My dad, August Hauptman was a Missouri Synod Lutheran Minister. He began preaching
in 1947 and retired in 1988. He continued to serve the Lord by
preaching at many churches through out the Los Angeles area. The
earliest sermon I have is from New Years of 1956. His last sermon I
have a record of is from June 1, 2012. My dad was 89 years old when
he preached this last sermon. He died just three weeks shy of age 97.
I’m not sure if my dad kept any sermons prior to 1956 but I imagine
after preaching a few years it made things easier to have a
collection of sermons to refer back to. My dad served the deaf his
whole career. He served deaf congregations in Great Falls, Montana,
Spokane, Washington, St. Paul, Minnesota, Toledo, Ohio and Los
Angeles, California.
Roughly two thirds of the sermons my dad left were hand written.
Initially, I scanned all of my dads sermons (almost 900) thinking
I would just post them as pdf files. After looking at them it
made sense to me to just convert them to html files since they
take much less space and are much faster to retrieve. Unfortunately
it takes considerable time to convert hand written sermons since
OCR can't convert them. So to date I've converted 631 as of October 18, 2024
I wish I had time to convert them all to html sermons but
it was quite a task just converting what was there to a digital
format (pdf). I don’t think my dad had any intention of publishing
his sermons but I felt that since it was his life’s work they would
be valuable to other ministers and to anyone that would take the time
to read and review the sermon bible verses. I not only learned a lot
about my dad but it was a great bible review and has encouraged me
to read daily devotions and the bible.