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Preaching Today: According to your book The Big Idea, the teaching staff at Community Christian Church practices group sermon preparation on a weekly basis. What led your team to this practice?

Dave Ferguson: We stumbled into this a long time ago, and we love it. The point person on our teaching team is Tim Sutherland. When we started Community Christian Church, Tim was actually on staff at another church in Ohio. We had become good friends, so I called him every week to talk through the message I was working on. When he started his own counseling practice in Chicago, he eventually came on staff at CCC. When we went multi-site, it forced our hand to embrace a team approach to sermon preparation. Because some of our sites receive teaching via video and some have a "live" person teaching, we needed multiple teachers. When we wondered how we were going to do it, what Tim and I had done over the phone in a long-distance friendship became a model for what we did on a weekly basis.

I see two different kinds of teaching teams out there. Some teaching teams are like a baseball team with a five-man pitching rotation. You have your ace, the pitcher who's second in the rotation, the third, and so on and so forth. Everybody takes the mound, but one at a time. You're rooting for the pitcher on the mound, but the other four pitchers are sitting on the bench, waiting their turn. That's not the kind of teaching team we are. Our teaching team is more like a basketball team. A basketball team has five players on the court at all times. Everybody needs to know how to handle the ball, pass the ball, dribble the ball, and shoot the ball to score. You'll have some people on a basketball team whose gifts may be in scoring, passing, or dribbling the ball, but you need everybody. Without one of those players on the court, you're at a huge disadvantage. Our teaching team is more like a basketball team in that every week, everybody is counted upon to contribute to "win the game."

We've found that this approach to sermon preparation is remarkably efficient. We get a better message in less time because of the power of collaboration and synergy. I used to spend 20–24 hours a week creating a message. Now I spend 10–15 hours a week. It frees up a whole day for leadership development or artist development.

One of the great things about this preparation process is that you never give a bad message. Some sermons are better than others, but because you have so many people involved in the process, it's practically impossible to lay an egg. On a scale of 1–10, your sermon might be a 7 one week. But you're never going to end up with a 3 or a 4, because too many people are working together on it.

Who are the key people involved in your group sermon preparation?

Jon Ferguson [Community Pastor], Tim Sutherland [Teaching Team Leader], Earl Ferguson [Campus Pastor], and I [Lead Pastor] compose the primary infrastructure of our teaching team at CCC. Adding nuance to each meeting is our New Thing network. The New Thing network is part of CCC's vision to be a catalyst for reproducing churches that are relentlessly dedicated to helping people find their way back to God. We have around 13 affiliate churches across the country, and they are all invited to come to our teaching team meetings via teleconferencing or videoconferencing. They all get a chance to listen in and contribute. A lot of voices have been added to our weekly conversations!

Describe what a typical group meeting looks like.

We meet every Tuesday afternoon from 1:15–3:00 to discuss a message that will be given in 7–8 weeks. We call it the 105 fastest minutes of the week. We gather in a room—some face-to-face, some virtually—and Tim Sutherland sets the stage by focusing us on the task at hand. For the first 15 minutes, he reminds us of the big idea for the message—our bull's-eye for the upcoming sermon. We then identify the burning issues the message needs to address and the desired outcomes we'd like to see. We like for the group to think in terms of head, heart, and hands. How do we want people to think differently? How do we want people to feel differently? What do we want people to do differently? We want people to leave having been changed. We want them to live differently and not just recite what they just heard. We also ask, "Where is Jesus in the message?" We always want to make sure that the sermon is Christocentric.

After we've determined issues related to head, heart, and hands and have made sure the sermon is Christocentric, we enter into a time of creative brainstorming. Because we know the big ideas for many of the upcoming sermons, we put giant Post-it notes up on the wall and throw out all the different thoughts we've had, whether they be stories or other things we've run across throughout the week. This brainstorming session takes about 45 minutes.

We then spend the next half hour structuring the sermon. We determine how many movements the sermon will have. We weave in the best thoughts that we've written down on the giant Post-It notes.

After we finish structuring the sermon, we spend the last 15 minutes gaining consensus. We've all given our best thoughts, but we need to make sure we're all committed to the finished product. Once consensus is found, three or four people from CCC and the New Thing network are asked to write up the sermon.

Preaching Today: When the initial meeting is done, what are the next steps you take as a group?

Dave Ferguson: Our Teaching Team Leader, Tim Sutherland, usually puts together the introduction, and those who have been appointed various tasks take the notes from the meeting and type them up. Each person has a week to get their portion of the message done. After all the parts of the sermon have been gathered, Tim edits the manuscript, creating what we call our 1.0. At this point we're seven weeks out from the actual sermon delivery, and we already have the initial draft of the sermon manuscript!

The heat gets turned up again on the Thursday and Friday before the Saturday or Sunday the message will be delivered. We've had our 1.0 for quite some time, and we almost always have more content than we need. We often have to spend a bit of time eliminating material. Those who will be teaching the message take the 1.0 and usually change it so much that we have a 5.0 before it actually gets taught! Every time someone makes a change, they e-mail everybody else in the group. They simply add a little note that says, "Ran across a great story; put this in!" or "This piece of Scripture doesn't work. Let's go in this direction." We go back and forth, allowing the collaborative process to continue.

If I get together with two or three of my sharpest friends who are teachers, within an hour and a half or so, we could crank out a killer outline that would make for a great message.

We now use a website where we can upload everything instead of e-mailing it to everybody. It's terrific! You have access to all the people who are within our New Thing network. You can also see things like service flow, music, and sketches. All the worship service elements are right there so you can make sure everything lines up.

In your book The Big Idea, you mention that even after the sermon has been delivered, the collaborative effort continues. The group gathers together to reflect on the sermon's effectiveness. What does that look like?

We use Zoomerang surveys for post-sermon reflection. Zoomerang is an online program you can purchase for your church to create basic surveys. We invite the entire staff and some of our volunteers to take the survey and help us evaluate the whole service, including the sermon. Everybody gets a chance to make a comment about how effective the teaching was at a particular location and what they would have done differently. Our two most basic questions on the survey are "Did the message hit the big idea?" and "Did the message help develop the vision and mission of CCC?"

Let's back up for a moment and address a few issues related to the heart of the group process. Some might question whether 105 minutes is long enough to do sound exegesis of a passage. Has someone done in-depth exegesis prior to the meeting or is that one of the things someone in the group is assigned as the meeting comes to a close?

We don't want to give the allusion that 105 minutes is all it takes to create a great message. It's just the time that the team spends together to pool their best ideas and create a sermon outline. The exegetical process is before, during, and after the 105 minutes of the teaching team meeting. We are always working through issues of the text. As you well know, nobody ever really finishes exegesis. Scripture is a well that's deeper than anybody's bucket and rope!

Primarily it's Tim Sutherland's responsibility to make sure we have done our exegesis well, though he oversees a team of more than ten message writers from across the country. He makes sure word studies and other study elements are being done before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting—right up to "go time" on a Saturday night or Sunday morning.

Another concern about this approach to sermon writing is that there's the potential for a lot of disagreement. How do you deal with that within the group?

There really are only a few disagreements. This is due, in part, to the CCC culture. We have such a strong belief in community that I think we trust the group more than we do ourselves! If the group says, "Dave, I understand what you're saying, but this isn't going to work," I don't just feel like I need to submit; I feel like it's the smart thing to do! Any disagreements that we've had in the past weren't over something key like exegesis. They were usually a matter of bias or style or structure. Some may not want to tell a joke because they think it's stupid. Others may want to tell a different story than the one we've landed on. I may choose a metaphor or a prop that's different from the one someone else wants to use. The disagreements are over more subtle things like that.

A lot of people will look at your picture of group sermon preparation and think, It must be nice, but I don't have the resources or the individuals to pull that off! What would you suggest to someone who's in a smaller church or doesn't have the kind of network that you have? Can they pull off this particular approach to sermon preparation?

I want to emphasize that this is something virtually anybody do. One of my fears with the book was that it makes this look more complicated than it really is. It doesn't have to be as complex as it is for us at CCC. Remember: this process was birthed in a weekly phone call I would make to a friend in Ohio. All you really need to do is get one or two friends and plan your teaching together. That's your starting point. Maybe you then find two or three other people. Even if you're just one pastor in a smaller church, you probably have ministry friends. All of you just need to say, "Okay. We're going to all do this together."

You can also make use of today's technology to make this happen! Because of computers and the Internet, you don't even physically have to get together. You could try and make use of teleconferencing. You could create chat rooms and message boards. E-mail certainly allows you to toss ideas back and forth. You could even create your own blog to work out sermons in community.

Dave Ferguson is the lead pastor of Community Christian Church in Naperville, Illinois. Dave provides visionary leadership for NewThing and he is the president and board chair for Exponential. Dave is also an adjunct professor at Wheaton Graduate School and the author of many Christian leadership books including The Big Idea (Zondervan, 2007).