Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

A few weeks ago Pastor Gillespie had a great article on “Automated Audio Recording of Services.”  It’s a great option but all geeky pastors know that not one size fits all, so here’s another option for recording your services (or sermons).

Zoom H2 Handy Recorder

At our church Trinity, Creston IA we lack some of the necessary options for recording as Pr. Gillespie suggests (mainly not enough computers and all in the wrong locations).  Fortunately, technology keeps marching on and portable audio recorders have increased in quality and decreased in price.  Enter the Zoom Handy Recorder H2.  This unit is primarily made for recording musician jam sessions.  The price is relatively low (about $150 at Amazon) and the quality is excellent.  It has many features that you won’t need for worship service (or sermon) recording.  However, its portability gives you the option of recording from any location (i.e. fellowship hall, outside, Sunday School classroom).

Because the unit is made to place in the middle of a jam session, it has front and back microphones for recording in stereo.  I place the unit on the pulpit.  The front microphone pick up everything I say (even when my back is to the microphone while I’m facing the altar)  and the rear microphone the congregation.

Front Mic Records Me

Rear Mic Records the Congregation

The recording is stored directly onto a 1G SD card (included).  An hour service takes about 100MB.  After the service simply pop out the card, insert it into your computer open it with an audio editing program (I suggest Audacity – The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor look for a review of this software here sometime in the future).   Cut out the extra stuff before and after the service (or sermon), add an intro, save it, burn it to a CD or publish it to the web.

1GB SD Card

I currently use this great tool to record my sermons every Sunday (http://wattswhat.podbean.com/).  I have plans of recording bible classes, too.

It’s simple, relatively inexpensive and produces a great quality result.

Rev. Jonathan C. Watt

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?