How to structure a sermon

We think people’s attention spans are slipping, but when it comes to preaching to young people, the media they consume is evidence that they can take a lot of information on board if it is structured in the right manner.

For example, the 3 act structure is a couple of millennia old. Yet, it is still a method that produces Hollywood hits, Netflix’s most-watched series and, yes, even attention-gripping communication with a live crowd.

Take a deep theological dive into the Gospel of Mark, and you will repeatedly see storytelling and story structure constantly engaging the reader and listener. The Gospel of Mark was written somewhere around 65AD, and the same techniques still grip hearts and minds today.

For those working out how to structure a sermon, we need to keep it simple and to the point. Do not ramble and take your message off on tangents. Instead, have a clearly defined path taking your listener from conflict to resolution and enabling them to act upon the message. We’re going to look at a few ways to do exactly that.

Know the goal of your sermon.

Stephen Covey is best known for helping people begin with the end in mind. In his book, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, he continually emphasises the need to know the end result of what you are aiming to do. This is as true for preaching as anything else.

You don’t just need to know how to preach to young people, but also why. Why are you sharing this message and what do you imagine the end result will be?

Before putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard, I highly recommend spending an hour daydreaming about your message. A more spiritual and leader-type phrase is ‘envision‘! Wow, did you get chills?

Take the title, topic, and/or key ideas and literally close your eyes and play out the delivery of this message in your mind. You might want to put on some reflective music or go for a solitary walk. Give your mind space to visualise and get a sense of the power, passion and product of your words.

I’m essentially asking you to meditate on the message. To meditate is to simply and intently think upon an idea. See in your mind what the end result of your sermon will be; as you do this, it will be easier to map it out in a sermon structure.

What are the 3 parts of a sermon?

The 3 core parts of any form of communication are:

1. Beginning
2. The Middle
3. The End

Humans love rhythm, symmetry and cadence/flow.

Have you ever met someone who can’t stand a crooked bookshelf, sloping picture frames or odd socks? Think of some toddlers who like to naturally line up all of their toys.

Having a clearly defined start, middle and end will give a sense of journey and completion during your message.

The simplest way of thinking about your message is the start setting you off towards your message goal, saying something useful in the middle and then helping people enact it towards the end.

As we talk more about structure, have these fundamental principles in mind.

The start is about opening up the audience to you as a speaker and introducing them to the conflict and challenge the message will bring.

The middle is the meat of the message that will be the key focus – think about it as something to mentally chew on! Here they will learn something new, gain insight and be challenged in their everyday lives.

The end is about bringing resolution to your message. Do not leave people in limbo.

Give them an action point.

Minister to them in a response time.

Bring a sense of finality to your talk.

Start with a Bible passage

If you have time for nothing else, focus on and remember a key passage. You should rarely come to deliver a message without giving yourself a good amount of time to prepare. However, if on the rare occasion you are caught short, knowing the passage inside and out is crucial. Everything in the message is built out of the revelation and life change that comes from knowing the truth contained in scripture. Do not shortcut this part.

Having read, reflected and prayed through the key passage of my talk, I write it down (or copy and paste it into a doc). It’s normally introduced in the middle of the message unless I make a slight reference to it at the beginning to tease out where the message might go.

Stick with a key passage and resist the temptation to jump around lots of different scriptures. It’s okay to have a couple of verses from different places in the Bible to support the main passage you are teaching from, but messages stick best when you can dig down into one key idea.

Having written the passage down, I can then build out the thing I have learned, been challenged by and discovered how these truths illuminate an area of our lives. I can write forward and work on the end and how the passage is to be applied. I could work backwards and reverse engineer how we arrived at learning from the passage.

If I run out of time to finish preparing, I will at least know the passage well enough to rely on something happening at the moment of delivery. Sometimes life issues happen and I have no margin in my week to finish preparing properly. If I don’t have much prep time, I can posit rhetorical questions and draw observations as necessary because I know the scripture well.

Please resist preaching on something you have not fully explored in your Christian faith. You cannot easily lead people to a place you have never visited. Remember your aim is to help young people develop spirituality, so be in that same state of being yourself.

How do you lay out a sermon?

	TITLE
Goal	What do I want the end result of this message to be?
Key Scriptures	e.g Matthew 5:1-7, Mark 4:4
Intro	Introduce yourself, and share a personal anecdote that ties into your message.
Content	Use one of the four models below
Conclusion	Round it off and apply the message. What do you want people to do about this?
Response	Is there a chance to respond to the message?

There is beauty to writing a sermon out in a journal, but you may find it easier to type it up. I use Evernote quite extensively for laying out a sermon as I can tag and cross-reference everything I have taught.

Whatever you decide, begin with writing out the title at the top of the page, make a note of any scriptures being used, and when and where this message was preached. You may wish to use parts of this message again and it is useful to note where it has been used previously.

Next, write your goal. Have it clear from the beginning where this message is heading. If you signup you can download our free template here and it gives an example of the layout.

Depending on which of the four models you use from this article, write out the subheading of each section to your talk. Copy out the Bible passage and begin to note anything you have learned from this passage.

Add in some sermon illustrations to each section. Try not to have more than one or two for each section and make sure they help make the teaching relatable. Think about Jesus’ parables and how they took everyday situations and tied them into Biblical truths.

Whether you work from the beginning to the end or like me from the middle outward starting with the passage, make sure each section links into the next.

Think about how your words will transition from one section to the next. Is there a link from finishing the introduction, to talking about how we all struggle with the topic of your talk?

Model 1 – The 3-point sermon model

This could be considered the ol’ reliable of preaching models. Take a core idea from your reflections on scripture and break them down into three aspects of the overall topic. This model works best when each point is built on the previous one. It can also be a helpful framework for alteration points, having each one begin with the same letter or having them somewhat rhyme.

An example would be a talk on the parable of the sower:

Rather than read the whole passage, particularly with young listeners, I would pluck out a few verses and paraphrase the context.

E.G.

	LET GROW WHAT WAS SOWN
Goal	To keep our hearts open to God’s word
Key Scriptures	Matthew 13:1-23
Intro	Introduce yourself, talk about a time when something undealt within your life tripped you up.
Content	1) Seeds on the Path don’t last  – Is your heart closed or open to what God wants to say and do in your life? 2) Seeds with Weeds Impede – Do you allow things in your heart that strangle the word of God? 3) Seed on Rocks don’t take stock – Are there things stopping you from going deeper in your faith?
Conclusion	Is there something you want to lay down that is holding you back from God’s word growing in your heart?
Response	Is there a chance to respond to the message?

Each point might have an anecdote from my life or somebody else’s. I may get 3 people up to hold a symbol for each point and stand with each as I make the point. The above is the outline and key ideas. I then begin writing to flesh out each area ensuring I have something to refer to if I get stuck.

So what are the pros and cons of this model?

Pros	Cons
It’s simple, and clear and each point can challenge a variety of listeners.	It’s predictable.
Once you have exhausted a point, you know where your message needs to go next.	It can lead to too many tangents.
Rhythm, rhyme and alliteration can help bring ideas that make the message stick in people’s minds.	Andy Stanley’s model argues that each point could be a sermon in and of itself (not always, but usually).
	People can forget the point of the message if there is more than one simple point.
	If it’s a topical sermon, you can end up jumping all over the Bible making people’s heads spin.

 

Model 2 – The 3-act model

The 3 act model has quickly become my favourite. It’s an ancient story technique that is best taught in Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’. It’s the main framework for virtually every blockbuster Hollywood film and has been proven time and time again as an effective method for helping people grasp the story.

It is essentially broken into 3 chunks that move people from an old normal to a new normal. The 3 acts take you on a transformation and an overcoming of a conflict. Split your time between the 3 acts into quarters; spend 1/4 of your time on Act 1, 2/4 on Act 2 and 1/4 on Act 3.

Act 1 is our current state of being and the conflict that we all might face. Act 2 is facing the conflict and the moments of transformation. Act 3 is the result of the dramatic transformation and our new normal.

Since the best stories are grounded in dramatic transformations of human experiences, the model lends itself well to preaching that is primarily about transforming hearts and lives.

Something like Isaiah 61 works well in this model; I can see around 18 different sermons in this chapter alone.

Act1: The conflict in Act 1 must be relatable and something that is far from God’s desire for our lives. For example, we all have moments of anxiety – the kind that stops us in our tracks.

Act 2: This is where we introduce the Bible passage and our experience of God working in the middle of that particular conflict. Here in our example of anxiety, we share stories of God being our refuge and strength; ways in which we can experience God helping us walk through our anxieties.

Act 3: Is the transformed state from having encountered God. In our example we talk about what living in God’s peace might look like and how we can encounter that peace. From here it is a natural point to lead people in a response to the message.

The pros and cons are:

Pros	Cons
A time-tested method of storytelling.	It generally works best for emotive and contrasting ideas.
Focus is on 1 key idea and so easy to remember.	You can alienate people who are at differing stages of the faith journey.
It takes people on an emotional journey.	If the journey of the talk is not dramatic enough, the message can feel lifeless.
The Bible becomes an anchor and the message pivots from start to finish nice and symmetrically around the teaching.
You can weave in lots of mnemonics, rhetoric, chiasms and other useful story techniques.

 

Model 3 – The Bullet point model

This model can work well with topical sermons, but I find it more fitting for going through a passage verse by verse. You begin and end this sermon in the same manner as the others, however, the content is more about quickfire lessons or nuggets of truth.

It could take the shape of five, six, seven or more points about your subject. For example, eight-character attributes from the life of David. Or, five things that build your faith. It’s essentially an expanded version of the 3-point sermon but you’re trying to sow out several ideas in the hope that some will stick.

The pros and cons are:

Pros	Cons
Lots of exciting ideas engage a wide variety of people.	The points can all get lost as listeners are overwhelmed.
A sense of pace and therefore interest.	You fail to get depth as there is no time to dig into the ideas.
It’s not commonly seen by preachers. Variety is the spice of life!	It could feel more like a lecture than a sermon.
It feels like you are drawing a lot from the passage.	It can be difficult to help people with a clear application for the message.

Model 4 – The Andy Stanley Model

One of the better-known models these days, and if I’m not using the 3-act model, I’ll use this one. In his book, ‘Communicating for Change’, Andy Stanley lays out an easy and memorable model that drives people forward to the life application of the sermon.

This model prefers you to make one point and one point only. Stanley argues that each point of a sermon can be a sermon in itself and therefore we should dig down into one main idea. Also, people tend to remember one thing and so help them do that better by reducing your message to lean into that one idea.

His basic structure is to talk about ‘Me‘, ‘We‘, ‘God‘. ‘You‘, and finally ‘We‘.

In some ways, it’s a 5 Act structure (or a stretched 3 act structure) similar to the outline of a play. Our one point is to be expressed on five levels that begin and end with moving people deeper into the topic.

Similar to the 3 Act model, we begin with ‘Me‘, the personal conflict – talk about your personal experience with the sermon topic. Follow this with ‘We‘, how ‘We‘ all share this experience and pain.

We then move to speak about how ‘God‘ breaks into the situation and transforms us.

As a result, we then challenge our listeners with “what are ‘You’ going to do with this?”. How will it impact their lives as an individual?

Finally, talk about the wider implications if ‘We‘ all live out the lesson learned. It’s no longer just the individual, but the community. What will our lives collectively look like if we take this sermon and apply it?

Pros	Cons
Excellent for a life application message.	Spiritual development sometimes requires several points to be hit through a message. One topic can sometimes focus more on outward change than inward change.
Very easy structure to memorise your sermon.
Easy for people to get the core idea of the sermon.
Proven track record as effective for wider audiences.

 

There are many ways to mix and match techniques. Be brave and try out a variety of methods. Pay attention to the media and what works in your culture. Be a continual student of storytelling and communication and looks for ways to assimilate techniques to help you connect your message with young people. 

Recommended Reading:

You can find these on Audible – you can get a free trial by clicking here and cancelling while still keeping the free Audiobook!

Stanley, Andy, Communication For A Change

Keller, Timothy, Preaching

Aristotle, Poetics

Synder, Blake, Save The Cat