Missing: Sermon File Addon

Thomas Black said:

The date indices, the topic indices, these are essential.  Nobody likes to brag about it, but as pastors we sometimes repeat a sermon.  It's saturday night, the morning message is done, but I've had a funeral and a wedding this week - I need a Sunday evening message and just haven't had the time to build one properly.  I can stay up all night and be groggy in the pulpit (bad Idea) Or I can prayerfully search for older sermons and believe that if God blessed it once, he'll bless it again.  So I pull up an old sermon, go over it again, check my conclusions/applications and then preach it only to have sister Agatha remind me that I preached that one last quarter.  

Thanks, Thomas for expressing this need. You're probably speaking for many of us. I continue to use the L3 addin so that I'll have the vital and oft-used sermon index.

db

I share in the frustration I'm hearing from so many in this thread.

I purchased the original SFA after I had already upgraded to L4. This was largely based on the promise that an L4 version was on the way. I figured it wouldn't be too bad to manage the sermons with L3 for a little while until Logos was able to get the an L4 version out to us.

It was more of a pain than I anticipated. I stopped bothering after several months passed, and committed to waiting for the L4 version. It floors me that it's 2012, and not only is there no code released, but the posts from Logos suggest a profound ambivalence about the entire concept of the SFA as it previously existed.

I know that software features come and go. But when the feature is an expensive add-on, it's not cool to just abandon your users like that.

So what sort of tool am I looking for from Logos? Well, for one thing it wouldn't be massively different from the SFA - I was willing to pay for the features that tool offered, after all.

Specifically, here's what I'd need:

• Forms, please - no markup should be necessary (although it could maybe be provided as an optional way for power users to prepare their documents).
• Fields must include the following: Author; Title; Primary Scripture Reference(s); Date/Location preached (must allow for multiple entries); Topic(s); User-defined.
• Must support lectionary preaching. Good: provide an "Occasion" field. Better: use dropdowns to choose lectionary days, so there is no discrepancy between users - i.e., "Lent 1," "1 Lent," "Lent 1B," "First Sunday in Lent, Year B" etc. Best: Incorporate lectionary support throughout Logos, so that sermons and other resources can be keyed to particular lectionary days.
• Sermons must be treated as sections of resources, and not as resources themselves.
• Versioning would be a big plus. If a sermon has been reused in a modified form, it should not be entered as a new sermon. Neither should the modifications to the original be lost. Tying the new and the original together as versions is the way to go.
• Supporting attachments (mp3, ppt, etc.) would be nice, but not essential.
• Online sharing is fine, as long as there is granular control over it.
• Must accept input from standard formats - TXT, RTF, DOC, DOCX, Open Office. If only one format can be easily supported, I vote for RTF, which any user should be able to save to.

Really, this amounts to a somewhat upgraded version of the original, which was an incredibly useful concept itself.

Logos, please reconsider the path you're taking on the SFA. If it's done right, this is one of the single most powerful uses of Logos possible. If it's done poorly, well... don't bother, then.

Thanks for listening.

MJ. Smith said:

including allowing for lectionary preaching.

MJ. Smith said:

including allowing for lectionary preaching.

[:)]