The Letter You Should Write Before Every Major Sermon

The practice is simple, takes approximately fifteen minutes, and has the potential to change the way you preach more than almost any other single adjustment to your preparation routine. Before you finalize your sermon — before the manuscript is complete, before the final outline is set — write a letter. Not to the congregation as a whole, but to one specific person.

The letter names the person (in your mind or on the page — it need not be sent), describes their current situation as you understand it, and speaks the truth of the sermon directly to them in the kind of language you would use in a pastoral conversation rather than a public address. The process of writing this letter does several things simultaneously. It forces you to name the specific person whom the sermon most needs to reach — which forces you to be specific about the human reality the sermon is addressing. It calibrates your language: the language used when speaking to one specific person in genuine care is almost always better than the language used when speaking to a generic congregation.

"The language you use when speaking to one specific person in genuine care is almost always better than the language you use when speaking to a generic congregation."

Who to Write To

Choose a different person each week, rotating through the range of people in your congregation. The new person who has been attending six weeks and has not yet decided whether this community is home. The long-time member in a season of genuine spiritual darkness who has not told you but you can see it. The teenager in the back row questioning everything. The couple whose marriage is under enormous pressure from circumstances outside their control.

Choose the person, write the letter, and then bring the sermon back into alignment with what the letter revealed. You may not use any specific language from the letter in the actual sermon. But the sermon will be shaped by having written it — will be more specific, more human, more genuinely pastoral — in ways that the people in the room will receive even when they cannot name exactly why this Sunday felt different.

How Great Preachers Develop

The great preachers — the ones who carry genuine authority, who move people toward God rather than themselves, who speak from a depth unmistakably more than skilled rhetoric — are almost never naturally gifted in any simple sense. Behind every genuinely formed preacher is a long and specific set of practices rarely discussed in the celebrations of preaching greatness. They live with the text before preparing the sermon — reading it in multiple translations, sitting with it in prayer, journaling about it without agenda, allowing the text to do something to them before they do something with it. They preach to one person. They edit ruthlessly. And they listen to recordings of their own preaching with honest critical attention — the most resisted and most productive discipline available. The preacher who never listens to themselves develops in a partial vacuum. The practice is uncomfortable. The compounded growth over years is significant.