Zetteling Sermons and Bible Studies

I started keeping a zettelkasten in March 2022. I remain enamored with the system. It is a most marvelous way of keeping organized notes. The only awkwardness is due to the front-heavy work of properly writing entries. Tasks that require high initial investment and low long term maintenance allow for the good sort of laziness. In its most flattering light, embracing “laziness” can be seen as adopting “innovation” and “efficiency”, and that is what I unabashedly strive for. Citations make me want to pull my hair out, and it is both impossible and useless to cheat the zettelkasten by feigning comprehension of a topic, yet the rewards for enduring the initial stages of the process far outweigh the pains of note-writing.

Digitizing the core points and discoveries of church sermons, inductive Bible studies, and devotionals is entirely unique from the typical zettel. This challenge is greater than other non-fiction books and technical class notes, which themselves are no walk in the park. Citations can be a real nightmare. Unrecorded, unpublished, and irretrievable personal conversations make me squeamish, but they are where I learn a great deal about faith. The Bible and workbooks are valid sources, but notes aimed at the proper interpretation and application of Scripture can be just as much of a headache.

Moreover, my deepest desire for these notes is that they facilitate spiritual growth. Many are not academic in nature at all. Facts are important, but it is the feelings, inspirations, and revelations which arise from presentation that I want to capture. We tip our hats to the idea that phraseology is important, but we often fail to recognize how powerful words truly are. Well-chosen words can convince us that the truth is a lie or that unimportant things matter, and then slip away before we realize that our perspective was not shaped by facts alone.

Of course, not all clever words are mismatched in this way; good, catchy sermons come from good, truthful foundations, but we do well to acknowledge the impact of persuasive and thoughtful words. Unfolding the meaning behind a cleverly worded sentence can destroy its impact, and reduce memorability, so while writing zettels it is important to maintain the emotional heartbeat of the original idea. In 2004, Volkswagen adopted the marketing campaign “Drive it. You’ll get it,” [1]. It was concise, assertive, and utterly brilliant. If the retailers had instead said, “Take our car for a test drive. You’ll understand why our customers are satisfied and you’ll want to buy one for yourself,” the phrase would have been less memorable and would have forfeit the intrigue that propelled many customers to do just what the campaign asked; “Drive it” and “get it”. A poor product can’t survive in the market on flashy slogans alone, but plenty of brilliant products go unnoticed simply because they lack clever marketing.

Capturing clever perspectives and memorable phrases for a zettelkasten is a very different task from capturing notes whose merit is solely in their factual validity. These notes need their own method, and below I share the techniques which have satisfied my expectations.

Before this, though, don’t forget:

Imperfect is okay, just do the best you can right now. You can always fix imperfections later if they keep you up at night.

Making Zettels From Bible Studies and Sermons

The basic rules of typical zettels still apply; atomic ideas, concise wording, good labels, etc. I discuss these basics in an earlier post.

Soft Citations For Biblical Zettels

My church records sermons and posts them online. When I initially tried citing thoughts from these sermons, I wanted to include the precise time-stamp that accompanied the idea. I like precision. If you know your citation styles well, you may have noticed that I often include page numbers for my in-text citations, even though I generally abide by the APA citation style which does not call for such specificity. This is largely because I want to know exactly where to look for an idea, and I expect anyone who wants to fact-check me would also appreciate the clarity. But with soft citations like YouTube videos of church sermons, I had to let this one go. Citing a sermon or personal communication had to be the rough credit giving it was born to be. I keep it as simple as possible now. It keeps me sane, and allows me to move through the zettel-making process quickly. Doing something I don’t like means I won’t be doing that something for long. Better to give up unreasonable expectations than to have an empty zettelkasten.

Organizing Biblical Zettels Within a Generic, Secular Zettelkasten

The following list lays out how I chose to integrate my new zettels with the old. Recall that I use Notion for my zettelkasten.

1. Index notes are specific to Biblical chapter. Additional context can be put into the note title, such as the main character or a keyword of the chapter. For example, “1 Kings 18 Elijah” is an index note in my zettelkasten. Like all index notes, however, these are not intended to contain all notes related to the topic. At that point, why not just search the whole database for them? Individual literature and permanent notes are meant to become interconnected and to springboard from one to the next naturally, and Index notes become useless if they are overladen with zettels that have no spring.

   
   

2. Verse-specific material is designated in tags within the permanent or literature zettel. For example “1 Kings 18:2” might be one of several tags for a zettel about Elijah revealing himself to king Ahab. Specific verses are included in tags for both number-based search efficacy (finding information when verse numbers are all I have to look up) and for proper concept grouping.

   
   

3. Chronological verses – the tag “1 Kings 18:1-2” is accurate, descriptive, and appropriately specific, but presently if I type in the Notion database search bar “1 Kings 18:2”, the search results will fail to include the zettel from the example. In Notion, I’m just not sure if this problem can be avoided without going through the trouble of adding every verse explicitly to the tags (ie, “1 Kings 18:1”, “1 Kings 18:2” instead of “1 Kings 18:1-2”). To achieve slightly-less-than-chaotic search results, I created a separate in-line view of the note-filled database which I then specifically designed for Biblical searches. I created the sort “Tags” “Ascending”. Then, under “View Options” I chose to “Group by Tags” and (importantly), to “Hide Empty Groups”. When searching a chapter of the Bible, all the verses of the chapter that have been zetteled will be called up. Like a drop down menu, the tags can be expanded to show the individual zettels that have been labeled with the tag. 

The more specific the search, of course, the fewer results will appear, but the less work one has to do rummaging about to find the proper verse. It could be a glitch in my computer, an issue with Chrome, or a bug that Notion will eventually smooth over, but if I create a new tag, it will not initially appear in proper ascending order according to the verses before and after it chronologically. I fix this by turning off the Grouping feature, reloading the page, and then turning the feature (and hide empty feature!) back on again. A bit grungy, but a tolerable band-aid fix until an update fixes the issue permanently.

References:

[1] Grant, A. (2014). Give and take: A revolutionary approach to Success. Orion Publishing Group.