As I like to do, I am participating in the group writing project of problogger.net. If you are a blogger you need to read that blog. In this writing project we are to either look back or look forward in some way. I am going to talk about the few failed preaching website projects and then a my plans for next year and SoulPreaching.Com.

In April of 2004, I created a website of links to preaching sites called HomileticsPortal.Com. I coded it up in html myself. It was a big pain, but there were a number of very helpful links that I still go to regularly. This site was actually well received and got added to a few important directories like DMOZ.

In early 2005 I created the website shermancox on blogger. In that site I talked about my interest in preaching as well as preaching classes in the seminary. It was here that I first began talking about a comparison between the Jazz artist and the preacher. In June of 2005 I moved off of BlogSpot and moved to a webhost and used WordPress. That was a very good move. I stopped updating the site in June of 2006, but it still gets some hits so I left it up.

Around June 2005 I also created a lectionary site entitled lectionary.shermancox.com. The software behind this was Drupal. I actually wanted to play around with Drupal and so I began creating sermons based on the lectionary and posting them there. That site actually did pretty well and actually was on DMOZ as well. It was interesting seeing my name on that directory. However, I have had difficult times creating a lectionary sermon every week.

On To Mambo

Around the same time I moved homileticsportal.com to the Content Management System Mambo. That was a very successful move. I had over 100 people to sign up for an account on that site and I expanded the site to include not just links, but audio and textual sermons from myself as well as documents from class.

Then I played around with homileticsportal by moving it to a wordpress site. I merged ShermanCox.Com and HomileticsPortal as a Wordpress blog in June of 2006.

SoulPreaching Begins

Then In Aug 2006 I started SoulPreaching.Com which was to be a site to celebrate the Black Preaching experience. Until recently HomileticsPortal was pointed to SoulPreaching.Com, but now HomileticsPortal is back as a links site and will stay as only a links site.

In October 2006 I resurrected lectionary.shermancox.com as www.lectionarypodcast.com. In that site we will have sermons based on the lectionary. And now I just started SoulSermons.Com. There I have posted a few of my sermons and will post the text of what is on lectionarypodcast as audio.

Goals for 2007

So what are my goals for 2007 as far as my preaching sites are concerned? As noted above, HomileticsPortal will stay a links site and only a links site. we have added a few extras so that users can suggest links and rank links, but that is all. Right now there are near 100 links, hopefully by the end of 2007 we can have near 150 links of interest to preachers.

In SoulPreaching I hope to post 3-5 times a week with reflections on preaching from an African American perspective. SoulSermons and LectionaryPodcast hopefully will have at least one sermon from me every other week.

And I plan to create a freely downloadable book and downloadable e-couse on preaching that will be based in two of my term papers.

If I can do that, I will be happy, and I hope my readers will be as well.