While the weekly sermon is only a piece of a church's overall discipleship strategy, it’s an important and prominent piece that publicly conveys the church’s discipleship values. That means the question of how to best communicate the timeless Word of God is always timely and important.

We live in an era of increasing biblical illiteracy, so the pastor’s role as the primary communicator of God’s Word has never been more necessary and critical. The point of tension is how to communicate the Word in a way that is understandable and accessible to believers and unbelievers.

At the same time, in a culture where everything is professionally branded and people have been trained to respond to nicely packaged and easy-to-use products, the church can use a similar approach to appeal to an audience that is increasingly inoculated against the church’s traditional approaches to communication.

In this Perspectives, we are addressing whether it’s more effective to preach in a series branded according to a particular topic or issue or to preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible. To be clear, the issue here is not simply a question of expository versus topical preaching. It’s an issue of whether or not to brand or theme your sermon series. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Communicators should consciously and strategically decide how they will address the concerns from these two perspectives in order to faithfully execute Paul’s command to Timothy to “Preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2).

Preaching Sermon Series Branding
One of the most effective tools for reaching people outside your church and discipling people inside your church is sermon series branding. Sermon series branding is creating themes for each sermon series along with brand assets to engage your audience in a dynamic way. Sermon series branding utilizes culture, leverages the gifts and abilities of the team and provides a creative way to communicate God’s Word. Church leaders should utilize sermon series branding because it makes sermons…

Sermon series branding utilizes culture, leverages the gifts and abilities of the team and provides a creative way to communicate God’s Word.

Relatable. Branding sermon series is an engaging way to make sermons relatable to your audience. It puts the cookies on the lower shelf for those new to church, without compromising the message itself. Good series branding will utilize titles, taglines or elements of things people are already familiar with, and it allows easy entry and greater receptivity to the message itself. Eight to ten series a year, each four to six weeks long, is recommended. Gather your team in the fall and begin praying and seeking God about what He would say to the church during the next year. Then find engaging and relevant ways to brand those series.

Practical. Series branding naturally lends itself to practical application, because you keep the message connected to an overall central theme that runs throughout the series. Series topics and branding are often relevant to life and allow people to grab onto practical handles of the truth being communicated. You can also use exegetical messages in topical sermon series. For example, create a series on marriage, but preach through the Song of Solomon. In addition, it is very helpful to create Bible reading plans people can use throughout the week that allow them to engage with the message and solidify the practical application they’ve received.

Invitable. This really isn’t a word, but you get the drift. Branding sermon series in a creative and engaging way increases the likelihood people will invite their friends and family to come to church. When sermon series are relatable, practical, and engaging, there will be a buzz about each week of the series, and people will want to invite others to experience what they are experiencing.

Create invite cards with the series brand on it, wear T-shirts and wristbands and do mailers and giveaways that leave a lasting impression of the series, and therefore the truth they’ve learned in that series.

Our goal is to reach individuals far from God and make disciples of all people. Let’s use every tool in our belt to create ways to help people find and follow Jesus!

Preaching Through Books of the Bible
Now more than ever, churches should offer systematic discipleship created, in part, from systematic Bible teaching. If preaching is like feeding people with God’s Word, preaching in series can be like eating all meat for four weeks, followed by four weeks of vegetables and then four weeks of fruit. On the other hand, preaching through books of the Bible gives you opportunity to have a balanced diet every Sunday over a long period of time. A consistently healthy consumption of spiritual food will produce healthy disciples.

Preaching through books of the Bible allows listeners to dig into a certain portion of Scripture. By the time you're finished with a book, they’ll know how that book fits into the overarching story of God’s Word, the particular messages the author wanted to convey and the author’s unique perspective. As a result, listeners gain a certain mastery over portions of Scripture that will help them, in turn, learn even more of God’s Word. The accumulation of this knowledge is what we call biblical literacy.

Preaching through books of the Bible allows listeners to dig into a certain portion of Scripture.

Preachers are creatures of habit, tending to return time and again to a handful of pet subjects or Scriptures. Preaching through a book of the Bible will help you avoid that trap and allow you to cover the full range of biblical topics. Rather than restricting you to one book, preaching this way allows you to pull in supporting Scriptures from the whole Bible, demonstrating the consistency of the whole counsel of God.   

The average churchgoer now attends church just 1.7 times per month, meaning they’ll only get half of any four-week series you preach anyway. But if you preach through books of the Bible, it’s likely to create an immersive experience over many months, and people can jump in anywhere, never feeling they’ve missed a large part of the series.

The amount of time and energy spent branding and promoting a series is enormous. It sometimes feels as though every series has to be bigger, better and more entertaining than the last. In many churches, every series has its own logo, screen backgrounds, handouts, videos, etc. Some pastors and teams simply don’t even have the creative expertise to brand series in that way. When preaching through books of the Bible, that energy can go into other areas such as creatively illustrating a message or promoting other discipleship opportunities offered by the church.

The beauty of preaching through books of the Bible for the preacher or teacher is that he or she doesn’t have to spend much time thinking about what to preach. Instead, time can be invested strategizing how the preaching will be creatively communicated and effectively applied for maximum life transformation.

This article was originally printed in the August/September issue of Influence. For more print content, subscribe.