My main computer tool for studying the Scriptures is Accordance.  It is fast and very easy to use.  More important to me, though, is that the layout and structure puts the actual study of the text first and foremost.

Here is a screenshot of my workflow with Accordance for Trinity 12:

You can click on the file to get a large view of it.

Basically what you see is four tabs.  In each tab I have each of the readings for the Sunday.  Then when you activate the tab, you will find the text in as many translations as you want.  I have four in this case.  ESVS, Luther Bible, the Textus Receptus (I alternate looking at that with NA27), and the Vulgate.  Then below you have my own notes on the bottom left, and another set of notes on the right.  Right now on the right I have the Catena Aurea, but I also have lots of other notes like the ESV Study Bible, all of the different textual apparatus, and tons of other resources.

If you hover over a word you will get a quick window with the definition.  If you double click a word a new tab opens with BADG, or Spicq, or TDNT, or whatever else you want to look it up in.

I then keep my Accordance window open on one side, and my Scrivener window open on the other.  It rocks as a setup.

How do you study for your sermons?

-Todd Peperkorn

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Books for the spring quarter.

Pastors have lots of books. Despite the advent of more and more digital works, theology by in large remains in the print domain and our libraries continue to grow. The question before us is how do we manage our ever-growing libraries?

While some have their own organizational methods and can exist without using technology, many of us have to use digital tools to manage our libraries. These library managers will used to track your number of books, where they are located, who you have loaned them to, and how much you have spent on your books (don’t show your wife). Some of the software can also track your DVD and CD collections and some even can track your tool collection. Tracking your “stuff” can be helpful if you ever need to file an insurance claim. No more guessing, simply hand the adjuster your list of goods lost (stored off site of course as a backup).

Library Managers are easily found through a google search. Here is what you need to look for:

• Auto Searching. Most library management programs reach out to services such as Amazon.com to gather information based on your search parameters. More advanced programs also reach out to services like the Library of Congress to gather even more information. The most common search variables are titles and ISBN numbers.
• Auto fill. You want the software to accurately fill in data from the above web services.
• Available Fields. Some software offers more fields than others. A helpful program gives you plenty of options for importing information.
• Export Functionality. While you may love your software now, you may hate it in a year. However, if the software you used doesn’t allow for easy exporting you may be stuck with the software unless you want to manually reenter all of your books again.
• Print Services. It is best if you can both print out a list of your books and also print labels if you are so inclined.

Like I said, a quick google search can turn up many options for management. I’d like to highlight a few of these programs.

If you are interested cloud computing LibraryThing might be of interest to you. It allows you to catalog your books and make your library searchable and by others. It is free to catalog up to 200 books. Beyond that you can pay $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. This is a growing service with one major downside. If you don’t have internet, you don’t have the service available. One cool feature is that you can buy a CueCat Scanner to quickly scan your books. You can also share your library and view the library of others.

Desktop Options (Mac focused):

Delicious Library is the most popular piece of software out there in this category. It has a slick interface and is very user-friendly. It uses the iSight camera available on most Macs to scan barcodes and import the information from Amazon.com. This program has a number of options including books, music, tools, and even clothes. I used this for my first three years of mac ownership, but switched after I had some library corruption issues that weren’t able to be fixed. Delicious Library currently retails for $40.

Another option is Bookpedia by Bruji. Bookpedia has a nice clean interface at the inexpensive price of $18. Bruji offers three companion applications to Bookpedia: CDpedia, DVDpedia, and Gamepedia. You are able to bundle applications together to lower cost which also allows you to get what you need (for example, I don’t catalog my CDs). Bruji’s website includes a number of user-created plugins that give access to more functionality beyond what most users will want/need.

My current choice of library management software is Booxter from Deep Prose Software. It doesn’t have the most eye popping interface but it is a powerhouse for managing my books. I now have over 1,000 books in the program and it doesn’t slow down at all. What I love about Booxter is the ability to do what I want with the software. It easily searches both the Library of Congress and Amazon.com to get information. I can quickly add in information about purchase price and retail price. One huge feature of this program is that it allows me to specify if a person is an author, editor, illustrator, or translator. Somehow, this feature is lacking in many other pieces of cataloging software. After I get all this information imported I can print labels or print lists. Unlike Delicious Library, Booxter does not catalog multiple media types in the same window. Instead you have multiple libraries. I have two now: one for books and the other for DVDs. Booxter retails for $49.99.

There is one last piece of software I think deserves mention: Librarian Pro from Koingo Software. I want to mention this because it seems to be a stable and feature rich program and also is cross-platform (both Windows and Mac). It comes at a great price: $19.95 for a single-user license and $7.95 for a single-user educational license.

Smart Phone Resources

For those of you with smartphones such as the iPhone there are some dedicated apps out there. However, the ability to integrate the above programs with an iPhone are somewhat limited. Amazon.com, who provides much of the data for these programs, limits what can be synced with a phone. Both Delicious Library and Bruji had iPhone apps which removed from the app store at the request of Amazon. You can export your library as a PDF and store it on your phone.

Summary

Like I said in my introduction, some of you can exist without this software. I cannot. If these programs interest you download them and take the demos for a spin. If you have any other program suggestions especially on the Windows side of things, leave a comment and we can add them to the article.

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In my last post about using a computer for workflow, I mentioned that I do my actual sermon writing in a program called Scrivener.  Scrivener, by company Literature & Latte, is a writing tool.  It can be used by everyone from novelists, technical writers, journalists, non-fiction writing, and beyond.  It is an almost perfect solution in my opinion for working with sermons and sermon texts.

Here’s why.

My workflow for sermon writing is fairly consistent. Here is a screenshot of my workflow in Omnifocus:

So the first thing I do in my workflow is setup my electronic resources (Accordance and Logos). Part of what I don’t have in my formal workflow is the gathering & reviewing of previous sermons and other online resources (e.g. historiclectionary.com). Because I use the one year series, this allows me to gather a great deal of materials from various sources on these sermons. Sermons I have written. Sermons I’ve collected from others. Snippets from Luther, Gerhard, the church fathers, artwork, Pius Parsch, and the like. Depending on the week, the amount on any given week may vary. It’s great to have and find all of this stuff, but it’s frustrating if you can’t find that one quotation or insight that is holding you back in your process.

So this is what I do with all this stuff.

Scrivener is divided into two sections in the left binder: the draft section and the research section. Under research I create a folder for each Sunday. I make these Scrivener projects by season, so that I have everything for Epiphany (or whatever season) all in one place. In this case I’m looking at the Gesima/Pre-Lent season. In each of these research folders, I can keep all of my previous sermons, snippets, graphics, audio files, web sites (or at least addresses), and then have it all in one place. So a typical Scrivener sermon project for me is going to look something like this:

So you note in the example above that the DRAFT section above has the current year’s sermons in it. Then under research you see a folder for the season as a whole, then each of the Sundays in the season. I have it open to Sexagesima. In there you can see 7 sermons by date, a web page, an extended Luther quote, and then the notes I’ve gleaned from historiclectionary.com. Below the Notes section you’ll find some general sites. I just have one in there right now for Luther’s sermons online.

The advantage of this system is that it allows me to keep everything together, so that I don’t have to hunt around in folders or searching the web or anywhere else. Once I’ve found it, it’s in there. At the end of the season I just move the current year’s sermons into the research section for next year.

In the new post I’ll discuss the actual writing process. I am still fairly new to Scrivener, so I’m sure there are other features I haven’t found yet. But at this point, I can hardly imaging writing without it.

Pr. Todd Peperkorn

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My computer is a nearly indispensable tool for me in writing my sermons on a weekly basis.  I don’t use it for absolutely everything, but I’m sure that 70% of my regular preparation and writing happens in from of my trusty computer.  While I intend to expand on this and unpack each step along the way, I thought it would be helpful to get a sense of the workflow on writing sermons on a weekly basis.  I use a Mac, but I expect that many of these steps would have equivalent versions in Windows or Linux.  Here goes:

1. Manage the sermon project in Omnifocus.  I am a huge Omnifocus fan.  It allows me to track multi-step projects, assign deadlines, make them repeatable, and generally helps to keep my sermon writing on track every week.  So I will have multiple steps and little tasks assigned for each day of the week.  This insures that my sermon writing doesn’t come down to “what am I going to talk about” on Saturday night.  We would like to avoid that as much as possible!

2. Keep all of my research and do my actual writing using Scrivener.  Scrivener is the ultimate writing tool.  I can hardly describe how much I love it!  It allows me to keep all of my sermons for a season in one project, as well as my  notes, links to web sites, snippets from various places that I’ve gathered, references, past sermons, and to manipulate all of this in a beautiful and simple interface.  It makes writing fun!  I’ll be writing a more thorough review of Scrivener later, but this is really the linchpin of my writing work.  I can hardly believe I worked without it until a few months ago.

3. Textual and Commentary work in Accordance and Logos.  Accordance (imo) is really outstanding for textual study, keeping notes on the fly, and working with the myriad of translations.  Logos has the most Lutheran resources from CPH & NPH & Augsburg/Fortress.  They overlap, but they are both great programs that are only improving as the years go by.  Logos, incidentally, also has an iPhone app so that many of your resources really can be had on the fly.

4. Greek/Latin New Testament audio.  This is the newest part of my sermon preparation regimen.  This amazing site has mp3 files of the entire New Testament read in both Greek & Latin.  It is amazing!  And free!  It is helping me to grasp the original texts in a whole new way.

5. Lutheran Service Builder.  I wouldn’t say that this is a part of my weekly workflow in terms of preparation, it is certainly worth mentioning.  Having all of the texts of the pericopes, introits, graduals, and hymn texts right at hand is really really useful for the liturgical types.  I find myself using it that way pretty often.

6. Apple Pages.  If I am making my sermon available in a printed form, I will format it in Apple Pages.  This is my “go to” word processor.  It’s elegant and beautiful, has a wonderfully intuitive interface, and is easy to use.  Unless you are doing lots of tables work where you are importing complex formulas from Excel or something, Pages is a great option.  Don’t get my started on Microsoft Word…

7. iTalk, GarageBand, iDisk, and WordPress.  I podcast my sermon over at Lutheran Logomaniac pretty much every week.  The way I do this is fairly simple: I record the sermon on my iPhone using iTalk.  I then edit the audio using GarageBand, export it to mp3 and save it in my public documents folder on iDisk (you could also do this easily with the free Dropbox), and then publish it in both text and audio with WordPress.  While that sounds like a complicated process, the whole thing actually takes about ten minutes or so.

That’s it on the first pass.  How do you use your computer for writing sermons?

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First of all, the LCMS Commission on Worship has provided Word Documents for the three-year lectionary that include all of the dates and other information available.  You may find all of those available online by CLICKING HERE.

If you prefer to go “old school,” Concordia Publishing House has a really nice chart available for your use HERE.

CPH has also done a fantastic job of making the three-year lectionary available in both Google Calendar, Outlook & iCal.  Go HERE to find them.

Another wonderful resource is that Logos (makers of some of the finest bible software anywhere) has a free lectionary viewer that includes the  one year and three year lectionaries from LSB.  HERE IT IS.

Now on to the one year lectionary:

The LCMS Commission on Worship page has a number of great resources for the one-year lectionary as well.  You’ll find it HERE.

Pastor Mark Schlamann has edited the COW chart and included it with the calendar dates and put them into a nifty color coded Microsoft Excel file.  You can download it here: 09 10 one yr guide

Mr. Stan Lemon maintains a great website called Sanctus.org.  This site includes all of the one year lectionary in calendar format, plus in a Google Calendar that will work with iCal or Outlook or nearly any calendar program.  More than that, he has it setup so that it will link you to specific bible translations.  It is a great site that I highly recommend.  He also has it self so it works very well on an iPhone or any other smart phone with internet access.

Another great program that works with both the one year and three year lectionary is Leitourgia.  It is available in both Windows and Mac formats, and uses many different lectionaries.  You can download a trial copy and try it out to see if you like it.

There are numerous blogs and other sites that provide commentary and other info on the Church Year, but I think this is enough to get us started.  What do you use for the Church Year?

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