How to Preach (part 3): Sermon Evaluation

How can you continue to improve your preaching? Sure, you can get experience and write more and better sermons, but one critical way to improve that lazy pastors skip is sermon evaluation. What can you learn from the message you already preached?

This is the third part of a three part series on the basics of preaching. So if you missed them, make sure to check out part one and two.

In part one we talked about sermon preparation. In part two we discussed sermon presentation. And now we will conclude with part three.

After you preach your job isn’t finished. The third and final phase to preaching is to evaluate your sermon. 

Phase 3: Evaluation (Improving For Your Next Sermon)

How did it go? What was good? What could be better?

A lot of people stop before this step, but the best preachers go the extra mile to get better by evaluating their preaching.

While honest evaluation can be painful, it’s crucial if you want to improve.

There are three simple things you should do to evaluate your preaching.

1. Watch Yourself on Video

All professional athletes watch game film to see where they can improve, even when they win. Preachers should do the same.

While preaching, you are in the zone. You can’t see from your audience’s perspective, and you won’t notice your nervous habits.

But when you watch yourself on video, your room for improvement is painfully obvious. And as much as it hurts, you won’t get much better if you don’t know what to work on.

So get a video camera. Any camera (as long as it doesn’t have a record limit). You can even use a phone. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Set up the camera and record yourself when you preach.

Wait a day or two and then review your footage. Be on the lookout for things like filler words, distracting movements, poor eye contact, speaking too fast, rambling without getting to the point, and anything else that you need to work on.

Pick your single most glaring problem, and focus hard on improving it in your next message.

Don’t panic if it’s worse than you thought it was. Your game tape will get better with practice.

2. Use an Evaluation Sheet

It’s helpful to set standards for your preaching, but standards are meaningless if you aren’t held to them. So create an evaluation sheet or use my sermon evaluation form.

Fill out your evaluation sheet when you are reviewing your video. It’ll help you focus on what you need to be looking for to improve. 

Even better, give the evaluation sheet to a few other people you trust and ask them to evaluate you too. 

The feedback you get from other perspectives will be priceless. They may not care about some of the things you think are a big deal, and they may point out a weakness you were blind to.

It takes thick skin and a whole lot of humility, but I promise you it will accelerate your growth as a preacher.

3. Study Good Preaching

Last but not least, continue to study preaching. Evaluate other preachers. No matter how experienced you are, stay hungry to keep learning all that you can because there are no perfect preachers.

• Read as many books and articles as you can from multiple sources. 
• Watch online videos of good preaching.
• Listen to podcasts of great preachers so you can learn from them.
• Take a preaching course, attend a conference, or enroll in a speech class.
• Study the great sermons in the Bible, and all the times God’s Word mentions preaching.

Don’t be so prideful as to think you can do it on your own. Take advantage of the many incredible resources available to you today.

Never stop learning how to preach.

If you don’t know where to start, I’m a bit biased, but I think you would get a great start with my preaching books or my online preaching course.

That does it for this series. Thanks for tuning in. Now get out there and do something with what you’ve learned. Information without action is useless.