The congregation is too kind. The elders are too political. Your spouse is too close. The presbytery colleague hears you preach once a year. So pastors drift — same six texts, the same illustration for the fifth time, lament missing while the congregation buries members. The first time most pastors hear what was actually happening in their preaching is on sabbatical, six years too late.
Sermon Helper reads your full sermon archive and gives you the report a sabbatical would. What you preach too often. What you've never preached. The illustrations you keep falling back on. The themes your congregation needs that you haven't gotten to. Free with every account.
"ChatGPT does not love my people."
He's right. ChatGPT doesn't love your people either. Cold AI sounds evangelical-flavored, hallucinates verses, gives you generic boilerplate where you need full Great Thanksgiving. That's because every other AI sermon tool was built for non-denominational, evangelical, or Baptist preaching — with a denomination dropdown bolted on later.
Sermon Helper is the first one built for mainline pastors as the default. Trained on the Book of Common Worship. Lectionary-aware. Knows your hymnal. Reformed sacramental theology baked in, not retrofitted. Magisterium did this for Catholic. Nobody had done it for the rest of us. Now somebody has.
You're physically in the room while writing the bulletin Friday at 9. Your spouse asked when you were going to be present this weekend. The kids stopped asking if you'd be at the soccer game. "Single parent with a roommate" is what one pastor's wife called the marriage during prep weeks. It's not nothing.
She needs the hymn list four to six weeks out so anthems get rehearsed and soloists prepare. She gets it Wednesday for Sunday. Or you get a tune that sounded fine on the page and bombs in the room, and you're frustrated. The relationship is a low-grade fire that gets worse every Lent.
That's not our line — it's a quote, the most-repeated descriptor of AI sermons among preachers. "Generic and a little bit eerie" is the runner-up. You closed the tab. Then read in CT that 64% of pastors are using it now and wondered if you're the holdout.
Brad East said the drudgery is part of the point. Chip Hardwick called sermon prep "part of the magic that God works in us as we preach." They're right. Sermon writing is formation, not a chore to be optimized.
So we don't touch it. Sermon Helper handles the bulletin liturgy, the music director's hymn list, the children's moment, the daily devotionals, the social meditations, and the post-Sunday cascade — the derivative work that wasn't getting done anyway. There's also a 7-phase prep pipeline if you want it (research help, outline options, illustration ideas) — but Phase 4 is your turn, and Phase 7 lets you write the sermon yourself if you want. The drudgery stays sacred. The work around it doesn't have to.
Upload your archive once. Sermon Helper reads every sermon and gives you the kind of read you can only get when someone reviews three years of your preaching at once. Free with every plan.
Self-image vs. corpus reality. Most preachers think they preach broader than they do. The data nearly always disagrees.
Cosine-similarity clustering catches recycled stories. Tells you what to retire.
Theme gaps surfaced against your archive plus a Reformed coverage frame. Honest, not judgmental.
Plus a Preaching Plan output: a 13-week forward calendar with text + theme suggestions that close the gaps the report surfaced, a list of biblical books and themes you haven't preached on, and a few series ideas. Run on 30+ sermons. Regenerate any time.
Series arc check, graphic concept, confirmation/youth tie-in, end-of-series Bible-study booklet.
Built by Pastor Dave Baker, Stated Clerk of the Presbytery of the Peaks (M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary), for the pastors he sees every month. Free during the beta — full pipeline, no card, no contract. Tell us what's wrong; we'll fix it before public launch.
Pastors outside Peaks: a few testers from neighboring presbyteries are being invited. Email Pastor Dave to be considered.
An "eager but sometimes mistaken intern" is the framing pastors keep landing on, and we'd agree. The sermon is yours; AI handles the derivative work. If you opt into the prep pipeline, AI is a research assistant and outline architect — but Phase 4 is pastor-input-only, and Phase 7 lets you write the manuscript yourself if you want.
Most pastors have. Cold ChatGPT has nothing to work with. Sermon Helper starts with your sermon archive, your church website, and a 90-minute onboarding conversation that builds two profiles. The first cascade you run already sounds like you preaching to your people. The 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. We're a pastor-led product — this is a 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. .docx, .pdf, .txt, .md all supported. Upload everything you have — even with inconsistent filenames, even scanned. Date-uncertain sermons get flagged so you can fix dates inline. The Insights Report works on whatever you've got; the more you upload, the sharper it gets.
Three things. Mainline by default — we're the only one. The others are evangelical-coded with denomination dropdowns. Real BCW liturgy — full Great Thanksgiving, not vague evangelical fragments. Honest archive feedback — the Insights Report is unique to Sermon Helper. No competitor reads your full archive and tells you what you've been preaching too much, what you're missing, or what illustrations you've recycled.
Sign in to the beta and run a cascade on this week's sermon. Or schedule a 20-minute demo and we'll run one on a sermon from your archive. No card. No pitch. Just the pipeline running on real text.