maybe. Still, a homiletical diet of a burger and fries is not what is going to sustain congregations. Listeners notice when sermons are thrown together late on Saturday night. Good preaching requires time in quantity and duration.
“I’ve found that my best sermons are developed slowly. Like my mother’s Crock-Pot® chili, slow cooking makes for a more appetizing fare. I need time to contemplate a text in Scripture. I may schedule a couple of hours into my Palm Pilot for sermon preparation. That doesn’t always mean those hours will be productive.
“I have found it helpful to begin preparation several weeks in advance. This doesn’t add any time to the process, but it does require some planning. In any given week, I can have three different sermons cooking, each at different stages of preparation. This has two primary benefits. One is the enrichment that comes from a longer duration. I’ll admit that some of my best sermon ideas don’t occur until I’ve had a couple of weeks to stew on the text. This isn’t to say the sermon is a constant presence in my mind, but I have found that if I take the sermon off the front burner and turn it down to simmer, some interesting things can develop over time.
“The second benefit is that working on more than one sermon at a time allows for a greater sense of unity among the sermons being prepared. Similar to Crock-Pot® stew, the carrots flavor the meat, which flavors the potatoes. I often have been surprised while working on one sermon to discover an insight into a different sermon that had been deepening quietly on the back burner.” (Read the rest of the story.)