A Note about Sermon Manuscripts

stevepvc — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:20:17 +0000

I’m going to publish sermon manuscripts here from time to time, and I wanted to say a little bit of how the manuscript functions for me. It is rarely a word-for-word version of what actually gets delivered from the pulpit, but its part of my preparation cycle when I’m taking the parts of thesermon and working out how they might fit together, how they might sound. It gives me a chance to tweak the sermon structure and do some word-smithing with particular parts of the sermon. It’s a part of crystalizing the sermon itself, part of the discipline of preparation, but I don’t usually think of the manuscript as the final version. and it might sound like a weird nuance, but I want to be clear that between the manuscript and the actual spoken word event, the real sermon is the latter. The manuscript is a written document reflecting the sermon, the sermon itself is a spoken word. I think they are both useful, although not exactly the same thing.

I welcome any feedback on either versions of the sermons I intend to post here. As with any post, if there’s an element in the sermon that leads you to another though, please share in the comments. The more voices, the better!

Steven Hovater's Blog » manuscripts

A Note about Sermon Manuscripts