Building Your Own Sermon Library

Most pastors are far too busy to bother with organizing their books, magazines, cds, tapes, etc. Most of the time they are just stacked into piles without any thought about trying to find one of them in the future. We're too busy trying to prepare this week's sermon rather than thinking about the months and years ahead and how we are going to utilize the hundreds of books, magazines, cds, dvds, notebooks, and dozens of others resource materials. But, if we don't organize the materials we have collected, we'll soon have a worthless pile of thousands of very valuable resources that can't do us a bit of good.

So, each week I will help you understand how to collect, categorize and input your resources in a way that you can find what you are looking for in a matter of seconds and have it right at your finger tips each and every time you need it.

Before I get too deep into this topic, I'd like to share with you how I first began building my sermon library.

When I entered seminary in 1975, I began buying books for the classes I attended. After the first year, I had dozens of books and materials from these classes just stacked in the corner of a room in my house.

I soon found myself going back to these books and materials for various reasons, sermons, teen classes, reference to other classes I was taking and just to answer questions that people asked. It was at that time I realized if I didn't figure out some way to organize this resource material, it wasn't just going to grow into a larger pile, but it would be worthless to me. And, because I spent so much money on all these materials, it was a waste of the money God gave me, if I didn't find a way to utilize it better.

So, the first thing I did was go to our seminary library and speak with our librarian. She was very helpful. I can still remember her name, Mrs. Green. She was an expert on filing and organizing the library, so I asked her if she could help me with my own library. She used the Dewey Decimal System and a cardex. Five drawers across the top and about five drawers down. It was filled with thousands of cards cross-referencing all the books and materials in our seminary library.

I went to the local office supply store and bought a one drawer, metal card holder. At the time, my library only had a few dozen books, so it looked very empty. But I typed the titles, author's name and description of the item on the card and then followed the Dewey Decimal System. Mrs. Green photocopied the Religious category out of her catalog for me and I used that as my template. In the right hand corner of each card I would type the reference number that corresponded to the item. Then I added it to my cardex and I was on my way!

More to come next week!