How do you get ready for Sunday?
When Monday’s pastoral meeting begins, teaching pastor Dan Jarms has already been reviewing next week’s sermon text.
“I might pre-read various things weeks ahead,” Dan says. “You have to pay attention to where the book’s going, so that you’re not saying the same things over and over. What’s unique about the passage we’re in?”
Planning for services at Faith Bible Church does not just begin with the preacher, though.
“Nathan Thiry is probably the first one thinking about it,” explains John Gardner, associate pastor for music ministry. “Nathan and the team that writes the Growth Guides. The elders will talk about what book do we want to preach, what topics we want to cover, and Nathan and his team break that up.”
As Christians, we’re called to a rigorous exploration of the Bible. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom.” Dan, John, and Nathan, along with the other five pastors and many elders, deacons, and members, model this intentionality as they create opportunities throughout the week for the church to obey this command.
“There’s the weekly rhythm and the daily rhythm,” John says. “We want people who are engaged in the Word, in ongoing accountability and discipleship. The Sunday morning gathering is the springboard for all the other things that are happening in our personal life, our family life, our community life.”
Dan agrees. “It’s true in my family, and it’s true in the church family. One particular quiet time is not the game changer. It’s usually the rhythm of connecting with God.”
Weekly pastors’ meetings exist within that rhythm, when each Monday morning the pastors nail down the next sermon’s structure. But first, they give feedback on the previous day.
“Sometimes, I wish they were less nice,” Dan says with a wry smile. “Only Nathan Thiry is really willing to be ruthless. I tell them all the time, like, ‘I know it was the most amazing sermon you ever heard, but we’re trying to improve here.’”
The pastors want to preach God’s Word with excellence. They aren’t just speakers opining on the Bible. They are stewards.
Dan explains that a sermon’s purpose is to connect God to the people in the congregation. “We want to say what God says. We don’t want to say what Dan says.”
“To make a sermon excellent,” John says, “it’s got to be both content and delivery. Some people can deliver a sermon really well that’s all fluff and no content. And some people can compose something that’s great content and doesn’t land because they can’t deliver well.”
“The hardest part,” Dan adds, “is how do we take something set in a situation that was 3,000 years ago for a culture that was very different, and cross the bridge to our time so that the people today see the Word for what it really is: Sufficient. Relevant.”
"There is an arc on Sunday morning that has some unity to it"
Dan notes that relevance must begin with himself. “Sometimes I’m stuck with where the sermon is going because I haven’t taken the step to say, ‘God what do you want to do in my life with this truth?’ I was reading Matthew 23 and that’s all about hypocrisy. You say something on the outside, but on the inside you’re something else. And I’m terrified of that. We want to preach from a heart that’s already being changed by the passage.”
2 Timothy 3:16 highlights this truth: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
With the sermon’s rough structure in hand following the Monday pastors’ meeting, Dan spends the next couple of days writing, using commentaries, language studies, and other resources to flesh out a rough draft. Wednesday night, he e-mails it to his sermon prep team, a group of six people: three singles and three married former pastors.
“I have a team of six, and one person rescues my sermon every week,” Dan says. “And it’s a different person every week. I try to have a bit of a spectrum. I’m not a middle-aged woman. I’m not a 20-year-old single woman. I got married at 22, so in our series on singleness, when we were going through 1 Corinthians, I had two or three focus groups with singles just to help me get my mind around what they’re going through.”
It’s important to Dan not just what he preaches, but to whom he preaches. “I pray through our members list. Try to do it monthly. So, I’m really trying to think about what’s going to be best for the people in the room.”
Dan is encouraged when people approach him after a service, no matter what they have to say. “I just want to thank anybody who comes up to say anything, because they care, and they usually have to have some courage.” He pauses, then continues: “I’m stoic and huge, so it’s already hard to approach me. So I need to have a really welcoming attitude.”
This attitude of welcome is reflected in the lives of members at Faith, who seek out community in a variety of places, including serving in ministry together.
“At least 60% of our members have a scheduled way to help the church,” Dan says.
“They’re not necessarily sitting home and reading sermon manuscripts or anything like that,” John adds. “They’re just doing the Christian life with people.”
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul offers the analogy of the church being the body of Christ: “For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.”
As members of a body, it is important to note where we may be weak and another is strong. Even if you are an eye, it doesn’t mean you see everything.
“Clarity is really hard for me,” Dan says as he breaks down the feedback he receives from the prep team. “That’s where almost all of the questions show up. ‘I’m not following you here.’ ‘I don’t understand the connection you’re making.’ Do my illustrations and applications work? I think my biggest struggle is that I usually think I will be clearer through more explanation…and that’s always an error. I’ve got to clarify by simplifying.”
While the majority of Dan’s sermon writing happens over an eight-hour stretch on Wednesday, the next few days each contain a two-hour chunk of editing. By Thursday afternoon, the sermon notes, songs, and Scripture readings for Sunday are sent to Faith’s communications team, which e-mails them out to the whole church Friday morning.
“A normal weekly routine for our church members,” John says, “is they get the e-mail and they’re looking over the text. A surprising number of people look over the notes. They’ll listen to the songs on Spotify. So whatever we’re doing on Sunday, they’ve been thinking about it.”
Come Sunday morning, Dan is awake before the sun is up to run through the sermon one more time. “Most of sermon preparation is just work,” he says. “Prayerful work, but it’s work. I think one of the biggest issues I had to fight was I had to schedule earlier. Most everything if you start earlier, even if you don’t put in any more time, you have more time to percolate on it. Especially with the Scriptures, that seems important.”
Sunday morning is the big deadline, and there is a specific vision for how the service unfolds. “There is an arc on Sunday morning that has some unity to it,” Dan says. “It’s a worship service. We fight against the music being worship and the sermon being something else.”
"We don’t want it to feel segmented. Everything that happens, we’re telling the same story."
“We don’t want it to feel segmented,” John says. “Everything that happens, we’re telling the same story. To an extent, we’re telling the same story every week.”
That story is the gospel of Jesus.
“We want the gospel to be highlighted four or five times,” Dan says. “One of those is the songs, because a lot of them are gospel-centered. The glory of God is our call to worship. We see who God is, and we respond in humility. That’s the gravity of sin. Then the grandeur of grace: sinners have received grace. The sermon is going to carry an element of the gospel, but then we’re also going to move to the Lord’s Supper. And then songs will fit in a variety of ways. Church life will fit in a variety of ways. Then we send everybody out with a benediction.”
“We want to view everything we do as just this cohesive whole thing,” John says. “It equips you for the normal Christian life throughout the week.”
Foundationally, the goal is simple. “We want Jesus at the center of everything,” Dan says. “From the micro to macro. We’re trying to tell the world it will be infinitely better for you if Jesus was at the center. But we have to tell ourselves that every Sunday morning, too.”
So how do you get ready for Sunday?
Maybe you read the passage when it’s e-mailed on Friday. Maybe you listen to the worship songs. Maybe your Tuesday night Growth Group works through the Word.
Much like the Sunday service itself, there should be a unity to our rhythms, from the micro to the macro. Our lives are not meant to be a sharp divide between church, work, and family, any more than Sunday is meant to be segmented between music, sermon, and Scripture.
Everything that happens, we’re living the same story.
Brandon Sullivan is an author, poet, and editor who participates in poetry open mic events and is always working on his next book project. He became a member of Faith Bible Church in 2025 and lives in Spokane Valley with his wife and daughter.
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