Hadley Baker of Rowlett | The Sermon Test Nobody Applies Until Thursday

Most sermons are forgotten by Tuesday. Not because the preaching was bad, and not because the people in the room were distracted. They get forgotten because nothing in them asked anybody to do something different on Monday morning.

Hadley Baker of Rowlett, Texas, northeast of Dallas, builds his week around that problem. As lead pastor of City On A Hill Community Church, he writes with a specific question running underneath the draft: what does a person do with this before the week is out?

A sermon that only works on Sunday did not work

There is a kind of preaching that lands beautifully in the room and evaporates in the parking lot. It moves people. The construction is careful and the delivery is warm, and nothing in it makes a demand on anybody’s Tuesday afternoon.

Baker treats that as a failure, not a near miss. If a passage cannot be carried into an ordinary week, the problem is usually not the passage.

The fix is rarely more application at the end. A sermon with three practical bullet points bolted onto the last four minutes still spent twenty-six minutes teaching people that the text is mainly information.

Baker builds the use into the middle of the thing. The point arrives with its consequences already attached, which changes what the room hears from the first paragraph forward.

Plain language is not dumbed-down language

Preachers reach for technical vocabulary because it feels like rigor. It usually is not. It is often a way of avoiding the harder work of saying the same thing in words a plumber and a professor both hear the same way.

Baker preaches in plain language on purpose. The theology underneath does not get thinner. The delivery just stops asking the listener to translate.

There is a cost to this and preachers feel it. Plain speech removes the protective layer that specialized vocabulary provides. If the idea is thin, everybody in the room can now tell.

That exposure is the reason to do it. A pastor who cannot say a thing simply usually has not finished thinking about it.

You can test this yourself with any sermon you have heard recently. If you cannot explain its point to someone at lunch without using a word you learned in church, the point was probably never clear to you either.

The question that kills half of a first draft

By midweek most sermon drafts have too much in them. There is the main idea, and then there are three secondary ideas that were interesting enough to write down and are now taking up space.

The cut comes from asking what a person is supposed to do. Ideas that survive that question stay. Ideas that only work as observations get moved to a file for another week.

Baker would rather send people out with one thing they will actually do than five things they will admire and forget.

The cut material is not wasted. Most of it comes back in a counseling conversation or a men’s group where the audience is four people instead of four hundred, and where the tangent is the whole point.

A sermon is not the only delivery mechanism a church has. Treating it that way is what makes them bloated.

What the week looks like when the sermon is not the only job

Sermon preparation does not happen in a quiet room with the door closed. It happens between counseling appointments, hospital calls, a wedding rehearsal, and a family that needs help deciding what to say at a memorial service.

That is not an obstacle to the preaching. It is most of the reason the preaching stays grounded. A pastor who spends his week with people in trouble writes differently than one who spends it with commentaries.

Baker counsels individuals and couples through marriage questions, loss, and decisions they cannot make alone. That work is pastoral and grounded in biblical principles rather than licensed clinical treatment, and he is careful to say so.

By Saturday the sermon has usually been shaped by three or four conversations nobody else knows happened. The people in those conversations do not get named. Their questions still end up in the room.

This is also a discipline about privacy. A pastor who mines his counseling appointments for illustrations will find those appointments drying up, and he will deserve it.

Baker keeps the questions and leaves the people out. What arrives on Sunday is the shape of a problem, never a recognizable person.

Preaching that sounds simple almost never is. The plainest paragraph in a sermon is often the one that took the longest, because saying something clearly requires knowing it well enough to stop hiding behind vocabulary.

Baker wrote No Longer A Slave, available on Amazon in print and audiobook, and the same instinct runs through it. Say the true thing. Say it in words people already own.

If you have sat through years of sermons and could not name three that changed anything you did, that is worth sitting with. The fault may not be yours.