Outlining for preaching

I may have mentioned this before but I can't find any record of it, so I'll mention it now! For many years I used a straightforward word processor to create sermons. I'd bash away at the keyboard generating my notes for each talk in a different file. The only way I could get an overview of what I was doing was to look at all the file names and hope they made sense. But frankly speaking that was not good enough. What I really wanted was a tool that would let me switch between ideas and research and outlines and plans etc. Step into the frame OmniOutliner and Scrivener.

An outliner is a nice tool for doing exactly what it says it does. It outlines. It allows you to create an outline of a project or a to-do list or, as I use it, to outline an upcoming sermon series. I can see quite easily the order and I can change things around as I wish. I can also add notes and dates. Of course you can do this in a spreadsheet or word processor document, but an outlining tool has some advantages.

Scrivener, on the other hand, is a step beyond mere outlining. It's a word processor designed for writing books or scripts, but it's actually very useful for sermon preparation too. You create a project, let's say "Characters" and you can have a separate page for each character. But here's the neat thing, you can see all the characters at once, and you can edit the whole lot or an individual page or collection of pages.

I know both these tools are Mac utilities, but a good alternative to Scrivener to use in Windows is Pagefour. It is similar to Scrivener and I used it a lot before I switched to Mac.

So if you are looking for a new way of working with your sermons, try these alternatives and see if they suit you.