New in Logos 9: Sermon Manager

Description: View and browse all your sermon documents with facets like date, passage, and topic. Bulk create a sermon series, or import your entire liturgical season, complete with passages for every reading. Plot out your preaching schedule alongside your Faithlife church calendar, and see your entire year at a glance in the radial calendar view.

Learn how to use Sermon Manager.

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Comments

This is looking really nice!

Can we pick a different lectionary for the liturgical calendar? Perhaps using a Personal Book?

Alan Palmer (Logos)

Can we pick a different lectionary for the liturgical calendar? Perhaps using a Personal Book?

It will use your preferred lectionary. However, personal books are not currently supported.

GregW

This is a huge improvement and makes Logos far more useful for sermon preparation, at least in my workflow. One question: can we add our own calendars or download Google calendars? In the UK, for example, we have Mother's Day in the middle of Lent, and our public holidays are completely different.

Alan Palmer (Logos)

Thanks Greg, glad you are enjoying it.

More calendar integrations are coming! First on our list are more pre-built holidays for various regions and better Faithlife calendar integration.

Brent Lawrence

I just updated to a Logos 9 Silver package and Sermon Manager is not appearing my Tools menu. Am I missing something?

MJ. Smith

Welcome to the forums Brent.

1. Are you a Connect subscriber?

2. If not, did you purchase the Silver library or Silver library + feature set?

3. Do you use Verbum where it is Homily Manager?

Brent Lawrence

It was a the Logos 9 Pentecostal & Charismatic Silver upgrade.

Brent Lawrence

Strangely, it just appeared ion the tools menu. Took almost an hour to show up, but it is there.

MJ. Smith

It was a the Logos 9 Pentecostal & Charismatic Silver upgrade.

If it was just the library upgrade, it won't provide the premium features. You need to request both the library and the feature set to get both. Check your order history

Calix Furus

Hi Alan,

This is a great new feature — when you say calendar integrations, do you mean like syncing with our iCloud calendars? That would make a lot of sense, the best way to plan! Also, as a UK user, the US holidays don’t help me that much, so looking forward to seeing more regions added Or perhaps the ability to subscribe to external calendars?

Keep up the good work

Blessings,

Calix

Alan Palmer (Logos)

hen you say calendar integrations, do you mean like syncing with our iCloud calendars?

Third party calendar integration (iCloud, Outlook, Google, etc) is not currently planned.

We are more likely to implement closer integration with Faithlife calendars first and reevaluate based on user feedback.

Fábio Silva

I really like this new feature, a couple of things that have been on my mind that would be nice to see integrated in the long term in the sermon, manager and sermon builder.

1 - Google Calendar integration - Either by having a calendar section on the homepage or by allowing us to export to Google Calendar in our phones, integrating with other features like prayers lists and reading plans for example would be a potent tool

2 - Right now something that has been weird to me is the "week" tab on Sermon Manager - Maybe I'm missing something on what this is supposed to enable us to do. I've set a couple of sermons on the sermon manager for this coming Sunday (1st of November) but in the "week" tab it shows that the sermon is for the week of from 1 to 7 November with no option to change that. Not sure what the goal of this "week" tab is but surely if it's to "allocate" the sermon prep time we should have the capability to define that and the default should be the week leading up to the 1st of November not the one after.

3 - Predictive text - I love the Sermon series/venue/service capabilities, it would be a nice QOL if we could integrate some form of predictive text in those text boxes. What ends up happening right now is that let's say I'm preaching a series on the book of Acts and name my series the "Acts of the Apostles" if by chance I end up while writing one sermon with inputing "The Acts of the Apostles" on the series textbox I end up with 2 different series on the Sermon Manager. Same thing goes for the venue or service.

4 - On the sermon builder private notes - I used to use the Private Notes to have the order of service and maybe some notices there, right now with the new update there's two things that have been hampering me, this is not major and I do have a workaround in mind. First, the text box is super small to write anything of substance there; Second, in the preaching mode it would be nice to have a button that would bring them up without me having to go back to the document.

5 - The Filter function in the Sermon Manager - Let's say I want to see all my sermons that I preached in "Church B", i press the "Church B" button and filter out only the sermons that I preached there. The problem is that some of those sermons I preached in other venues, and right now all those appear as entries in the list. For instance if I preached 6 times in church B there still appears all the other times I preached those same sermons in "Church C". I end up having duplicate sermons on that screen (12 entries).

Great job on the Sermon Manager btw, I'm excited to start using it more and more. I regularly preach 3 times a week and with Christmas Season coming up I see it as a useful and timely addition.

Bob Pritchett

Right now something that has been weird to me is the "week" tab on Sermon Manager

Our observation is that different churches have different concepts of the week, or even the 'sermon day'.

Some sermons aren't just for Sunday, they are delivered Saturday night and again once or twice on Sunday morning.

Some churches think of the week as a unit leading up to the Sunday service; others think of the weekend services as starting a week unit (in which small groups might use questions/themes linked to the sermon heard on the weekend, etc.)

So the plan is to offer multiple calendar views and to let you choose 'first day of the week' for your church. (Typically Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, depending on the church.) One of the new calendar views will be a week view, where each row is a week, starting on your first day of the week, and optionally merging Saturday/Sunday if you have two days of weekend services. Then you'd have 52 rows of 7 days (or 6 day blocks, with the weekend as one), in order to make it easier to see sermons series / themes / seasons at a week granularity (reading down the rows) rather than a day granularity.

I used to use the Private Notes to have the order of service

Proclaim already supports an Order of Service; the plan is to expand and enhance it, and allow you to edit it on Faithlife.com as well as in Proclaim, and to link it to the calendar view in Sermon Manager.

We'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on improving this whole area, from sermon management to various calendar views/visualizations of the church year to order of service management.

Fábio Silva

Right now something that has been weird to me is the "week" tab on Sermon Manager

Our observation is that different churches have different concepts of the week, or even the 'sermon day'.

Some sermons aren't just for Sunday, they are delivered Saturday night and again once or twice on Sunday morning.

Some churches think of the week as a unit leading up to the Sunday service; others think of the weekend services as starting a week unit (in which small groups might use questions/themes linked to the sermon heard on the weekend, etc.)

So the plan is to offer multiple calendar views and to let you choose 'first day of the week' for your church. (Typically Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, depending on the church.) One of the new calendar views will be a week view, where each row is a week, starting on your first day of the week, and optionally merging Saturday/Sunday if you have two days of weekend services. Then you'd have 52 rows of 7 days (or 6 day blocks, with the weekend as one), in order to make it easier to see sermons series / themes / seasons at a week granularity (reading down the rows) rather than a day granularity.

I used to use the Private Notes to have the order of service

Proclaim already supports an Order of Service; the plan is to expand and enhance it, and allow you to edit it on Faithlife.com as well as in Proclaim, and to link it to the calendar view in Sermon Manager.

We'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on improving this whole area, from sermon management to various calendar views/visualizations of the church year to order of service management.

Thx for this Bob,

I remember when the new notes came out with Logos 8 it felt slightly unfinished but I also remember how quickly you guys incrementally built on it, it now is my primary note taking (only use my Tab S6 notes app when I want to handwrite with the SPen [wink wink]).

So, I have no reason to doubt that you guys will make this feature much better in the coming months.

Ok, for me and I suppose for some of your other non-denominational, non-liturgical calendar users (don't want to speak for anyone else but me though). I would appreciate the capability to view it as the week leading up to the day the sermon is to be delivered as opposed to seeing it as the week after. Kind of a sermon prep time reminder.

I end up regularly preaching twice on Sunday, once on Thursday. So it would be nice to use the Sermon Manager calendar as to now what I'm supposed to be doing.

From a pastoral pov, I would love to be able to use Logos Homepage as diary/calendar more consistently (i've been using prayer lists as to-do lists for instance). It's already my go-to for my morning readings and devotionals but I think there is potential to be tapped there towards making Logos the one-stop shop for pastors. Sermon Manager was a great step in that direction, I used to have to use a notetaker app to keep track of my sermon series planning.

Is there any particular difficulty in integrating with Google calendar (and IOS as well) API, it would seem to me that that shouldn't be too complicated?

The problem with Proclaim for me as we are a conservative low-tech church (hymnbooks and paper Bibles for the most part) there is almost nothing we would be using from it. But thank you for the recommendation.

David Buckham

I'm looking forward to trying this feature in the very near future.

FWIW, I create my sermons in a Mind Map form (using Simple Mind). I teach preaching classes at a local Bible College and show a lot of different types of builds for notes in the pulpit to no notes at all.

I've briefly dabbled with and debated increasing my usage of the Canvas set up in Logos for a bit, but found it a bit clunky. I'm not opposed to a more linear set of notes, but as a preacher, I feel linear notes "trap" me a bit more than I want to be.

All that aside, I like the layout I am seeing in the videos that mention Sermon Manager in L9.

Phil Gons (Logos)

I would love to be able to use Logos Homepage as diary/calendar more consistently

Sermon reminder integration is coming to the Homepage soon.

Is there any particular difficulty in integrating with Google calendar (and IOS as well) API, it would seem to me that that shouldn't be too complicated?

Sermon Manager integrates with Faithlife group calendars, and Faithlife allows you to import Google Calendars, so I think we already support this.

Phil Gons (Logos)

3 - Predictive text - I love the Sermon series/venue/service capabilities, it would be a nice QOL if we could integrate some form of predictive text in those text boxes. What ends up happening right now is that let's say I'm preaching a series on the book of Acts and name my series the "Acts of the Apostles" if by chance I end up while writing one sermon with inputing "The Acts of the Apostles" on the series textbox I end up with 2 different series on the Sermon Manager. Same thing goes for the venue or service.

Coming in the near future.

Doc B

Will the Sermon Manager feature be available as a stand-alone purchase (now or later) or must I go to the Silver Level feature upgrade to get it?

Marklund Johan

Are you planning to include Pbbs in the lectionary-list in sermon manager?

The sermon manager is the sole reason that i moved over from accordance in the first place. Thanks for this feature!

//Johan