Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

Now for Something Completely Practical.

One of the most important aspects of Pastoral care is the home visit.  I remember old time pastors telling me “A home going pastor makes a church going people.”  While I reject the idea from a theological standpoint (only God working through the Spirit in Word and Sacrament makes peoples’ faith grow) it is true enough from a sociological view.  A congregation whose pastor is regularly in their homes is a congregation who knows the pastor loves them and is concerned for their spiritual welfare.

The problem with home visits?  Scheduling.  Phone call after phone call yields little in the way of appointments.  Cold calls most often fall on empty houses.  Society isn’t just mobile in the sense that people move from community to community, people are active outside of their homes many nights (especially if they have children at home).  I don’t have a solution for the busyness of people.  I do have a simple way to help you plan, schedule and keep track of your visit schedule.  Once again we turn to a free web service “Remember the Milk”.  (http://www.RememberTheMilk.com)

One of the great things about RTM is its simplicity.  As far as to-do lists programs go, this one works the way I use a to-do list.  (Frankly before RTM, I used about a hundred slips of paper shuffled about my desk, this was not organization this was chaos).   It is a testament to RTM’s flexibility that I have found ways to use it that I hadn’t planned.

Scheduling Home Visits with Remember the Milk.

I’m going to outline three steps here to help you create and maintain a visit schedule using the free web service Remember the Milk.

Continue reading

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?

Rev. Jonathan C. Watt
Trinity Lutheran Church, Creston, IA

I’m not really a list keeper.  Well, at least I never was before.  But put a guy in a church with no secretary and you have to keep lists; prayer lists, visit lists, board agenda items, thank you notes to send, “to dos” for everything from newsletter article ideas to sermon illustrations to remember.  So, what’s a forgetful pastor to do?  I’ve tried them all.  Post-it notes are great but they don’t always stay where they are put.  And you can’t haul your computer monitor with you to a meeting.  The paper to-do note pad works but it’s either too large to carry everywhere or small enough to get lost, and a forgetful pastor like me often forgets where he put it.  Oh and don’t forget, you actually have to look at the paper list to remember what’s on it.  I’ve tried PDAs. They work well but good ones just cost too much.  And if you have a cell phone who wants to carry two devices?  It doesn’t take long to feel like Batman with a utility belt.  Now I must admit new cell phones look to be merging into very useful tools that will do a lot for the forgetful pastor.  But again the cost can be a factor.  Here’s one solution that I’ve found that is actually free (with internet access).   It doesn’t solve all the portability problems but there are some slick features that make it work well for me.  The answer http://RememberTheMilk.com

Remember The Milk is an online web service for managing your “to do” lists and more.  Here’s the description of the service from the provider:

Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.

One of the strengths of RTM is that it is available wherever you have access to the internet.  (BTW that includes access from your cell phone browser at http://m.RemembertheMilk.Com).  But even more than that is the feature rich, easy to use interface.  Oh, did I mention that a basic account is free!  I’ve been using the service for years.  The basic free account does all that I need and more.

Here’s just a sample.  I use Remember The Milk to track my Sunday morning prayer list.  I make an entry for each prayer request using a label at the beginning (i.e. “Cancer: John Doe”).  That way all the requests for “cancer” are sorted together.  I set the due date for the Sunday the prayers will be done.  Now I can easily list the prayers for Sunday by searching by due date.  But even more than that, RTM has a very rich natural language way of setting how you items to repeat.  Usually I set prayers to repeat “every Sunday for 3 times” or “every Sunday until 1 Dec 09”.  After the Sunday list is printed I mark the prayers a completed and they repeat the next Sunday as I have specified.

Sunday morning announcements are done in a similar fashion.  For example I can remember to put an announcement in the bulletin that the Youth Group meets the third Wednesday of the month by having an announcement repeat “Every month on the 3^rd Sunday”.

Here is a list of a few other things I track with RTM.  Items I want to discuss at meetings.  Books I’ve let out.  People I need to contact.  Shutins I’ve visited with communion.

Here’s a short list of other features in Remember the Milk.  You can have an unlimited number of lists.  The user interface if very intuitive.  Items can “tagged” with keywords to make searching and sorting easier.  The system can remind you via eMail and SMS messages of due items.

There are many more features that make Remember The Milk a very useful program to use and one that I depend on every day.

Pastor Jonathan Watt.