Evernote – An useful service for Gospel ministers

Evernote is a service on Internet that can be of great help to any pastor, preacher, teacher of the Word of God or youth leader. But before I present and recommend it to you, I want to quote the testimony of the great evangelist Dwight L. Moody about how he prepared his sermons:

When I choose a subject, I write the name of it on the outside of a large envelope. I have many such envelopes. If, when I am reading, I meet a good thing on any subject I am to speak on, I slip it into the right envelope, and let it lie there. I always carry a notebook, and if I hear anything in a sermon that will throw light on that subject, I put it down, and slip it into the envelope. Perhaps I let it lie there for a year or more. When I want a new sermon, I take everything that has been accumulating. Between what I find there and the results of my own study, I have material enough. Then, all the time I am going over my sermons, taking out a little here, adding a little there. In that way they never get old. (Dale Carnegie, Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, Kessinger Publishing, 2003, page 21)

What is your method of preparing a sermon or a Bible lesson you are going to teach? Whatever it is, it must involve the collection of ideas, information and their organization for the subsequent use in the messages. I used notebooks and copybooks but the disadvantage is that I can not always carry with me these notebooks, and because a large part of my ministry I do away from home and country, I can not carry with me all my notes to always have them when I need them. But even when I am at home, still I do not always have enough time to look through my many notebooks to find notes that I made once on a particular subject.

I have heard earlier about the existence of such an option on the Internet, but I did not hurry to invest more in its exploration, even if I opened an account then. But these days, I got into a situation when I lost some valuable information and this has complicated my work and making decision at the moment. I decided to study more about Evernote, the service which I have mentioned above and I found that it offers the following advantages:

• taking notes and saving them on the online server
• automatic sync when the computer is connected to Internet
• creating online notes
• creating notes on your cell phone or iPad
• all these notes are made available on every device and computer you use (it becomes a personal digital library that can hold any note)
• You can keep notes, images and audio recordings
• all information is indexed and can be found easily at any time
• The text in the images is scanned as regular text and indexed to be easily found
• the service offers 66MB per month for free for upload and for an affordable price the virtual space can be increased up to 1GB/month

I already have a few days since I use Evernote and I am  excited about the capabilities it offers. So now I keep there all the addresses. When I met someone and got the business card of that person, I took a picture with my camera and sent the information to Evernote. When I study the Holy Scriptures, I put my ideas for the next sermons and lessons on Evernote. While reading, I photographed important information that I must have and find easily in the future and I uploaded them on Evernote. Even documents can be scanned and placed there. The best thing is that Evernote provides this space and all information that is placed there will be saved and it also offers the possibility to be downloaded and stored on the local computer.

I am convinced that anyone will understand the effect of this service will benefit from it and so I rushed to share this useful information with my colleagues who are ministers in the Gospel.

At the same time I’m curious if any reader of this portal uses Evernote and how does he use it? I invite you to share your experience through comments.

Translated by Felicia Rotaru