Visibility 11.6.2025

    Every once in a while, I think it is good to discuss tools rather than tasks. Specifically, I want to discuss why I use an outline tool to lay out my sermon calendar. There are many such available tools. I have several Outliners (They are sometimes called Outline Processors) that I am constantly updating, testing, evaluating, and calibrating to determine which tool to use for a given task. I have Outliners that I use for quick outlines of one-off sermons, articles, or even poems. I have other tools which excel at the huge multifaceted work that goes into a full year’s preaching. 

    For my sermon calendar I am currently using the Omni Corporation's OmniOutliner (OO hereafter) The primary reason is that I know that it can reliably handle all the information that goes into preparing and researching a year’s worth of preaching. I collected all the basic organizational information I needed to plan for 2026 in OO. I have a calendar, a list of holidays and special emphases, as well as a place for some basic preaching work. 

    Next, I have major subdivisions for AM Preaching, Other Preaching, Outside Preaching, Weddings & Funerals, Writing Projects, Sunday School. There are times I may create separate outlines for specific projects. Generally, however every single first draft for the year will be prepared in this one long outline. There is the ability in OO to focus on a single heading or node in the outline and every sub-node. This is in a sense where the magic happens. I am able to open the outline drill down in such a way that I can see every week, every text, every title, every theme laid out for the whole year. It is this perspective that I find invaluable for laying out a balanced congregational diet for the whole year. This tool allows me to visualize the entire year, not as fifty-two separate weeks, but as one continuous program of congregational discipleship. 

    Because of OO’s particular focus, the year’s work has a clear plan to follow including built in benchmarks. Because I know where I will be I can work ahead and write entire blocks of sermons or conduct forward pointing research with reference to the big picture for the year.

    And all of that brings us to the title for this essay and the goal to which it has been pointed. This kind of work tool and the investment in learning how to use it well provides me with a level of visibility that other tools either lack, or which require much more effort to implement. Could I use a word processor? Yes, I could but it would be more clumsy and correspondingly more difficult. I’m using the writing program Scrivener to write this very essay and virtually every year I try to move my sermon calendar into this application and find it too be more complicated than I had anticipated and much more frustrating to work with. With a repeatedly used template and consistent numbering and tracking schemes already set up on OmniOutliner, it took me about an hour to set up the structure of my 2026 Sermon Calendar and was able to begin the process almost immediately of analyzing and breaking down the Scriptures to fill out the meat of the plan. 

    Visibility is good. Visibility helps the preacher to have greater insight. Visibility helps with all the issues we discussed last month. From clarity to coherence, we need visibility to achieve consistency and certainty. Driving blind is not safe. Why would we think that restricted or obstructed vision would help us with preaching?

    The power of visibility is really evident when past yearly outlines are opened alongside my current year’s work as well as next years. Now, in identical collapsable format I can examine how several years’ worth of messages function together to provide a clear path to growing discipleship. It allows for a degree of visibility with far greater reach than opening individual word processing documents. Which I do, have done, and try to avoid, because all those open documents make for a clumsy work environment.

    I learn a lot from rereading those old sermons. Occasionally I recall different wording from when I preached the message, and I can compare the first draft outline with the subsequent editions and even the final copy. It is helpful to recall how thoughts are smoothed out, phrases tweaked, and sentences retooled. This is not to satisfy the cravings of the perfectionist but rather to determine if I have done the best job I can possibly do of explaining what the text says to God’s gathered flock on a particular morning. This process of turning back and reviewing one’s work is also invaluable when one returns to a text in a future sermon or in a different context. I can then take the basic structure and reframe it for the different context of a changed audience with different needs.

    This is invaluable not only for preparing one’s weekly work but for the long haul as well. Turning back, I can see the last year laid out behind me. Looking forward I can see the next year approaching in all its promise. Good, consistent preaching integrates good study habits with good writing habits. Checking our work, editing our work, reviewing our work, and revising our work requires perspective. Perspective is what we call visibility in other contexts, but it is the same thing for the preacher. We need to be self-aware about what we say and how we say it. The message we bear is too important to be neglected or trifled with. We must be good, dependable, trustworthy workmen and that means we know where we are going because we know where we’ve been. Eyes on the road, friends. God will use you to give guidance to the lost or confused.