So the hottest homiletical tool seems to be a piece of software called Wordle . Cut and paste the text of your sermon into the appropriate window and Wordle creates a verbal mosaic, calling out key words in various colors and designs. (You can also try that with your denomination’s confession of faith .)
Want to know whether your sermon is sufficiently Christ-centered ? Wordle will give you a snapshot. Look at the words that pop. Fair chance those are the words that will be ringing in your congregants’ ears.
I, of course, put Wordle to an even higher purpose—I pasted in text culled from the screenplay for Twelve Monkeys , director Terry Gilliam’s underrated fear-the-future sci-fi magnum opus:
(I don’t need you to tell me I should get help, BTW . . . )
While I have you, can I ask you something? I’ll be quick.
Twenty-five thousand people subscribe to First Things. Why can’t that be fifty thousand? Three million people read First Things online like you are right now. Why can’t that be four million?
Let’s stop saying “can’t.” Because it can. And your year-end gift of just $50, $100, or even $250 or more will make it possible.
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