More Important How You Finish

During March Madness this year, I heard a commentator say something that stuck: Winners want to be coached. I wrote it down because I knew it applied to more than basketball.

A few days later, I sat down with Don Wilson for the Better Preaching Podcast, and he proved it. Don pastored Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, Arizona, for over three decades, preaching to 25,000 people a week by the time he stepped away. Six live services on a weekend. No executive pastor for most of that run. And the thing that defined his preaching more than any of that was this: every Saturday, he walked off the stage after the four o’clock service, and four or five people followed him into a room and beat his sermon up.

That joke didn’t work. That illustration was too long. Why did you say it that way?

Then it was up to Don to decide what to change before the next service. He did this for years. Not because he was insecure, but because he wanted to get better.

Here’s the part that convicted me. Don said that in his post-ministry years, he’s worked with roughly five hundred pastors. Most of them say they want critique. But when you actually give it to them — when you ask hard questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing — most of them don’t want it at all.

I think he’s right. And I think I know why. Preaching is personal. You pour yourself into a message all week, you stand up and deliver it, and then someone tells you the story ran long or the conclusion fell flat. That hurts. But then again, growth usually hurts.

Don also said something about giving his wife to critique his preaching. He told me: I don’t need a wife who worships me. I need a wife who loves me. He meant that he needs someone honest enough to say, That came across a little judgmental, or You lost them in the middle. Not because she enjoyed saying it, but because he’d created the space for her to say it and she loved him enough to walk into that space.

The green room is comfortable. The critique room is where you get better. Most of us know which one we prefer.

We also know which one we really need.

Nobody warned Walter Neuenschwander that the panic was coming.
But somebody warned me. Early in my preaching life, a seasoned minister told a room full of young preachers that one day that, probably about a year into full-time ministry, you’re going to show up on a Monday morning and think you’ve got nothing left. You’ve preached everything you know. The cupboard is bare.
Walter heard the same warning in seminary. And by the grace of God, neither of us ever hit that wall. Here’s why: process.
The idea is simple, even if the discipline isn’t. Get six weeks ahead of your Sunday sermon. It starts with knowing your preaching calendar a year out. Then, when you’re six weeks from a given message, start writing. Put something on paper. Let it marinate. Then pick it up the week before you preach it, edit it, talk through it — literally out loud, multiple times — and then step into the pulpit.
That’s it. That’s the secret.
I know what you’re thinking. Six weeks ahead? That’s impossible. It felt that way to me once too. But here’s the advice that cracked it open for me, borrowed from Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change: don’t try to get six weeks ahead. Just try to get one week ahead. Write the sermon you plan to preach in two weeks first. Then write the sermon you plan to preach in two days. Do that for six weeks and suddenly you’re there.
And what you get on the other side is something preachers rarely talk about: your Saturdays back. Your family back. The margin to handle a funeral, a crisis, a season where life throws fifteen curveballs in three months, without your Sunday sermon being the thing that suffers.
Walter put it well. When you’re six weeks out, you’re not panicking. And when you’re not panicking, you’re not just surviving until Sunday. You’re actually thinking. Crafting. Letting a sermon breathe before you have to breathe life into it from a pulpit.
Ministry is a long game. The preachers who last are almost always the ones who learned to stop running behind and start running ahead.
Six weeks out is a great place to be.