Planning and brainstorming sermon series

Eric Mann

How do you plan sermon series from scratch using Logos? Most of the time, I go through books of the Bible, which makes a series relatively straightforward to plan. However, I'm working on a series tackling the "One Another's" in the Bible and right now it's just a list of the commands in Excel with Bible references next to them. Is there a Logos tool that would allow you to process this information and turn it into a series? Right now I have a list of 27 "one another" commands (I know that's not all of them), but I am limiting myself to seven sermons. Some of the commands will just be left out and maybe covered in another series if I get back to it, but many of the commands can be grouped together along common general themes, so that I hope to be able to cover 2 or 3 in a single sermon. Still, Excel doesn't seem to be the best program to use for this process. I thought about using the "Canvas" tool, but that seemed TOO UNSTRUCTURED, but I've never actually used it before, so maybe I'm missing how it could be used for this. Any suggestions?

Jeremy White

Have you looked at the Sermon Planner function?

Planning Sermons with Sermon Manager – Logos Help Center

Eric Mann

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1355935#Comment_1355935

I use the sermon planner to prepare my sermons each week, and present them on my iPad using Logos. What I'm trying to do is take a bigger picture look at the various possible sermons, and develop the series as a whole. Once I know what each sermon is going to focus on, I'm comfortable using the sermon planner. I'm just trying to figure out how to process all the multiple possibilities for sermons based on the "one another" commands, and distill them into a seven sermon series.

Jeremy White

Ahh - OK - thanks for the clarification. I'm thinking you might make good use of various mind mapping tools that allow you to have your different "one another"s separate and start to flesh out what you would want to say regarding them and then make decisions based on the volume and significance of your different points to determine how you will reduce them down to seven. There are plenty out there free and paid - I'm a fan of Twine / An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories - it's not strictly a mind mapping tool but my mind tends to like having conversations with itself and this tool allows me to keep track of the different threads and then determine how to condense it down and thread a needle to communicate something that others can follow without endless parenthicals or rabbit trails.

Thinking about it you could kind of do that with sermon planner by setting each one another up as a seperate message for sometime in the future and then transfer any work you do in each seperate one another to the final 7 that you actually present. I'm thinking that might be overally brittle for your purposes but just thinking out loud here.

Eric Mann

Thanks, that's helpful, I'll check out the Twine tool/app.