How to Evaluate a Sermon: A Checklist You Can Actually Use
September 21, 2026
Most sermon evaluation forms fail in the same way: they ask for opinions (“Was the message engaging? 1–5”) and opinions are exactly what nobody wants to give a preacher. A checklist works when it asks for things you can point to in the sermon itself. This one does. It is built for evaluating your own preaching from a recording, but it works just as well for a homiletics class or a peer group.
Before you start: what not to evaluate
Leave three things off the sheet. Doctrine — whether the interpretation is the right one is a question for your tradition, not for a form. Spiritual weight — what happened in the room does not survive into a transcript, and scoring what is not there is pretending. The preacher — you are evaluating this sermon, not a calling. Everything that remains is about the words, and words can be checked.
1. Structure
- Can you name the points? Write them down from memory after one listen. If you cannot, the congregation could not either.
- Are the joints visible? Look at how each point hands off to the next. “And another thing is” is not a bridge; “That was the promise — now the cost” is.
- Does the listener know where they are? Somewhere past the middle, is there a line that says which point this is and how many remain?
- Length by section. Time the introduction, each point and the conclusion. An eight-minute introduction on a thirty-minute sermon is a finding, whatever the content.
2. Handling of the text
- Were the verses around the passage read? Or did the sermon land on one verse and leave?
- Do the illustrations come back? Every story should return to the text. Mark the ones that do not.
- Where did the conclusion come from? From the passage, or from a thought that arrived on the way?
- Quotation accuracy. When Scripture is quoted, is it quoted, or paraphrased as if quoted?
3. Delivery — count, do not judge
This is where a transcript beats a memory. Judgments can be wrong; counts cannot.
- Filler. Count “so”, “you know”, “amen?”, “right?”. Past ten, the congregation is hearing the habit, not the word.
- Sentence endings. How many sentences end the same way? When every emphatic line lands with the same cadence, the one that mattered lands like the other six.
- Sentence length. Find the longest sentence. Read it aloud. If you run out of breath, so did they.
- Repeated words. Not key terms — the ones you did not mean to repeat.
4. Application
- Direction or action? “Let us love one another” is a direction. “Before you leave today, find the one person you have been avoiding and say their name” is an action. Mark each application as one or the other.
- Is there a when? Applications without a time (“this week”, “tonight”, “before you leave”) rarely happen.
- The last sentence. People carry out the last thing they heard. Did it end on a picture or on an abstraction? You do not need a new image — bringing back one you already used is enough.
How to use it on yourself
Do not fill it in from memory. Memory keeps the good paragraphs and deletes the awkward ones. Record the sermon — a phone near the pulpit is enough — get it into text, and go through the checklist on the page. Then do it again the following two Sundays. One sermon shows you the day; three show you the habit. A finding that appears three times is yours to work on. A finding that appears once was the weather.
Preaching Lab runs this checklist for you. Send one link or recording and you get the sermon transcribed, the counts done, and each finding tied to a quotation from your own sermon — not “transitions were weak” but the actual sentence that served as a bridge. Over several sermons it separates what keeps coming back from what you have already fixed. It does not rule on doctrine, and only you see the report.