I’m convinced God gave me a ‘Geek’ gene.
From my monopoly on science fair first prizes in high school to my toy tank that fires bb’s to my radio-controlled helicopter that shoots plastic missiles, I love any gadget that runs on electricity. I’m also among an elite 50,000 who bought the very first Macintosh in 1984. I sold a life insurance policy and used the cash value to pay for it. Since then I’ve owned over 20 different Macs and I now sport a brand new MacBook Air. I also use an iPhone 4 and an iPad.
Like I said, God gave me a geek gene.
At the same time Mac blood has flowed through my veins, God infused into my bones a passion to teach God’s Word. I’ve preached over a thousands sermons and I’ve seen my preaching evolve over the years in this progression.
- write sermon notes in the margin of a wide column bible (my eyes can’t see teeny-tiny print now 🙂 )
- type out the sermon on one half-page and insert into my bible
- type up the full text and insert small pages into the bible so that it looks like I’m not using notes
- print out the full text and place the full sized pages on the lectern
- Preach from an iPad
I love using the iPad now. It took a few weeks to getting used to it, but I don’t think I will ever change. I see three advantages in using an iPad.
- Easily mark up and highlight on the fly
- Keep all your sermons in one place
- You look really cool, especially when the house and stage lights are off…it casts a holy glow on your face 🙂
Here’s how I now prepare my sermons and get them to the iPad.
- I write my sermons on my Mac with Word. Accordance (easy to use and trusty) and Logos (quite expansive yet rather slow and cumbersome at times) are my primary study tools. Note: My iPad still has not replaced my laptop and I don’t expect it to.
- I save my Word doc as a PDF file
- I drop the PDF into Dropbox (a free app that allows you to easily move a pc file to the iPad via shared wi-fi)
- I open up the PDF in Dropbox and then open it in Noterize ($2.99). Many PDF markup programs exist. This one tends to be a bit slow in turning the pages, but thus far it works best for me. I would love to use Apple’s Pages program, but at this point they don’t offer highlighting options.
- I then mark up, highlight, and make changes as needed. Our service production team always has a paper copy available in case my iPad goes down.
Here’s a screen shot of what an iPad page looks like.
If you are an iPad user, what apps do you use for preaching? Any tricks you’ve learned?
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