Organising sermon preparationPosts in this series
Now that you have your commentary list, you need to group your commentaries for easy access.
In the week before I preach, I dedicate one day to reading hard copy commentaries, one day for soft copy commentaries, and one day for the local theological college library's commentaries.
The hard copy commentaries is the place I start on the first day. This is because I usually own the better commentaries in hard copy and so when I'm looking at the text for the first time I don't want to be led up the garden path from the beginning.
Shelving the commentaries
To read the hard copy commentaries, I firstly collect all the commentaries I own on the book of the Bible I'm preaching on and put them on a shelf next to my desk. They only remain there until I'm finished preaching on that particular book. The rest of the time I keep all my commentaries on a separate bookshelf well away from my desk. I find it's best to keep books that you need regularly as close as possible and keep those that you access only occasionally further a field - anything to save me walking around the office wasting time.
However some commentaries rarely move from the shelf next to my desk. This is because some commentaries don't just exposit one book, they include all the books in a testament or even all the books of the Bible. So, for example, the whole Bible commentary by Jamieson, Fausset & Brown never leaves the shelf next to my desk. And commentaries on one testament move back and forth as I move from preaching on the New Testament to the Old Testament.
Grouping the commentaries
Once my commentaries are on the shelf, I group them so that I read the more in depth commentaries first. So the commentaries are on my shelf in the following order:
(i) more in depth commentaries on the book;
(ii) less in depth (lighter, more popular) commentaries on the book;
(iii) commentaries on the whole testament;
(iv) commentaries on the whole Bible.
I then move through them in that order.
Bookmarks
When it comes to hard copy commentaries, I should also make a comment about bookmarks. I leave bookmarks placed in the commentary at the verse I'm up to in my preaching to save time when I come to the commentary again in the following week. But if you end up preaching on several books of the Bible at the same time and have a significant number of commentaries, that can mean a lot of bookmarks. So what I advise is collecting my favourite type of bookmark - business cards and train tickets.
I hate traditional bookmarks. Firstly they are usually long, so if it is a small book you end up with half a bookmark hanging out the top which is easily knocked out. Secondly traditional bookmarks are usually skinny meaning they don't separate the pages well enough so you have to flick a bit to find the bookmark if it is tucked in below the top of the pages. Whereas business card size bookmarks are the perfect size. And best of all, you often get them for free!
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