Thursday, July 03, 2008

Mindmap your sermon

Following on from this post, the latest news is that not only have they all gone and left me in charge, but that I am also down to preach this weekend. Fools. Anyway, in my usual style as a right-brained musician day-dreamer, I have decided to mindmap my sermon as a tool both for preparing the message and for delivering it. And I have to say it's working out quite nicely.

Here's the first draft.


This is the brainstorming, planning, throwing-everything-out-there phase. If I preached about everything on this plan then we'd be there all day. It's a sermon series in itself. It even goes over on to a second page, look...



So I have refined it down to a second draft...

(sorry for the poor quality - I'm holding the picture up to the iMac's built in camera - not designed for scanning images!)

I will be using this mindmap as my preaching notes, supplemented with a list of Bible verses, and this is exactly what we are handing out this evening as the sermon notes for the congregation, and for the two services tomorrow morning. Yes, handwritten sermon notes that we are photocopying; no computers have been used in the production of these notes - it's so 1980's!

So we thought we'd stay with the mindmap theme for the graphics, and here's what we're putting up on the screen tonight...


Oh yes, and there'll be one or two other surprises in store too - I've been doing my research.

So, what do you think?

And that's my Creative Chaos this week.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Mark - cool graphic. Just mainly wanted to say I found your blog so I can be reading. We keep bumping into one another through Seeker Solutions so when I saw your link on flowerdust I clicked to read! Enjoying it!

Mark Jaffrey said...

Jan, welcome to the blog - thanks for your encouraging comments, and for sending me that wedding service.

jimkastkeat said...

love it. and i love that you're passing it out as notes!

looks like a great message!

Jim Drake said...

I used FreeMind (sourceforge.net) and find it very helpful in service planning (putting future thoughts out there and resources when I find them). I also preached with it from my Mac 2 years ago--took the mac on stage-clicked on the links and taught from them =then closed it. made it very easy not to have to shuffle notes.

Is this the Official Mind Mapping Software? I like the "hand drawn" look of the branches.

Mark Jaffrey said...

jimkastkeat - thanks for the encouragement. Just preached it for the first time and I got tons of good feedback. I'm looking for transformed lives - let's get generous.

jim drake, one of the reasons it looks hand drawn is because it IS hand drawn - voila, I have revealed my secret. For me, the whole point of mind mapping is that it is an organic process, and as much as I love my Mac, mindmapping is a strictly analogue discipline for me. Coloured pens and paper. As a sermon preparation tool, spending the care and attention and time in making it look good actually helped focus me and was a great thinking and processing tool for the content of the sermon.

Perky Gramma Teaches said...

Great idea! I've been mindmapping my notes i listen to.
Some poeple (read: right brained tinkers) think this way all the time...

Mindmaps Unleashed.com said...

Hi Mark, great to see that you create sermons using mindmaps. Could you please contact me? I would like to do a short interview with you on your experiences for my mindmap training.

Hope to hear from you!

- Arjen ter Hoeve
(visualmapper.org)

Mark Jaffrey said...

Ryan, thanks so much for the comment, and dorothy, not many people get away with calling me a right-brained tinker, but I'll let you off this time seeing as you have four blogs and I only have one :-)

Unknown said...

Most excellent brother. Next step is to down load iMap for your iPhone. If I dig up the link I'll send t to you. Tobes