By Eric Moulton
Thursday, 11:30am
First Church of Somewhere
Somewhereville, USA.
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Youth Pastor Bob
is diligently working on his weekly sermon for
the upcoming youth meeting. He’s teaching a series of messages
from the book of Ephesians. Bob is racking his brain, attempting to
think of an illustration that would help get his point across in this week’s
topic. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the thought occurs to Bob that he
recently read a cool story somehwere that would serve as a great illustration
for his talk. Was it from the last issue of “Youthworker” magazine,
or was it from that Max Lucado book he read two years ago? “That illustration
would Be powerful,” thought Bob. “But how am I ever going to find
it…?” |
If you are anything like me,
you’ve been in
Bob’s shoes before. You work hard in your preparation
of the Word for your students. You desire to communicate
effectively and bring a fresh Word to your kids from
the Lord. You pray and work diligently to make the
message understandable.
In your preparation, you realize the value of input,
anecdotes, illustrations, quotes and stories that
will help drive your point home with your audience.
How
do you develop a bank of resources that will become
a consistent well that you will be able to tap into
over the course of your ministry? The secret is in
your filing system. If you just said yourself, “what
filing system?” then this article may be truly
enlightening to you and helpful for your ministry.
In the last article I wrote about reading, I discussed
the important role that reading plays in the personal
growth of the youth pastor. Reading is fundamental
and critical for those of us in ministry, especially
in the infant stages of the information age. The
question becomes for us then, what do we do with
what we are
reading? How do I make my reading profitable not
only for the immediate moment, but for the future
as well?
The secret lies in our ability to retrieve the information
successfully at the right moment. Unless you are
blessed with a photographic memory, you have probably
read
some great stuff with great teaching insights and
illustrations that you are simply unable to recall
or retrieve because
you do not have a retrieval system in place for all
the information that you are processing. Think for
a moment of all the different things you have read
over the past week or so. Perhaps you are currently
working through a book or two, regularly reading
the newspaper, internet articles, magazine articles
and
are taking sermon and teaching notes. What do you
do with all that information that may prove to be
very
valuable for your teaching and preaching ministry
somewhere down the road. I would like to suggest
that you begin
to develop a method of filing. Think of it as your
own personal “warehouse” of ideas that
will become a reservoir of sermon helps, insights,
illustrations, etc.
Here’s how you might begin your filing system.
The first thing you will need to do is invest in one
of those old, archaic office items- a 4 drawer file
cabinet. Second, you will need an unending supply of
file folders and labels. The top 2 drawers of your
file cabinet are what we call you’re A-Z Topical
files (your top drawer may be a-l and the second drawer
would be m-z). This is where you store hardcopy articles
that you read from the internet, magazines, newspapers,etc.
For example, say you are reading an article about the
effects of divorce on children from the latest issue
of Time magazine. In it you read some interesting quotes
and statistics. What you would do is cut out the article
from the magazine (or photo copy it) and store it in
your divorce file. You will be surprised how many different
topics you will come up with for your topical file.
It’s important to be very specific with your
topics. Avoid being too general or broad in your
filing because this will slow down and muddy up the
retrieval
process. Now you are able to recall that information
when you need it. This makes your reading profitable
now and later. This is being a wise steward of the
resources God puts before you.
The third drawer is what we call the Biblical reference
file. Create a file corresponding with each of the
sixty-six books of the Bible. This is where you file
articles, sermon notes and other teaching materials
that specifically deal with certain passages of scripture.
For example, say your pastor is doing a teaching
series on the book of Philippians. Taking notes on
this series
will be valuable for you personally and for your
own teaching ministry. But again, these notes must
be accessible
if they are to be truly valuable (note: your Bible
should not double as your filing cabinet). Since
the nature of the series is not a topical one, but
an expository
survey of a particular book of the Bible, you would
want to file this in your Philippians file. By the
end of the series you have your pastor’s commentary
on the book of Philippians at your disposal to refer
to when you preach from a passage of the scripture
to your students. Some articles you read, whether
on the web or from periodicals, are not topical in
nature,
but are more like commentary on certain scripture
passages. Over time, you will develop a tremendous
commentary
collection coming from a wide variety of places.
This will become a bountiful resource for your own
teaching
and preaching ministry.
The fourth drawer of your filing cabinet is your
own sermon file. File your own sermons in alphabetical
order in this file for future reference or to preach
again should the Spirit of God direct you. I have
also
included another section in this drawer called “sermons
in development.” There are times when I will
get a seed of an idea for a future sermon and have
a few sparse notes or thoughts concerning that message.
I file them in this section so that I can work on them
at a later time. This helps me not only organize my
notes but safeguards me from forgetting the ideas that
God is giving me. Keep a legal pad with you at all
times because you never know when the Lord will show
you something profound. This takes care of your paper
files. One last thought is that you probably have what
I call “administrative files.” For these
administrative file needs, I use my large office desk
drawer which accommodates a smaller, but adequate number
of files. Avoid mixing your administrative files with
your other reference files because this could prove
to be confusing. This takes care of all our paper filing.
Now let’s consider our library.
This is where the genius of good filing really takes
off. As we have mentioned before, reading is critical
for personal growth and fruitful, long-haul ministry.
The key to your reading library is all in the retrieval.
Am I able to access information from the books that
I have read in a quick, efficient manner? Am I really
gleaning all that I can from the material I am reading
for the ministry? Let me describe for you one way
in which to make your library a gold-mine of resources
for you.
The first rule in this filing
system is to train yourself to read with a legal
pad. Here’s how it would
work. Say you are reading Max Lucado’s “God
Came Near.” The first thing you would do is label
the top page of your legal pad accordingly:
God Came Near
By Max Lucado
After noting the book and
author, you put a number one in the top left corner.
Naturally, as you are reading
you will come across lots of new thoughts and ideas,
etc. Let’s say that while reading through the
first chapter you come across a great new definition
of grace. This is something you would want to remember
and perhaps be able to recall. And let’s say
that Lucado gives a great insight on a passage of scripture
in Matthew. This you would label on the legal pad not
as a topic, but as a Biblical reference shown in entry
2. Here’s how you would note both entries on
your legal pad:
God Came Near
By Max Lucado
A great new definition
See page 18
Great thought on prayer from this passage
See p. 20
You can probably just imagine all the different topical
and Biblical reference entries you would have by
the time you finish a volume of material. It is a
good idea to highlight the passage or make margin
notes in the book for easy retrieval when you do
refer to the book in the future.
The second phase of this process is to move your
legal pad entries to a file index. At this point
you can move in a number of directions. One way to
do this is to put each entry on a 3x5 index card
and file them in a small index file drawer (you can
get one at any office supply store). This way you
end up with what looks like a library card catalog
file. You will need two file drawers. One is an A-Z
topical file, the other is a Biblical Reference file.
File your topical entries in alphabetical order for
future recall. Now file your Biblical reference entries
by the corresponding book of the Bible (Gen.-Rev.).
The other thing you can do is store these indexes
on your computer (rather than 3x5 cards) in the data-base
program of your choice (just be sure to have this
saved in a back-up should your computer crash on
you).
You have just completed the filing process. Let’s
look for a moment at how this can truly be a valuable
help to you. Now, let’s say you are preparing
a sermon on grace two years from now. All you need
to do is look in your index file under “G” to
see all the entries you have for grace. The book
you read three years ago (whose content you cannot
remember) now becomes accessible once again as a
resource for your ministry.
You may be thinking that this is quite a tedious
process. This assessment is true. It takes a reasonable
amount of effort to establish this system of filing.
Anything worth having takes effort. The fruits of
filing are more than evident over the long run and
I am convinced that anyone who begins this process
will surely be glad to have discovered this method.
This is information management that no minister of
the gospel do without. Filing is a great tool for
many obvious reasons. One thing I found the filing
process to be for me was as a motivation for challenging
reading. Because I knew that I now had a place to
store the resources I was mining, reading became
an even greater use of my time and energy than I
had ever imagined.
There is never a substitute for your own God-given
ideas in teaching and preaching, but filing provides
a wealth of ideas and resources to strengthen, aid
and confirm your teaching ministry. God bless you
as you seek to be a wise steward of all that He has
given you!
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