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Of everything you do to help your church balance God’s purposes, nothing may be more important than your weekend messages. And it’s not about your sermon style either. Purpose driven preaching is first and foremost about intentionally building sermons around the five purposes (worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism). Here are a few points to consider as you try to do this within your own preaching ministry.

1. Balance your preaching schedule by purpose.

If you want your preaching to be balanced, you have to connect your messages to God’s purposes. The fact is, every message you preach should be connected to a New Testament purpose of the Church. Unfortunately, we often center our messages on the purposes we feel most inclined toward. Half your messages may be focused on evangelism or discipleship or ministry. But unbalanced preaching will lead to an unbalanced church.

When you sit down to plan your preaching schedule, identify which purposes relate to each message. You should be able to see at this point if your schedule leans too much toward one purpose – or even avoids a purpose. Then you can correct the problem.

But remember, just because you preach a message related to discipleship doesn’t mean that you have to ignore your unchurched guests. You still should make sure that whatever you preach is understandable to everyone. It just means that the focus is on maturity. Even people who aren’t believers need to grow in maturity! It’s just that their first step of maturity is accepting Christ as their Savior – then they’ll need to know how to grow.
 
2. Ask for commitment by purpose.

Purposeful preaching is also about helping your people take their next step in God’s purposes. Ask yourself on every sermon: what do I want people to do when they hear this message? Do I want them to accept Christ, join a small group, join the church, get involved in a ministry, or maybe some combination of these goals? Over time your people should have opportunities to make commitments in all of the purposes.

We tend to think about giving people an opportunity to make a first-time commitment to Christ and even a commitment to church membership in our messages. But if we are serious about helping our people live purpose driven lives, we need to be encouraging other commitments as well.

Make sure you are providing opportunities for people to not only make these commitments, but to demonstrate the commitments as well. Want people to join small groups? Provide a place where they can sign up right in the service.

3. Evaluate the results by purpose.

Evaluation is an important part of any ministry. We can’t improve on anything if we don’t evaluate what we’re doing well and what we’re not. Preaching is no different. We should be able to see that lives are being changed by our preaching.

But be careful that you’re evaluating your messages on the right criteria. If you are going to plan your preaching and ask for commitments by purpose, then you better evaluate your success by purpose as well. Don’t just evaluate your messages on how many people come to Christ at the end, although that’s an important indicator. The question is: how many people took a spiritual step after the message?

This article has been adapted from Tom Holladay’s series 11 Ways to Be Purpose Driven.