A minister with 27 years of sermon folders built a living system to connect them

Achievement I built a working Airtable system to organize and coordinate the full ecosystem of the liturgical year — lectionary texts, seasonal themes, sermon development, and the content that flows from each Sunday (blogs, Facebook/IG posts, meditations, and images).  The base allows me to cross-reference readings across the lectionary cycle, track my notes and drafts, and ensure coherence between what we proclaim and what we practice — especially through seasonal framing and the selection of Eucharistic prayers.  It’s a living tool that’s already strengthening my ability to craft a meaningful, integrated liturgical year for spiritual seekers.   Tools ChatGPT Airtable Methodology For nearly 27 years of ministry, I have maintained a disciplined system for sermon preparation. Because the lectionary is the backbone of a liturgical tradition—a three-year cycle that draws from a wide range of scripture—my organizing method was folder-based: Year A, B, and C, then subdivided by season (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time), and then by each Sunday within the season. Within each Sunday’s folder, I stored my research, notes, prior sermons, and supporting resources. This system served me well for continuity from one lectionary cycle to the next, but it had a critical limitation: it didn’t support cross-referencing. If I encountered a meditation or article based on a particular text, I often knew it belonged somewhere in the lectionary—but not where. Likewise, it was difficult to trace recurring themes across years or quickly compare similar passages (for example, parallel gospel stories that share a core narrative but differ in emphasis). I wanted an approach that would allow me to search, connect, and retrieve content by text, theme, season, or output—rather than by folder location. Early in AI Mastery, I explored building a sermon-prep “Project” inside ChatGPT to solve this problem. ChatGPT helped me outline the structure and even generated a template. In practice, however, the solution was unwieldy: it would have become a single, massive document containing hundreds of pages—making meaningful retrieval, updating, and long-term usability impractical. I realized I needed a relational system designed for linking information, not simply storing it. The turning point came when we were introduced to Airtable. Airtable offered the exact strengths my folder system lacked: structured records, linked relationships, and flexible views for searching and filtering. Using Omni, I described the lectionary cycle, the significance of seasons, and the set of outputs I generate each week (sermons, notes, blog posts, social posts, meditations, and images). From that description, Omni generated an initial Airtable base that I then refined. The base is organized around Lectionary Years, Seasons, and Lectionary Days. My primary working table is Lectionary Days, since that is where weekly sermon preparation and content creation converge. Each record includes the year, day, season color, assigned readings, and connected fields for my notes, sermon manuscript, blog, Facebook and Instagram posts, meditation, and the related images. I kept a few auto-generated fields even if they’re not immediately useful, since the base is still evolving and I want to live with the structure before pruning it. As I began using the system, I expanded it beyond sermon storage into liturgical coherence. In the Seasons table, I added fields such as Season Notes (articles and reflections on the season’s meaning and rhythm), a seasonal image field (to store Facebook cover images), and the Eucharistic Prayer used for that season. This helps ensure that the themes of the season are consistent—not only in preaching and teaching, but in the prayers and the overall shape of worship. Looking ahead, I anticipate building an agent or automated workflow that can synthesize a season based on accumulated inputs—season notes, sermons, meditations, posts, and prayers—so that, for example, I can quickly generate a seasonal overview or a newsletter reflection (e.g., “Lent, Year A”). Over time, as the database grows, I expect it to become a generative resource for new content: articles, prayers, and seasonal devotional materials grounded in the accumulated theology and practice of the community. Learnings My key learning was to stay flexible about which AI tool fits the task—effective AI work isn’t about loyalty to one platform, but choosing the right tool for the job. My first instinct was to use ChatGPT Projects; ChatGPT helped me think and design the concept, but it wasn’t the right structure for scalable organization and cross-referencing. Being open to Airtable—something I wouldn’t normally associate with sermon preparation—turned out to be the breakthrough: what looks “spreadsheet-like” has become a living system that not only organizes my work, but can eventually transform accumulated content into insight. As the base grows, I expect Airtable’s automation and agent capabilities to help synthesize seasonal themes and generate increasingly rich summaries grounded in my theology and lived experience. 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