Preaching without Notes

Bruce Bryan · 2025-07-10T19:39:23+00:00

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Does anybody else preach the Sunday Morning message without any notes? By heart? Except on rare occasions, I have done this for 35 years. This has rendered the Sermon Builder mostly useless for me (although I have dabbled in the AI features like illustrations or quotes on occasions). I do manuscript my message (on Google Docs) as I prepare it. I generally practice it three times: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Often during a practice, I come up with a new idea (outline, illustration, explanation) for the message. I then go back and add it to the manuscript. I get my manuscript to the AV guys (Google Folder Share) by the end of the week, and they put verses up on the screens as I refer to them. They put the main outline points on slides too. Occasionally I will have a picture, or some other AV item, and I simply stick that in the Shared Drive Folder, and I indicate to the AV team where I want it. I have found that FOR ME it is juts easier to connect with the congregation when I am not referring to the notes all the time; usually, "just me and my Bible and my people". This has worked well. Finally, I got the idea of preaching without notes years ago from a Dale Carnegie book "Public Speaking" (1926). Just food for thought for you all. Happy to talk with anyone interested in trying this method.

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Comments

Francis

I use a short outline. It allows me to keep on track, remember cross-references but not be tied down to a manuscript. I repeat based on the outline until I know my message well enough (what I aim to communicate, not word-for-word). This allows me to focus entirely on communicating and talking to the congregation. I don't really use the Sermon Builder a whole lot and tend to prefer filing my outlines in Notes. Either way it is helpful to have a good "filing system" in Logos. I can see how it could be helpful to preach from Logos using my tablet but I prefer to use a paper Bible and a printed short outline.

Bruce Bryan

Awesome Francis. Thanks for the comment!

Lew Worthington

Yeah, I would prepare the message well enough that manuscripts were not needed, but I would generally know exactly where it's going and how to get there. Like most people, I've been talking longer that I've been writing, so it just comes across more naturally if I divorce my delivery from the written word (except when precise phrasing is important).

Bruce Bryan

I never use the manuscript. It is just on file if I need to preach the sermon at a later date. Truly, the sermon I preach is often quite different from the manuscript—never a word-for-word copy. Often stories and illustrations are the same, but the telling of them might be different 'live".

The main outline points are the same as they are in the church bulletin. But often as I preach, I trust that the Lord is leading me to share just what he has for my people.

Sometimes I even think of other stories or other related Bible verses as I preach. To me there is great freedom in preaching without notes/manuscript.