Proclaimer Blog
Avoiding boring sermon illustrations
Experienced preachers often suggest younger ones should start a file of sermon illustrations. There isn’t really any other way to avoid recycling illustrations everyone has heard before.
The trouble – at least for me – is that this involves an awful lot of organisation. You have to remember to write it down when the inspiration hits, or you hear that perfect story. Then you have to remember to file it properly. And you have to file it in the right place. There are plenty of illustrations that cross categories – that might be useful to illustrate humility, but seem more sensibly filed under marriage. Neither paper nor, until recently, computers, offered solutions to that problem that are anything other than baroque – at least if you build up a file of any size.
Recently I discovered a solution that is both simple and free: Evernote. This program will file whatever you like, and you can search all your notes easily – and find them by any of the words contained in it, not just by title or where you happened to file it. And then you can organise them however you want. Unlike paper notes, it is easy to tag your note both ‘humility’ and ‘marriage’. And all this is backed up to the internet, accessible from anywhere, so you can’t lose the files. It can file pictures, sounds, and web-pages as well, and even has the ability to search text in photos you add.
If you have a smartphone of almost any kind, it works on these too. So if you are out, you can make a quick note on your phone or take a photo, and when you get home it will be sitting there on your computer.
And as a result you spend far less time desperately trying to remember where you saw that article last month which illustrates exactly what you need to say in your sermon this week.