Have you ever come to the closing part of your sermon and just sputtered out? Maybe you put everything you have into the main part of your message and neglected to plan the closing, thinking it would just come naturally. If you haven’t planned how to close, you may be left looking awkwardly at your notes, trying to pull everything you preached into a coherent conclusion.
Your congregation will remember your closing clearer than anything else you said, since it’s the last thing they’ll hear from you until your next sermon. It’s important to finish strong and with power. Don’t let an absent-minded or weak closing be left in your congregation’s heads. Here are some tips on how to close your next sermon powerfully.
1. Always Plan What You are Going to Say in your Conclusion
It’s easy to assume that after preaching it’ll be clear to you how you should wrap things up. After all, you’ve written out a great sermon with multiple points. Surely after winding up so well, you’ll deliver a knockout pitch. Right?
Not always. Your mind can go blank at the worst possible times. It’s important to plan out a solid closing that gives your congregation something to ponder throughout their week. Take some time to pray and ask God what you should leave the congregation thinking about this week.
2. Summarize your Sermon
Since the closing is what will stick the most, why not quickly recap your message? Repeat your points—not in detail, just the points themselves—in your conclusion. This will help make the “big picture” of your message clearer and give you a nice segue into your upcoming action challenge (more about that in the fourth point).
3. Vision Cast
Vision casting is showing your congregation what could be if whatever you preached about were taken into action. For example, if you spoke about loving your neighbor, you could tell a story about someone showing mercy, love, or forgiveness in a strenuously stressful circumstance. Then invite your congregation to imagine if most people acted that way.
If you spoke about giving, you could paint a picture of a world in which everyone was generous and kind. Did you speak about sharing the Word of God with non-Christians? Paint the picture of what it could be like if multiple people shared God’s Word to a person and how that would impact them.
Vision casting inspires the congregation to take the Scripture they heard you preach into action in their lives.
4. Give an Action Challenge
You’ve educated, inspired, and summarized everything up for your congregation. Now it’s time to challenge them to go into the world and act like the mighty people God has made them to be. If you spoke about giving, this is the time to challenge them to give an offering in faith. If you spoke about witnessing to the unsaved, here is the time to encourage them to share the love of God with two or three people in the coming week.
What you’re trying to do here is leave them with something concrete to do with the information you shared with them in your sermon. You gave them Scriptures, examples, and inspiration, but they might still walk through the church doors wondering how this all applies to their everyday lives. Don’t let that happen—tell them how it applies and what they should be trying to do to put it into action.
This will force you to think hard about what the point of your message is. You haven't finished preparing your message if you can't think of a challenge with action. Try to be specific in your closing. What are you asking the people to do?
Our numbers three and four are interchangeable. Perhaps you want to vision cast after giving your call to action; maybe you prefer wrapping up your vision cast with the action challenge. It’s up to you. They are both effective, so it sort of depends on which way goes best with the sermon you have prepared.
5. Practice your Delivery
After you plan your closing, practice it. Commit it to memory as much as you can. Your sermon closing will be much more powerful if you can deliver it while looking at your audience, rather than down at your notes many times. This will also help you determine what tone of voice is ideal for your closing.
6. Make Sure your Closing isn’t too Long
The most effective closings are short and intense. The longer they are, the easier it is for your congregation's minds to wander. You’ve spent your time to get to this place—this is just the final phase. Short and powerful is the best way to go.
