A Cloud of Witness(es)

The other day I stumbled across Wordle, a website that generates "word clouds" from any text that you paste into its word-cloud engine.  Essentially, it analyses the text, identifies statistically significant words and groups them together into a visually appealing clump; the more often the word appears in the text, the bigger the word in the cloud.  You can then play around with the font, color scheme, layout, and so on.

Word clouds give you a sense of a particular text's major themes, concerns and motifs at an aesthetically pleasing glance.  Someone used Wordle, for instance, to make word clouds of the 66 different books of the Bible.  Check them out here-- they are absolutely fascinating.

Of course, it didn't take me long to wonder the inevitable:  Inasmuch as the better part of my work lies in the world of words, what would the word cloud of my preaching look like?  Because I preach pretty much directly from manuscripts, this is a relatively easy question to answer.  Here, for instance, is a glimpse of the word-cloud hovering over the FreeWay during our recent 7-part series on the Book of Ecclesiastes.



And the next inevitable question, the question that may be, perhaps, the litmus test of a biblical preacher, wasn't long to follow:  how closely does the word cloud for my preaching match the word cloud of the Scripture I'm preaching from?  A humbling question, to be sure, but in some ways an arbitrary one. I could get the exact same word cloud by just reading the text and leaving it at that, and I wouldn't be preaching.  Nevertheless, it's a revealing exercise:  is the cloud of speech I'm raising each Sunday morning at all like the cloud breathing out from the Scriptures themselves?  Are my concerns its concerns, my hobby-horses its hobby-horses, my themes its themes?

For instance this fall I did a series on the "I AM" statements in the Gospel of John.  Here's the word-cloud that series generated:



And just to compare, here is the word cloud of the Gospel of John itself, produced by the good folks over at Sixty Six Clouds.  I will refrain from commentary and leave you to draw your own conclusions.