Sermon Prep with ADHD: Why 'Sit Down and Write' Was Never Going to Work

It's Tuesday morning. You blocked nine to noon, closed the office door, opened a blank document, and typed the passage reference at the top. Then you straightened the bookshelf. Then you answered three emails that could have waited until Friday. Then you looked up whether the Hebrew word for wilderness is related to the word for speak.

(It is. That was forty minutes.)

At 11:40 you have a passage reference and a graveyard of open tabs.

Sermon prep with ADHD does not respond to the advice everyone gives you—block the time, shut the door, sit down and write. Not because you lack discipline. Your brain runs on a different engine, and nearly every prep system on the market assumes an engine you don't have.

One thing up front: I'm a pastor who builds software, not a clinician. None of this is medical advice or a substitute for a real diagnosis. This is craft. But craft matters here, because most sermon-prep advice was written by people whose attention shows up when it's called.

Why "sit down and write" fails an ADHD pastor

Look at what the standard model actually asks of you. Gather your material. Hold the whole shape of the sermon in your head. Then produce polished prose from a blank screen while keeping that shape intact.

That's two of the hardest possible tasks for an ADHD brain, stacked: sustained working memory, and self-starting into something with no external structure.

Russell Barkley, who has spent a career on the executive-function side of ADHD, puts it about as plainly as it can be put: people with executive-function differences are best helped by externalizing information—putting it into physical form, out in the environment, at the point where the work happens. A plan you're holding in your head is a weak source of control over your own behavior. A plan on the wall is a strong one.

Translated into our work: a sermon that exists only in your head is not a sermon you can work on. It's a sermon you can worry about.

And you are not a rare case. The CDC's most recent estimate puts current adult ADHD diagnosis at about 6% of U.S. adults—roughly one in sixteen—and more than half of those adults weren't diagnosed until adulthood. Some of the pastors reading this found out at forty-three. Some haven't found out yet, and have simply concluded for twenty years that they're lazy.

You're not lazy. Your system is mismatched. Here's what a matched one looks like.

Externalize everything, immediately

Make this the rule: never think about the sermon without leaving evidence.

The idea that arrives in the shower, in the car, mid-conversation at the hospital—that idea is real work, and it evaporates in about ninety seconds unless it lands somewhere outside your skull. So build catching into the day. Voice memo on the phone. A note dictated at a red light. One running document per sermon, ugly and unsorted, where every fragment goes.

Then do the same with the sermon's shape. Get it onto something you can see all at once: a whiteboard, a wall of sticky notes, cards on the dining room table. Physically moving your third point above your second does something for an ADHD brain that dragging a paragraph in a word processor does not. You stop remembering the sermon and start looking at it.

By Thursday, the goal isn't a draft. The goal is that the sermon exists somewhere other than inside you.

Start where the text already has you

Standard advice says start at verse one and work through. Your attention doesn't run on sequence, and it doesn't run on importance. It runs on interest.

So use that instead of fighting it. Start with whatever in the passage already has a hook in you—the strange detail, the verse that irritates you, the question you can't answer. Work outward from there. The energy is real, and real energy is the scarcest thing in your week.

The catch is that interest-first prep can wander forever, which is why the anchor matters: your job every week is still to arrive at one sentence—the big idea this sermon is actually saying. Chase the interesting thing, but keep asking what it has to do with that sentence. When the answer is "nothing," you've found something to cut, which is its own kind of progress.

Build deadlines your brain believes

Sunday is a deadline, but it's the wrong one. It's far away right up until it's terrifying—nothing on Tuesday, panic on Saturday. If Saturday night is your actual rhythm, there's a way to do that on purpose rather than by collapse. Most weeks, though, what you need is a smaller deadline with a face attached.

A real deadline has a person in it. Text your outline to a staff member by Wednesday at four. Preach the first three minutes to your spouse on Thursday. Tell another preacher you'll walk them through it Friday morning. Social accountability isn't a moral crutch; it's external structure, which is the whole game.

The same logic sits behind body doubling—working alongside someone else who's doing their own unrelated work. It's popular in ADHD communities, and the research is genuinely mixed: small studies, promising trends, nothing conclusive. So treat it as an experiment on yourself, not a proven cure. Two prep sessions in a coffee shop next to a friend grading papers will tell you more than any study will.

And shrink the block. A three-hour morning is not three hours of prep; it's twenty good minutes wrapped in avoidance. Four twenty-five-minute boxes with a timer, spread across the day, will usually outproduce it.

Talk first, draft later

The blank page is the enemy, and here's the thing—you don't actually need it yet.

You can talk. Talking has no cursor, no permanent record staring back at you. It's also, for a lot of us, where thinking actually happens. This isn't an ADHD accommodation, incidentally—it's a habit good preachers have used forever, and it's the core of preparing a sermon faster for anyone. Walk and preach it to nobody. Record it. Transcribe the recording, and your "blank page" is now three pages of your own words that need editing.

Editing is a completely different task than generating. It has structure. It gives you something to react to—and most ADHD brains are far better at reacting than initiating.

If you don't have ADHD and still hate writing sermons

Some of you landed here searching I hate writing sermons or I can't focus writing sermons, and you've never wondered about ADHD at all. Stay anyway, because the failure point is identical.

You don't hate preaching. You hate the specific act of manufacturing prose from nothing while you're still not sure what you're saying. That's not a character flaw either, and more willpower won't fix it. Refusing to draft until the thinking is externalized will—out loud, on cards, in conversation. Everything above works with or without a diagnosis behind the struggle. The systems are simply optional for people who can white-knuckle a blank page, and mandatory for people who can't.

Why a dialogue works when a blank page doesn't

Plainly: we build an AI sermon coach, so I'm not neutral here. But the mechanical fit is worth naming, because it's why we built it the way we did.

A coach asks questions. You answer. Answering is reacting, not initiating—the easy direction. And because it asks what a mentor would ask on a Tuesday, your answers end up externalized in front of you, in your own words, which is exactly what a blank document refuses to provide. It won't write the sermon, by design, ever. It reflects your thinking back at you, sharper. That's the whole shape of it.

Honest fit note: this is not treatment, and it will not get you into the chair on Tuesday morning. If the wall you keep hitting is starting at all, software won't start for you—a person across the table might. The dialogue helps once you've started. It just makes starting cost less.

One step this week: don't change your schedule, change your first move. Before you open a document, take a twenty-minute walk with your phone recording and talk through the passage out loud—no structure, no points, just what you notice and what bothers you. Come back and transcribe it. That transcript is your first draft, and you made it without ever facing a blank page.