Bible Teaching and Wordclouds

(Confessions of a mom's group Bible Study teacher)

So it's Wednesday night. The night before I am to deliver a lecture in my series, The Names of Jesus... it's late, my brain hurts and I've been praying my heart out for inspiration. I'm talking on "Son of David" and have searched all the New Testament references for this phrase "Son of David." I do all my homiletics and word study tricks and still I got nothing. I've got general ideas of where to go with this, but I need a little inspiration.

Then I remember a cool website called Wordle where you can paste any amount of text and it generates a "wordcloud." ("Oh, visuals. I like visuals.") I'm not super technical, but a wordcloud is just a picture made of words where the size of each of the words is determined by how many times it shows up in your chunk of text. So, big words = show up most often. I can get that. My tired brain nods appreciatively at the generated results of my study.

So, how I did this nifty thing:

1. Go to a Bible website like BibleGateway or YouVersion and search for texts of interest
2. Copy and paste your findings into a text editor or Word, removing references. You just want the juicy text.
3. Copy the whole shebang onto your clipboard.
4. Go to Wordle and click on "Create Your Own"
5. That's it!
6. Once it is created you can monkey with the styles and colors
7. Save the little sucker (as a jpeg or png). I used Jing to screen capture mine. I'm sure there are other, more capable sorts who can suggest other tools to do this.

Fast forward to Thursday morning...

During my talk to the Moms with A Purpose I got to share this wordcloud with my ladies and it was so awesome. We're a small group (about 50 in the room) so I was able to ask "what jumps out at you?" and get audience involvement. It was great to hear the answers.

From a heart perspective, after analyzing the words, I was so convicted about the desperation in the people's voices. I was struck by how unloving and stern the onlookers were. And I was grateful again for Jesus graciously bringing his Kingdom into the broken lives of those willing to cry out in desperation for his help. Lots of applications that I could apply to my own self-sufficient soul.

So there you have it. Confessions of a Bible teacher who likes to have fun with wordclouds. What do you think?

Try this in one of your talks / sermons / lectures...  leave a comment and let us all know how it goes!

Comments

[Tom Harper]

Love it, Dawn. I'm going to print this out & save for future reference when I teach in our adult Bible fellowship. Can't wait to try it out.

[djchuang]

Dawn, what a creative way to teach the Bible AND to use web technologies! You've masterfully illustrated that technology is simply a tool that can be used in a variety of ways... sky's the limit

[Dawn Carter]

Tom: thank you for stopping by. I want to see your first one, so send me a link!

DJ: never thought I could intersect my two passions... God knew all along ;-) thank you for your comment!