Creating a Collaborative Sermon Workflow With Trello

by | Mar 25, 2016 | productivity, trello | 3 comments

Creating a Collaborative Sermon Workflow With Trello

Have you ever wished you had a single place to develop a sermon workflow with your team? Imagine how easy it would be to have your worship leader, other pastors, key volunteers and anyone else necessary having access to key sermon information. Not to mention, the ability to work ahead on sermons in a directed pathway.

I use Trello.com to do just this!

All this week I am blogging on using Trello in ministry. This is the 2nd post in the series. Here are the other links

  1. Productive Pastor 46 | Organizing Ministry with Trello
  2. Why You Need To Build a Trello Reading List (and how to do it). 
  3. Streamlining Church Assimilation with Trello. 

First, I use Trello as a team based tool alongside another amazing piece of software. Evernote is my digital brain, and what I love is how I can link the two pieces of software together. I use Trello to work alongside everyone teaching at my church, our worship leader and our kids ministry team (they develop Sunday morning curriculum that runs alongside our main Sunday worship).

This used to be handed through a string of emails. The only problem was that led to more questions, having to go deeper in a text message and other confusion points. I am also a HUGE fan of preparing sermons and series in advance. I talk about that on this episode of Productive Pastor.

Creating Your Sermon Workflow

You know your community and churches needs better than anyone. Our workflow went through a few different versions before we settled onto something that works best.

1. Start a Board for every sermon series (or if you are lectionary-based, for each month). 
When you start the board, add your team from the menu. This here is important. Your team needs to have a Trello account before you invite them. To take full advantage of Trello, create a link from https://trello.com/recommend. This will give you an easy way to invite and onboard team members as well as give you a month of Trello gold for each signup. Trello Gold opens up more options and abilities.

2. Create a Communication Key.
This is the sweet sauce. After several revisions and asking questions about best practices, we stumbled upon this short key to base our sermon workflow off of.

Preacher
Title
Scripture
Big Idea (I tend to call these Monday Moments)
Guiding Question
Intended Response
Outline

Every one of these items is given it’s own card in the first stack on the board. This key is then used forward for every sermon in a separate card stack.

Here is a board we are currently using. Because of the flooding here in the spring of 2016, we canceled a Sunday (so it appears we are missing a week).

Screen Shot 2016-03-25 at 8.07.51 AM

We have 2 of us that preach regularly at Foundry. We have frequently added others into the mix as well. No matter who is speaking, this sermon workflow is given to them and we try to move stuff into it as frequently as possible. It also streamlines sermon preparation because you get into a routine of asking specific communication focused questions.

Here is a board of an upcoming series for you to see when and how we normally work on these items.
Screen Shot 2016-03-25 at 8.13.56 AM
I hope this use case is helpful. I use it for team-specific preparation, but others might love to do this on their own…even if they don’t need the communication angle. If you are looking for a way to use Trello to handle ALL of your sermon preparation, Rev. Nathan Hale has developed a great resource. You can purchase this super affordable template for Trello use right here.

 

3 Comments

  1. Michael Romans
    Michael Romans on March 25, 2016 at 2:42 pm

    Great post Chad! How does this Trello work flow coalesce with your sermon preparation worksheet? Obviously some of the same information is here but not all of it. Do you do the worksheet separately and it becomes the outline here, or do you ask other folks to show their work (so to speak) in Trello so that you can follow along with their preparation via the worksheet?

    • chadbrooks
      chadbrooks on March 25, 2016 at 3:01 pm

      Hey Michael-this workflow was actually designed because folks on my team were wanting a copy of the sheet! After a few weeks of texting them a picture, we developed the necessary group elements and then added a few others.

      This tool is for communication. I’m not using it for individual preparation so much. I (along with our other preachers) drive the majority of the content. So in essence, this is a “show and tell” resource for others on our team.

      • Michael Romans
        Michael Romans on March 25, 2016 at 3:13 pm

        Thanks, that makes good sense. That way individual preachers have the freedom to prepare in a way that makes sense to the but still keep others in the loop.