Somewhere between the last Vacation Bible School photo and the first “can you promote this” email of fall, most churches skip a step: looking at the whole year at once.
It is easy to plan one event at a time. It is harder, and more valuable, to step back and ask what the year as a whole should look like. Are you repeating the same things because they work, or because no one has questioned them? Is there something new you want to try, and if so, what has to come off the calendar to make room for it?
This is the season to ask those questions, before the fall rush fills every open square on the calendar.
Start with what you already have
Pull out last year’s calendar. Every event, every series, every recurring meeting. For each one, ask two honest questions:
- Did this serve our mission, or did we just do it because we did it last year?
- Who benefited, and would they miss it if it were gone?
Some things earn their place every year. Others survive out of habit. A quarterly newsletter deadline, a spring rummage sale, a fall kickoff Sunday: these might be genuine priorities that shape everything else. Or they might be smaller commitments that have quietly taken up more room than they deserve.
Put the priorities in first
There is a well-known illustration, often traced back to leadership writer Stephen Covey, about filling a jar with rocks, then pebbles, then sand. Try to pour the sand in first, and the rocks never fit. Put the rocks in first, and everything smaller settles in around them.
Church calendars work the same way. Decide first what genuinely carries your mission for the year: Confirmation, VBS, Advent and Lent series, charge conference, your major outreach events. Get those on the calendar before anything else. Everything smaller gets built around those anchor points, not squeezed in ahead of them.
Do it in the other order, and you find out every October that a good idea showed up in June with nowhere left to land.
Ask what needs to end
This is the harder conversation, and the one most planning sessions skip. A calendar that keeps everything and adds more each year eventually wears out the same handful of volunteers and staff. If you are adding something new, something else probably needs to come off, not because it failed, but because your people only have so much time and energy to give.
Let your church’s mission and current goals guide the hard calls, including retiring something you have “always done.” Then look at the gaps. Is there a ministry area that has quietly gone unattended while everyone’s energy went toward the same few events year after year?
Look outside your walls too
A calendar built in isolation misses things. Knowing what else is happening in your community, your school system, and among neighboring UMC churches can help you avoid duplicating another church’s VBS the same week, or spot a chance to partner instead of compete.
Watch, too, for the routine happenings that never make it onto an official calendar but still shape whether an event actually gets attended: choir practice, sports seasons, school testing weeks. A little cross-checking now saves a scheduling headache later.
This is not just a staff exercise
Annual planning sounds like something for the pastor, the district superintendent, or the church office. It is not only that.
If you are not on staff or in formal leadership, you can still use this same thinking, just at your own scale:
- Sunday school teachers and small group leaders can map their own 12-month teaching plan instead of choosing curriculum week to week. What themes matter this year? What has been taught three years running that could be freshened up?
- Committee chairs (trustees, missions, hospitality) can look at their own recurring responsibilities and decide what is essential before the year fills in around it.
- Volunteers juggling multiple ministries (choir, VBS, food pantry) can use a personal version of this exercise to see where their own time is actually going, and where they might be quietly overcommitted.
- Families can even apply it at home: what matters enough to protect on the calendar before the school year swallows every free evening?
The principle holds at every level. Decide what matters most first, put it on the calendar, and let the smaller things fill in around it, rather than the other way around.
A simple way to start
You do not need special software. A spreadsheet or even a poster-sized paper calendar works well. List the months across the top and your ministry areas down the side, then fill in your priorities before anything else. Many leaders find a natural lull, the week after Christmas, a quiet week in July, works best for this kind of thinking, since it is hard to see the whole year clearly once the calendar is already filling in. If that window has passed for you, any quiet week will do. The point is doing it before the fall rush, not waiting for a perfect moment.
A calendar built once is also worth revisiting. Check in on it quarterly, or even monthly, and adjust as the year actually unfolds. Ministry is unpredictable, and a good calendar leaves room for that instead of pretending it will not happen.
For further reading
Monthly Ministry Planner, ResourceUMC / United Methodist Communications. A month-by-month planning tool, January through December, built to help local church leaders see what is coming and prepare for it ahead of time. A practical next step once you have decided what your own church’s priorities are for the year.
Toward a Year-Round Stewardship Ministry, Ann A. Michel, Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary. Written about stewardship specifically, but the underlying approach maps closely onto this article: build a yearly timeline so every part of a ministry area gets attention at the right point in the church’s calendar, and start small by adding one new thing at a time rather than overhauling everything at once.
AI was used to brainstorm and polish this article.