Is Your Preaching Proportionate?

Once a year (or ideally more), I try to get out of the office to think specifically about the preaching ministry of our church. My typical process involves looking back at where we’ve been in the pulpit ministry and looking out a year or two ahead and asking where the Lord may be leading us. Included in this process is a prayerful consideration of the challenges our people are facing presently and the questions they’re asking. I also try to discern the challenges we may be facing in the year to come as well as the questions we should be asking. Sometimes as I search the Scriptures I get excited about one book or another and it happens to line up with what I believe we need. Upon returning, I run these ideas by the other pastors and members of our worship planning team and the sermons eventually make their way onto the preaching calendar.

Much more could be said about this process, but this post isn’t about the preaching planning process. This post is about preaching proportions.

Today as I was reflecting on where I’ve been in the pulpit ministry, I decided to do a little analysis. I put each book of the Bible into one of nine typical categories:

1. Pentateuch
2. Old Testament History
3. Psalms
4. Wisdom
5. Prophets
6. Gospels
7. Pauline Epistles
8. Other Epistles
9. Other NT (Acts/Revelation)

Graphically, the proportion of each segment of the Bible compared to the whole looks like this:

Then I went through and put each of my sermon texts into the appropriate categories to determine the sources of my sermons since January of 2017:

The most glaring takeaway from this graph is that I have majored in the Pauline Epistles. The other thing that jumped out at me was how little the Wisdom Literature and Pentateuch are represented in my preaching.

After looking at this graph, I decided to compare side-by-side the proportions of my preaching (blue) to the proportions each of these segments are represented in the Bible itself (red).

This graph is revealing.* Compared to the proportion of the Bible each segment comprises, my preaching seems to be quite disproportionate. Here are some of my observations in no particular order:

1. The Pentateuch is the most underrepresented segment of the Bible in my preaching. Upon reflection, this seems almost criminal! The Pentateuch lays out so much that is foundational to the rest of the Scripture that to have neglected these books so long concerns me. At the same time, though I have not preached from the texts themselves, I have not totally neglected them. Because they are so foundational to the rest of Scripture, I find myself returning to them often (especially Genesis) to give the background information necessary for understanding other biblical texts. One of my immediate takeaways is to begin planning a series in the Pentateuch.
2. A close second, in terms of the most underrepresented segment in my preaching, is the Prophets. I’m not surprised by this one. I have preached a couple of the shorter prophetic books but have not yet felt compelled to tackle an Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. If I were to do an expository series on one of these, the sheer volume of sermons it would require would dramatically alter this graph. I also suspect the length of such a series has thus far dissuaded me.
3. The third most underrepresented segment in my preaching is the Old Testament Historical books. I especially love the content in these books and have wanted to preach a series through one of them for quite some time. This graph gives me further encouragement to do that sooner than later.
4. While the second pie chart shows only a tiny sliver of my preaching coming from the Wisdom Literature, it’s only the fourth most underrepresented segment in my preaching. I have been thinking about a series in this segment for a while, but it looks to me like it can be included beyond the immediate time horizon.
5. The greatest disproportion in my preaching is the Pauline Epistles. This disproportion is going to continue to grow because I am currently in a series on 2 Corinthians. While I realize I may need to make a course correction going forward, I do not feel that I or my congregation has suffered from this emphasis. Not only are Paul’s letters treasures in themselves, but they have also led us to consider many other parts of Scripture.
6. One of the biggest surprises to me is how much more the New Testament is represented in my preaching than the Old Testament. I love the Old Testament and would have guessed there was greater balance. The graph has me wondering: given my affinity for the Old Testament, why am I not preaching from it more?
7. The only underrepresented segment of the New Testament in my preaching is the Gospels. Similar to the longer Prophets, I think that the sheer length of the Gospels and the amount of time required to do an expository series through one has caused me to put it off. One possibility for addressing this is to do a shorter series through a segment of a Gospel, or breaking a longer series into parts with other series in between.

Perhaps before asking if our preaching is proportional, we should ask the question: does it matter? I do not believe there is a Biblical mandate for our preaching to be proportional. However, as those who desire to preach the whole counsel of God, an analysis like this can reveal areas we may be neglecting in our pulpit ministries. Given the crisis of biblical literacy in today’s church, we pastors should be careful not to contribute to it by ignoring large portions of scripture.

*Another way to look at proportions would be to list various theological themes and consider how frequently each of them are represented or neglected. A much bigger project would be to see how these proportions vary among pastors by theological tradition.