Twelve to fifteen hours of sermon prep is already inside your week. Add the bulletin liturgy, the kids' moment, the newsletter article, the social plan, the slide deck. The sermon suffers. The prayer life suffers. You suffer.
Your music director needs the list four to six weeks out so anthems get rehearsed and soloists prepare. She gets it Wednesday for Sunday. CE coordinator improvises the Bible study. Children's ministry runs to Pinterest at 11pm Saturday. Things fall through.
You tried ChatGPT. It sounded evangelical-flavored. It hallucinated a verse. The bulletin liturgy was vague where you needed full Great Thanksgiving. The voice wasn't yours. You closed the tab.
You'd never preach what an intern wrote without reading it. Same here. The sermon is yours — your voice, your pastoral heart, your knowledge of your people. Sermon Helper handles the busywork.
One Saturday-morning conversation builds two profiles — a preaching profile from your full sermon archive (your vocabulary, your sentence rhythm, your "tells") and a church profile from your website plus a survey (your hymnal, your communion frequency, your liturgical patterns). After that, every cascade run reads from those profiles. Generic Reformed boilerplate becomes this sermon for this congregation.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Saturday-night sermon scramble | Sermons drafted weeks ahead |
| Music director gets the list Wednesday | She plans 4–6 weeks out |
| CE coordinator improvises Bible study | Pre-Sunday study generated weekly |
| Newsletter article a separate writing task | Newsletter is part of the cascade |
| Social media is dead air | Pre & post-Sunday meditations on theme |
| PowerPoint thrown together Sunday morning | Slide outline ready Wednesday |
| Disconnected staff work | Whole staff aligned around the calendar |
This isn't a productivity hack. It's the whole staff finally on the same page.
The killer feature. Knows your hymnal — Glory to God, PH 1990, The Hymnal 1982. Knows your last 2–3 years of repertoire from your bulletin scan. Knows your top-30 congregational favorites. Hands you 5–7 hymn picks plus 3–5 familiar-tune substitutions — HYFRYDOL, NETTLETON, BEACH SPRING — with less-known texts on tunes the congregation sings cold. Most music directors don't have time for that matching. Now they don't have to.
Trained on the Book of Common Worship. Real Call to Worship, real Prayer of Confession with Assurance, real Prayer of Illumination, Pastoral Prayer in your voice, Affirmation from the Book of Confessions, full Great Thanksgiving on communion Sundays — Sursum corda, Preface, Sanctus, Words of Institution, Memorial Acclamation, Epiclesis, Doxology — theme-connected to your sermon. Not vague evangelical prayer fragments.
One 60–75 minute session held Wednesday or Thursday that prepares the congregation for what's coming Sunday. Not a 4-week series — nobody runs those without burning out. Not a sermon recap — no point. A study that primes the room. With opening icebreaker, leader background, observation/interpretation/application questions, facilitation guide, closing reflection, closing prayer in PCUSA voice, Zoom adaptation.
Upload everything you've preached. We extract metadata for every sermon — title, scripture, date, themes, summary — and discard the originals. From then on, every cascade and every prep session reads what's there. "You haven't preached on lament since 2023." Won't re-propose Romans 8 if you preached it three weeks ago. Won't suggest Christmas-Eve illustrations for Easter morning.
Every Bible verse, every illustration, every "according to," every quote attribution — tagged verified or needs pastor verification. AI hallucinates Scripture. We tell you when we're guessing. Outputs land in files; nothing posts, schedules, or sends without you. Auto-publishing pastoral content is a line we don't cross.
Generated Monday or Tuesday. Nine outputs.
Generated Monday or Tuesday after preaching. Six outputs.
Optional. Phase 1 brainstorms ideas (lectionary + current events + gaps in your prior teaching). Phase 2 picks texts. Phase 3 does the research — original languages, historical and literary context, four to six commentaries synthesized, modern scholarship, cross-references — replacing 4–6 hours of commentary work with about 10 minutes. Phase 4 is your turn; AI captures what struck you and where the Spirit nudged. Phase 5 produces 3–4 outline options. Phase 6 finds illustrations matched to your voice. Phase 7 either hands the work to you or drafts a manuscript you rewrite.
Each phase has an "ask the AI a follow-up" chat. Drill into a commentator. Talk through implications. Conversation persists across visits.
Your profiles. Your sermons. Your cascade outputs. Your edits. Yours. Export anytime as a markdown bundle.
Raw archive uploads (we extract metadata, then discard). Pastoral counseling notes. Specific congregants with sensitive details. Confidential session deliberations. Personnel files. Member giving. Discipline cases. Sermon Helper is forbidden from generating content involving any of these.
Paid API tiers (Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok). Not used to train future models. Your sermons don't end up in someone else's chatbot.
Built by a Stated Clerk for the pastors he sees every month. While we tune the product, it's free for the Presbytery of the Peaks — full pipeline, no card, no contract. Tell us what's wrong; we'll fix it.
Pastors outside Peaks: we're inviting a few testers from neighboring presbyteries. Email Pastor Dave to be considered.
No. AI is your seminary intern — the work that gets to the pulpit is still yours. Sermon Helper handles the derivative content. The sermon itself can have your full attention. If you opt into the prep pipeline, AI is your research assistant; the pastor-input phase is required and you write the sermon, or rewrite the AI's draft.
Most pastors have. ChatGPT cold has nothing to work with. Sermon Helper starts with your full archive, your church website, and a 90-minute onboarding conversation. The first cascade you run already sounds like you. Difference between cold-prompting and profile-aware is the difference between generic Reformed boilerplate and a sermon for this congregation on this Sunday.
Sermon Helper is forbidden from generating content involving counseling, specific members with sensitive details, or session deliberations. Hard line, not a feature flag.
Default is PCUSA, with bulletin liturgy trained on the Book of Common Worship. UMC, Episcopal, ELCA, RCA, ECO, EPC, ACNA, evangelical Presbyterian all supported. Non-mainline (SBC, Pentecostal, non-denominational) works, but onboarding takes a longer conversation about worship culture.
Typical case. We support .docx, .pdf, .txt, .md. Upload everything — even with inconsistent filenames, even scanned. We extract what we can. Date-uncertain sermons get flagged so you can fix them inline. Profile sharpens with every sermon you add.
90-minute onboarding conversation, plus AI processing time on your archive. After that, every cascade run takes about 15 minutes of AI work plus 30–45 minutes of pastor review. Most users are running it weekly by their second week. Start small — bulletin only the first week, add the Bible study, add social meditations. Two-month adoption curve.
Free during beta — nothing to cancel. Once we charge, month-to-month, no contract. Profiles, archive, and cascade outputs are yours from day one and exportable as a markdown bundle.
Three things. Profile-aware — we start with your voice and your church. Tradition-faithful — real PCUSA bulletin liturgy with full Great Thanksgiving, not vague evangelical fragments. Music director handoff that uses your hymnal and your last 2–3 years of repertoire, not generic CCLI suggestions.
Sign in to the beta and run a cascade on this week's sermon. Or schedule a 20-minute demo and watch one run on a sermon from your archive. No card. No pitch. Just the pipeline running on real text.