Creating a Sermon Illustration Archive in Evernote

I have always struggled with sermon illustrations.  Years ago I was part of a youth ministry training program that taught us to do all our speaking and preaching in "modular style".  This was essentially a talk that was made up of nothing but illustrations.  To make it worse this organization suggested that we should (shudder) not explain our illustrations but let them speak for themselves.  I never liked this approach and in fact, if I remember correctly, I got a rather subtle reprimand for doing too much speaking without illustrations when we were practicing this portion of the training with each other.  Through this experience I realized that often illustrations are misinterpreted differently than the speaker intends.

Another issue that I developed with illustrations is that I assumed that illustrations were intended for the purpose of making the difficult things you were talking about easier to understand.  Because of this I only went looking for illustrations when I was trying to explain a difficult topic.  This caused me to rarely find illustrations that were relevant to topics I wanted to use them for because, well, they were difficult topics.  My understanding on how to use illustrations changed in 2016 when I read the excellent book on preaching, Saving Eutychus.  The authors of this book suggested that pastors should use illustrations to amplify the things that are easier to understand in a sermon in order to give the readers a break so that there brains are ready when you go to explain something that is more difficult.

Understanding and agreeing with this approach to sermon illustrations caused me to go looking for illustrations which brought me to the other reason I struggle with sermon illustrations.  They are really hard to find.  Now, you may be thinking there are scores upon scores of books on Amazon that can be purchased for the purpose of finding sermon illustrations.  I've purchased more than ten of these illustration books and the problem is that there is not a book that I am consistently finding my illustrations from.  I found myself going from book to book each week.  I was reading lots of illustrations and I realized I needed a solution for keeping track of the good ones that I would find but wasn't going to use in the sermon I was preparing that week.

At the time I was a pretty devoted OneNote user and I realized that the number one reason I was frustrated with OneNote, lack of good tagging support, would be amplified in trying to build an archive of sermon illustrations.  Hoping for a good, free alternative I decided to give Google Keep a try.  I had just switched back to Android from Windows Phone and so I thought why not give the Google ecosystem a try.  It worked fantastically until I quickly discovered that there was pretty small limit on the number of tags you could use in Keep.  I had created an archive of roughly 20 illustrations by this point and had already crashed my head into the tag ceiling with potential topics.

This ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back on my departure from OneNote to Evernote.  Evernote has excellent tagging support and the limit is 100,000 different tags.  I don't think I will ever get anywhere near that limit.  Over time I have developed a good archive of illustrations in Evernote.

Each Wednesday I have an item in task manager to add three illustrations into my archive.  In my library I have several sources for illustrations.  I have books several books that are specifically categorized as being for sermon illustrations.  These are valuable but I often find that I'm not the biggest fan of how the book categorizes the stories.  This is one way that my tagging system is helpful.  If I like an illustration I tag it with every possible use I think I may have for it.  I also go through my illustrations occasionally and add a tag if something new comes out at me from another reading.

I also have books that are of anecdotes and quotes.  These are usually sorted by the person that the story is about or from instead of being by topic.  On a week where I have to prepare to teach catechism, officiate a funeral, and write my regular sermon I don't have time to go to these books to see if a story about Igor Stravinsky fits with what I am preaching about that week from Ephesians.  This is sad because these anecdotes books are arguably the best illustrations resources I have.  By going through these books I am building my own categorized collection of these great illustrations.

The last source of illustrations to put in this resource come from your life or things that you are reading.  I was listening to one of Carrie Fisher's autobiographical books when I was driving and she told a story about her daughter that I thought could be used in a sermon.  I pulled off to the side of the road and instantly added it to Evernote from my phone.  You can also add things that happen to you that might be good for illustrative purposes.  I had a thought while driving home from Subway regarding something that happened when I was ordering.  As soon as I got home I opened up Evernote and started putting what happened into a note.  It actually turned into a devotional article for the local paper and a post for our church blog.  If I wouldn't have had a central spot for gathering this information that idea would have never come to fruition.

Having organized illustration resources are important for a pastor that preaches regularly.  There are many ways you can develop an illustration library, but few will offer you the ability to categorize and search that Evernote does.