Helpful Hacks for Preaching from a Manuscript

I try to make different kinds of material distinct. I bold and double-underline the main points. I bold the main point of individual paragraphs. I make cross-references red. I make illustrations blue. I’m sure everyone who preaches from a manuscript does something like this. The biggest thing that has helped me not get lost in my manuscript is to keep my paragraphs short. It is easy to get lost in a long paragraph.

I find that a manuscript gives me freedom. Having thought out a sermon to the point of writing it out actually enables me not to be chained to it, yet I still end up saying most of what I wanted to say. There have been a few occasions when I had to preach when sick or had to preach with something heavy weighing on me, and I found that a manuscript helped me get through. On a recent occasion, I told a church member afterward, “That was rough.” He replied, “What do you mean? The message was a blessing.” Even though I was pretty sick and felt mentally discombobulated, God was good in using the manuscript to help me get through.

I don’t use manuscripts ( yet) but I’m not rigid in my thinking about these things. There are definitely advantages to having the whole thing in text.

The way my mind works, as much as I like to write, I wouldn’t be able to work from a manuscript live. At least I can’t imagine how that would work. I have a hard enough time reading my notes (which are quite minimal by the time I’m done).

But I do think it comes down to what makes you effective in connecting with the audience and conveying truth to them and keeping them engaged. … If it works, it works.

I do not use a word for word manuscript, but I do have my sermons written out in complete sentences in such a way that someone else could pick them up and get the main idea of the message. Sometimes I use the same wording as those sentences, but often I just glance at them to remember what I wanted to say and then say it in a way that flows better with what I had just finished saying. If I simply read them out loud, my message would probably be about a third as long. But Jonathan makes a great point about how the situations of the day can distract us. It is not unusual that a momentary distraction would cause me to lose my train of thought. When such times come, I am able to go back to my notes and read one of my sentences word for word and get back on track again. So in a sense, I have a condensed manuscript, but I do not adhere to it exactly unless I need to because I forgot what I was going to say. I doubt that what I do would work for most people and I doubt that what most people do would work for me. We are all wired a bit differently so I just tell people to figure out what works best for them. Sure, homiletics classes are great, but I view them as tools to help us figure out what works best for us, not cookie cutters to show what everyone should do.