How could Logos help your sermon-writing process?

Mark, please broaden your outlook. If you look at sheer volume, more faith formation, adult education, Bible study, and daily service reflections and lessons are used in the church than primary sermons. Logos needs to provide more complete services to the full range of people who formally spread the word rather than concentrating on single-text sermons which is a small slice of the actual marketplace.

Mark, please broaden your outlook.

Both/And - I am glad for a laser focus on those who prepare public sermons regularly.

But the focus is only on a small subset of those who prepare public sermons regularly:

• the focus is on sermons with long preparation times - not for those who preach daily or add the optional preaching to the morning and evening prayer
• the focus is on sermons based on a single text - little support for the interrelationships between multiple texts
• the focus omits what one exegesis author refers to as "exegeting the congregation"
• the focus ignores the interplay of liturgical texts with the scripture and sermon 
• the focus ignores the progressive churches that use expanded canons with gnostic text additions

What does "the focus omits what one exegesis author refers to as "exegeting the congregation" mean? 

Here are several views on the topic with some variety in naming.

[quote]

Several steps in the process of application can be distinguished:

1. Ascertain the major thematic idea of the pericope.
2. Integrate the major theme into the overall structure and total message of the book.
3. Exegete your audience just as you did the text until you are confident that your message will be both meaningful and relevant. Here we must recognize that it is insufficient to exegete the text and the ancient culture unless our audience is exegeted as well.
4. State the need that you are addressing and describe your intended audience.
5. Prepare applications that speak to the varied needs and challenges of your total audience.

Dean B. Deppe, All Roads Lead to the Text: Eight Methods of Inquiry into the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 294–295.

[quote]

These last questions indicate that a sermon is not merely an outlined description of a text. A sermon is an explanation of the continuing truth principles evident in the Bible that indicate how contemporary persons should respond to a mutual condition we share with those who were the original subjects or recipients of the text in the light of God’s response to or provision for their situation. Since a sermon ultimately answers for listeners, What does this text mean to me? the explanation has to be framed in such a way that it maximizes meaning for listeners. Thus, adequate explanation requires accurate understanding of both the text and the audience. We must exegete our listeners as well as the text to construct a sermon that most powerfully and accurately explains what the text means. It is, after all, quite possible to say many true things about a text and yet communicate a highly inadequate or an entirely false meaning by not taking into consideration a congregation’s background and situation. What can be heard as well as what should be said demand attention as a preacher lays the path of explanation.

Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 106.

[quote]

Below are a few questions and issues to consider as you take up the challenge of communicating the text:

1. Whom are you addressing as you communicate the text? How would you “exegete” your hearers (e.g., congregation, students, participants)? What form of communication would be most effective (e.g., sermon, Bible study, lecture, art)?
2. How can the text’s claims or affirmations inform your Bible study or sermon? Can your presentation move your hearers in a way similar to the way the text encountered and moved its earliest hearers or readers?
3. Are the text’s central concerns intelligible or meaningful to the cultural and religious experience of your hearers? If not, why not? Are there ways to bring the text and your community closer together?
4. All of us read from a particular social location or place. A way to broaden your perspective is to consider how the text might be heard today by others whose social location differs from your own. For example, how would this text sound to someone living in poverty, or to a physically challenged person, or to someone of different ancestral background, gender, or sexual orientation?

Prior to your exegetical work on the text, you developed a self-exegesis, a profile of your “hermeneutical” self that provides insight into the influences that have shaped the way you read and interpret the biblical text. Now that you have also done significant exegetical work on the text, you are invited to “exegete” the community you plan to address in your communication of the text. For congregations, I recommend the handbook Studying Congregations (Ammerman et al. 1998), which offers ways of studying communities in terms of their culture and the dynamics of congregational life. An effective preacher is one who knows the congregation, not just pastorally on an individual basis but also in terms of how the congregation is organized, how power is exercised and distributed, how decisions are made (i.e., polity), and what challenges the church faces within its larger social context (e.g., demographic location). Whenever I am invited to preach or teach in a congregation that is not my own, the first thing I do is study the congregation’s Web site and exegete its mission statement, which will reveal much about the church’s priorities. Notice also, for example, the kind of educational programs it offers on a regular basis, committee structure, the kinds of events the church hosts, and so forth. The Web site will tell you a lot about the congregation’s public face. From the pictures posted, what is the racial or ethnic makeup of the congregation?

William P. Brown, A Handbook to Old Testament Exegesis, First Edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 329–330.

[quote]

For American Catholic preachers the most important document to come out of this movement to revitalize preaching was published in 1982 by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Fulfilled in Your Hearing: The Homily in the Sunday Assembly. The principal writer was the Reverend William Skudlarek, O.S.B., a leading Catholic authority on the place of preaching in worship.
The introduction to this document makes very clear that it is the teaching of the Council that the primary duty of priests is to proclaim the gospel of God to all. From its very first paragraph we are favorably impressed. That preaching is proclamation is a fundamental insight. It may come as a surprise to American Catholics, but to Protestants of more classical tendencies it is elementary or, perhaps better, fundamental. Here Catholics and Protestants can easily agree. The document goes on to say that the sort of preaching that is properly called proclamation is to recount the mighty acts of God for our salvation and open up the mystery of God’s presence in the incarnate Christ.
Another thing that endears this document to Protestants of more traditional cast is that at the beginning of chapter 1 it quotes at length the story of Jesus preaching in the synagogue of Nazareth. In fact, it is from this story that the bishops have drawn the book’s title, Fulfilled in Your Hearing. All three elements of liturgical preaching are found in this story: the preacher, the text taken from Scripture, and the gathered community. Here the bishops surprise us. They want to begin their study by talking about the assembly or, to use the customary Protestant term, the congregation. But this move has real wisdom to it. As I was taught in seminary, it is just as important to exegete the congregation as it is to exegete the Scriptures. Apparently the communication theorists of our day have impressed the bishops with the importance of understanding the audience one wants to address. The worshiping assembly coming together on the Lord’s Day is the covenant community that God has called together as a sacramental reality. This is the community with whom God has graciously entered into a covenant. Sunday morning worship is a gathering of baptized Christians who are members of the body of Christ. It is essential that the preacher respect the gathering of Christians before him as a Christian congregation if preaching is to be rightly understood.
The bishops also are concerned to get across that preaching at the Lord’s Day assembly should be eucharistic preaching. It should be culminated in the celebration of the sacrament. The community gathered together on the Lord’s Day is a sacred community; even more it is a priestly people. The bishops are concerned to affirm the dignity first of the worshiping congregation, and only then of the ministers of the congregation. This, of course, is basic to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. It is because the church is a priestly people that it can offer up worship to God. “The church is the fundamental sacrament of Christ.”
Next, the bishops address the duties of preaching that are truly pastoral. It is pastoral preaching that is needed in the church today, and if we are to have truly pastoral preaching then our preaching must be the fruit of prayer and meditation. We need to listen to the Scriptures. In fact, this document very specifically suggests that one should spend several hours a day studying and meditating on the Scriptures to be preached on the following Sunday. One should give time to a careful interpretation of the Scriptures in the week beforehand. One should pay attention to both exegesis and hermeneutics in one’s sermon preparation. In fact, the bishops are concerned to encourage preachers to study seriously the texts appointed by the lectionary. A preacher should develop his own library of lexical aids and commentaries. What the bishops have in mind for a sermon is obviously far more than a few devotional remarks about the lessons read from the Gospel.
One easily recognizes the concerns of the Christian humanists back in the sixteenth century. In fact, we can go even further back and recognize the ideal of Augustine in his De doctrina christiana, and, for that matter, the advice of Basil of Caesarea, who insisted on the value of literary studies for the Christian preacher. The concern for a broad education in the liberal arts is one of those classic concerns that reaches far back in the history of Christian preaching. One is especially pleased to see it being reaffirmed in our own day.

Hughes Oliphant Old, Our Own Time, vol. 7, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 298–301.

Why would you want to spend 10 hours doing something you can do in 5 hours? That is the whole point of having a software, isn't it?

My answer is basically I use software to read ABOUT the Bible, its grammar, structure, etc.; here the appropriate speed is the speed in which I can mentally digest the data presented. I don't use software to study the Bible where the goal is not simply understanding but allowing the scripture to shape me. Here I don't judge tools by time saved but rather by barriers broken.