Preaching From my Phone

What do I take into the pulpit when I preach? My phone and my bible.

Explanation:

I've been trained to write a full manuscript of my sermon and take that to the pulpit. I think this is great because you carefully craft your sermon and have it with you if you need it. I tried doing it the way my pastor does, by printing it out onto paper, but that didn't work well for me. Even though I upped the font size to 14 it was still too much on the page for me to sift through while preaching. Maybe if I went through like he does and marked it up and highlighted it I would do better, but having a printed manuscript is not my thing. I like to have it on my phone. That might sound ridiculous but hear me out.

I found a very helpful article by Tim Challies about preaching from your iPad. I used a lot of the tips he shares in that. I don't use an iPad, but instead my iPhone Plus which is pretty huge when it comes to phones. I have an iPad I could use but after practicing on my phone a dozen times that's the screen I'm used to. I actually really like the size that it is compared to an iPad. Let me tell you why.

My Sermon Manuscript on my Phone

I export my full sermon manuscript from Google Docs into the Kindle app on my phone. From there I make the font huge, the screen black, and the text white. That way it doesn't glare off of my glasses as easily as a white screen would. Also as I practice my sermon on my phone, only like a dozen lines of text show up on the screen. I've found if I work my way through the sermon on my phone like this, practicing it several times, eventually I barely need to glance at my manuscript on the phone. I think that's because each screen of text has become like a flash card that I've mostly put to memory after practicing it.

Printed Sermon Manuscript

Some other perks to using my phone:

- I'm constantly finding edits I want to make while practicing my sermon and I hate printing out a long document just to use it once and make tons of changes to it and have to print it off again
- It's really easy to highlight and make notes while practicing that are then all accessible on one screen for review later without having to hunt through the whole manuscript to find the edits I want to make
- Each screen of my manuscript becomes like a flash card that I eventually don't need to look down at very often
- The next page of my notes is a subtle tap/swipe away when I'm in the pulpit
- It's always with me in my pocket
- I can still highlight
- I can still make last minute notes in the Kindle app that are easy to access while preaching with a tap
- I've found I can get to a place of not being tied to my manuscript while preaching from my phone if I've practiced enough - this without having to mark it up with a pen or highlight things like bible verses I'm using
- I'm sure I could get to a place where I was less tied to my manuscript while preaching from paper, but it seems more time consuming to do it by highlighting and marking up the manuscript. This method works really well for a lot of preachers but for me I like to use my phone.
- If I was ever called upon to preach with no notice (which I've heard happens) I could easily pull any of my manuscripts down from the cloud and have it ready to go within a minute, no printer needed