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Small Catechism Preaching Series
Free and downloadable! A schedule for preaching through the Catechism in 12 weeks, plus bulletins that you can easily alter to suit your own parish's needs.
If you want to move forward, you have to go back to the beginning, and for Lutherans that's always the Small Catechism. There is no more beautiful or succinct summary of our faith.
But there's no reason for the junior high kids to have a monopoly on Small Catechism study! Everybody in your congregation will benefit. Even older folks will enjoy discovering that they still remember so many of those words and phrases after all these years: "We are to fear and love God, so that we do not..." "This is most certainly true..." and so on.
I spent 12 weeks preaching through the Small Catechism at my congregation this fall. In some cases I did a little bit of juggling to coordinate with the holidays--Reformation, All Saints', and Christ the King in particular. At the beginning of the series, I handed out the tiny-sized Catechisms, had people write their names on them, and encouraged them to take the Catechisms home and read them. I piled extras in the pews since, inevitably, most people forgot to bring theirs back to church. Before the sermon each week we pulled out the Catechisms and read the relevant portions through together as a congregation.
Below are files of the bulletin inserts I created--rival "Celebrates," if you will, renamed plainly "Today's Lessons," in an easy format for folding and inserting in the regular bulletin. Each includes a prayer of the day (sometimes longer or shorter, depending on how much room I had!), an Old Testament lesson, a psalm, a New Testament lesson, a gospel lesson, and prayers of the day. Sometimes I preached on all 4 lessons; sometimes just 1; sometimes I stuck closely to the Catechism and didn't use the Scripture much at all. Each bulletin includes the date, but since it's just a word file you can change it to suit your circumstances.
In fact, if you use these, change them all you want--replace one lesson with another, or rewrite the prayers altogether. If you're worried about losing out on precious pericope study time with fellow pastors, encourage them to do this series too. The Sundays after Pentecost are a marvelous time for special series like this.
Introduction, 1st and 2nd Petition of Lord's Prayer
3rd, 4th, and 5th Petition of Lord's Prayer