(Or: Why I Made a Sermon Design App.)
The tools that you use to do a task shape the way you think about the nature of the task.
This is not a new insight. After all, most people have heard the axiom: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
That principle is part of the reason for the coding work I’ve done adjacent to my work as a minister. I wanted to dive into the process of tool-building, because it helped me better understand the nature of the work itself. Sermon Design was the first foray into trying to build a tool for myself and my colleagues. A couple of observations led me into that rabbit hole.
If I went about the work of trying to create a sermon in a word processor, then I tended to approach the sermon like it was an essay. I wrote the sermon, making choices of style and rhetoric like a writer. I would use very precise language, which is fine, but the language was often dense—something that helps good writing feel powerful, but makes oral delivery feel heavy and heady. A densely written sermon often comes off as too intellectual in the actual moment of its delivery. They are harder to listen to because the hearer has to process everything as quickly as it is read, and sermons written like that often don’t give the hearer the chance to process. Writing for speaking requires a great amount of experience if the spoken word is to feel natural in the moment.
There’s much more to be said about the differences between written and spoken media, but for my purposes here, I want to simply note that the tool for writing—the word processor—subtly influences the kind of thing produced in the end. Indeed, different kinds of word processing apps probably influence the process sin their own way—Word, Pages, and Google Docs1 all exert slightly different bits of influence on the writers that use them.
On the other hand, sometimes I’ve thought through what I want to do in a sermon by plotting it directly in slide design software. My app of choice is Keynote, but the general influence of building a sermon there will be similar to using its siblings PowerPoint, Google Slides, or something like Canva2. Depending on the version of the software and the preacher’s usage, it may train the preacher to think about the sermon as a sequence of points, or perhaps as a presentation of information. That sort of process will tend to create sermons with flow and structure, but which may be much looser in their detail.
I’ll leave it to the reader to consider whether “sermon as essay” or “sermon as presentation” is better, but the point is that the kind of tool used to prepare the sermon will heavily influence what the sermon becomes. That observation is what drove me to really consider trying to create a tool that reflected the kind of process that would lead to the kind of sermon I wanted to create.
The process of coding forced me to slow down and consider what a sermon actually is. It was a vehicle for exploring how the process of creating it contributes to what it eventually becomes. It made me think of where a sermon comes from, from the initial space of discerning what our church’s preaching schedule should look like to the release of the manuscript that will become the preacher’s guide in the moment of the sermon itself. It tries to honor the process of carefully listening to the text and considering the process of building rhetoric for the specific purposes of a sermon.
In some ways, the app that resulted from that process of coding and reflecting is aspirational. It’s a process I’m reaching towards each week, even if the various stages are somewhat incomplete. The app is also pretty idiosyncratic, meaning that it reflects my ideal process, not necessarily anybody else’s. This app is sort of my contribution to homiletical instruction; it’s a sort of tutor in the process of creating a sermon.
To mix axioms, I wouldn’t argue that everyone needs to reinvent the hammer. You don’t have to learn to code to consider the tools you use and the influence they have on you. But I do think that process of discerning the way we approach our work can give us insight into the work itself. Ideally, we come out of that process making sure that our proper task is being pursued with proper tools, instead of thoughtlessly letting the technologies available to us, in vogue at the moment, drive the way we go about the work of preaching.
Sermon Design 3 is an app for creating intentional sermons. It’s available on the macOS and iOS app stores.
- There are many more, of course. For example, I’ve used Ulysses, a minimalist WP for years. Ironically, it took me a second to know how to insert a footnote here because I’m writing in my blog’s web editor, and the feature was buried. I almost gave up, which would have been an example of the tool and its assumptions changing what I wanted to create! This happens all the time, where the tool subconsciously shapes the product by making some things easier and some things harder. ↩︎
- Again, though I’m speaking of the broad effect of this kind of app, the particularities matter! The features that each of these apps brings to the front, and which are buried will subtly influence the way the preacher thinks about the nature of the sermon being created. ↩︎
Steven Hovater 