Church of Christ Sermon Preparation

Three Churches, One Name

Three unrelated bodies share versions of this name and they turn up in the same search results constantly. This page means the congregations that trace to the Restoration Movement of the early 1800s, hold no additional scripture, and answer to no headquarters. Not the mainline body with a national synod, and not the tradition founded by Joseph Smith.

We have written the full disambiguation and how this tradition reads scripture at Church of Christ Bible study, including its founding documents. Rather than repeat it, this page assumes it and moves to what nobody else covers: what all of that means when you sit down on a Tuesday to write Sunday's sermon.

Nobody Can Tell You What Order to Preach In

Most denominational preaching guides assume a fixed liturgical position for the sermon. That assumption does not hold here, and the reason is doctrinal rather than casual. With no governing board and no convention, there is no body with standing to prescribe one.

One congregation states the principle plainly. Writing on what the correct order of worship is, they list what the first-century assemblies did: prayer, citing 1 Timothy 2:8; singing, citing Hebrews 2:12; the Lord's Supper, citing 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; preaching, citing Acts 5:42; and giving, citing 1 Corinthians 16:1-2.

Then they draw the line that matters for a preacher planning a service. Their words: Some congregations have the Lord's Supper before the sermon; some have it after the sermon. Either way is fine. Some congregations have six songs; some have seven. Some congregations have two prayers, and some have three.

And the conclusion: The order of services is not what matters; what matters is whether the services are conducted in an orderly way, without confusion and chaos. The verse behind that is 1 Corinthians 14:40, let all things be done decently and in order, which the same piece is careful to say has been over-read by some as a command to fix one specific order permanently.

The practical consequence for you is simple. Ask the elders where the sermon sits in your congregation, because there is no answer that holds everywhere and nobody outside your building can tell you.

The Sermon Never Has the Hour to Itself

Weekly communion is the single biggest structural difference between preparing a sermon here and preparing one in a tradition that observes the Supper monthly or quarterly.

It means the assembly's emotional center of gravity is not the sermon. Something else in that hour is always going to be doing the heaviest theological work, every week, without fail. A sermon written as though it is the summit of the service will fight the service.

It also constrains length in a way that is rarely stated out loud. Five elements have to fit, and one of them is not negotiable and not shortenable. Whatever time the Supper, the singing, the prayers and the giving take, the sermon gets what is left.

The useful adjustment is to know which side of the Supper you are on. Preaching before it means you can build toward it and let it land the point. Preaching after it means the congregation has already been to the table, and a sermon that tries to re-create that moment is competing with something that already happened.

The Man in the Pulpit Was Probably Not Trained at a Seminary

A great deal of sermon-preparation advice assumes seminary training: Greek and Hebrew exegesis, homiletics coursework, a supervising professor. In Churches of Christ that assumption often does not hold, and the alternative is worth understanding because it shapes what a preacher actually has to work with.

Schools of preaching are the common path. Memphis School of Preaching describes itself as having spent almost sixty years training men to, in its words, preach the Word, citing 2 Timothy 4:2. It runs a two-year program.

Sunset International Bible Institute in Lubbock has operated since 1962 and describes a rigorous two-year Bible program comprising over 40 courses and 128 credit hours. The governance detail is the telling one: the school operates under the oversight of the Sunset elders, who serve as its board of directors.

That is congregational autonomy applied to preacher training. The school answers to a local eldership rather than to a denominational accrediting body, which is entirely consistent with a movement that has no headquarters.

What it means practically is that the toolkit varies enormously from one preacher to the next, and that advice assuming a shared seminary vocabulary will miss a lot of the people it is aimed at.

Authority Is the Question, Not Structure

Because no form is prescribed, the pressure in this tradition falls somewhere else. The question a Church of Christ sermon has to answer is not whether it was expository or topical. It is whether the thing being asked of the congregation can be shown from the text.

That is the working end of a movement built on taking the New Testament as the only rule of faith and practice. A sermon that lands a point beautifully but cannot establish scriptural authority for what it wants people to do has failed on the terms this tradition actually applies.

So the preparation order runs backwards from a lot of homiletics advice. Establish what the text authorizes first. Build the structure around that. The shape of the sermon is a delivery decision. Whether the text supports the ask is the sermon.

What This Page Does Not Claim

Written by an outsider from documents this tradition published about itself. Every quotation is linked below, so check them.

Then apply the same scepticism to the sentences here that are not quotations. A movement with no governing text cannot be summarised the way a confessional one can, and any writer who says Churches of Christ do X is describing a sample, whether or not they admit it. This page quotes one congregation in Texas and two schools in Tennessee and Texas. Three data points from thousands of autonomous congregations.

So read the quotations as what those specific bodies said about themselves, which is exactly what they are, and treat the connecting argument as one outsider's reading. Your own eldership outranks all of it.