The Three Passes I Make Before Preaching

The hours between Saturday-night manuscript and Sunday-morning pulpit are the most common place where a sermon improves or quietly degrades. Most ministers know this and have something they do in that window. What I do is three passes through the manuscript, each looking for something different. The whole thing takes about an hour, spread across Saturday evening and Sunday morning, and it has saved me from things I would otherwise have preached.

Pass one: claims

The first pass is for verification. Read the manuscript with a pen. For every claim that depends on lexical, historical, or cross-reference work — every Greek gloss, every "in first-century Galilee," every cross-reference — ask whether you have personally checked the source.

If yes, mark it.

If no, check it now. If the check confirms the claim, mark it. If the check breaks the claim, fix the claim or cut it. The cuts always feel painful in the moment and are always right.

This is the pass where most pulpit trouble gets caught. A confident claim that came in during the writing, on Friday, that you did not check then because you were tired, gets caught here. Better caught than preached.

Pass two: rhythm

The second pass is for delivery. Read the manuscript aloud. Not silently — aloud, in the voice you preach in, at the volume you preach at.

You are listening for two things. Sentences that work on the page and not in the mouth. And places where the rhythm breaks — a long sentence in a stretch of short ones, an unmotivated transition, a paragraph that sounds like it was written for a paper rather than for a pulpit.

Mark these with pencil. Fix them on the spot when the fix is small. When the fix is bigger, mark the section and let it ripen until tomorrow.

The aloud reading also catches a category of preacher's tic — the clearing-throat phrase, the unconscious filler, the habitual reach for a particular word. Most ministers are not aware of their tics until they hear themselves in their own mouths. The aloud reading is the first time you hear the sermon as your congregation will.

Pass three: the listener

The third pass is on Sunday morning, in the shower if I am being honest, and again in the car. This pass is for the congregation. I am imagining specific people in specific seats. The widow in the second pew. The young couple still figuring out their marriage. The deacon whose father died in October. The visitor whose first time this is.

The question on this pass is whether the sermon does pastoral work for these specific people. Are there any words that will land harder than I intended on a wound that I forgot to think about? Are there any moments where the sermon is glib in a way the room cannot bear? Is there anything I am about to say that I would not say if I were sitting next to one of these people right now?

If yes, fix it before the pulpit. Sometimes the fix is a softening. Sometimes the fix is an addition — a beat, a pastoral aside, a moment of acknowledgment. Sometimes the fix is to cut a sentence I was proud of.

This pass is the one I would give up last. The congregation is the reason for the work.

The shape of the ritual

Three passes. About an hour total. Claims, rhythm, listener. Each looking for something different. Together they do most of the work of getting a Saturday-night manuscript into a Sunday-morning sermon a minister can stand under.

The ritual is small. The improvement it produces, week over week, is the kind that compounds quietly across a long ministry.