Generated Mon–Tue.
Bulletin liturgy (full BCW set with Great Thanksgiving), Bible study, music director handoff with hymn picks against your hymnal, children's moment script, daily devotionals (Mon–Sat), social meditations with branded image cards, newsletter article, slide outline.
Generated Mon–Tue after preaching.
Blog-post adaptation, YouTube metadata + chapter markers, 3–5 short-form clips with timestamps, four staggered social follow-ups, ready-to-post 1080×1080 pull-quote graphics, searchable archive entry.
Occasional.
Series arc check, series graphic concept, confirmation/youth tie-in, end-of-series Bible-study booklet (print-ready PDF). Plus the standalone Preaching Insights Report — archive analysis on every plan.
Every consultant has a list of what your church should be doing now. Social media. Email teasers. The blog. The weekly newsletter. The website you'd love to refresh. The kids' curriculum. The hymn handoff to the music director four weeks out. The bulletin liturgy that's actually theme-connected. You'd do it all if there were enough hours. There aren't.
You used to read four commentaries before writing. Now you read one. You don't want to plagiarize, and you don't have time to chase down the Greek every week. You feel yourself returning to the same six texts. Your illustrations are starting to repeat — not because they fit, but because they're handy. The third draft hasn't happened in months.
The congregation is too kind. The elders are too political. Your spouse is too close. The presbytery colleague hears one sermon a year. You drift, and you can't see the drift — the same six texts, the rock-climbing story for the fifth time, lament missing while the congregation buries members. Most pastors first hear what was happening on sabbatical, six years too late.
This is the question. Most pastors using AI today are wrestling with it. Some land in shame. Some land in shortcuts. We tried to land somewhere honest.
The principle: don't outsource the work that's forming you as a preacher. Do delegate the work that's eating the rest of your week.
Writing the sermon. Pastoral care. Specific congregants and sensitive matters. Session deliberations. Anything where the wrestling is the work. We won't touch any of it. Hard line.
Imagine you had a research assistant — competent, eager, sometimes wrong, never the preacher — who could look through the concordance for every related passage in the canon, read ten commentaries on this week's text and surface where they agree and where they disagree, walk you through the Greek or the Hebrew on the load-bearing words, and generate a dozen sermon ideas (lectionary or off-cycle) that fit your voice and your room. Then take your finished sermon and write the bulletin liturgy, plan the music handoff, prep the children's moment, draft the daily devotionals, and stage the social. That's what we do.
The result isn't "save time." It's "do a tenfold better job in the time you already have." The third draft happens. The Greek gets checked. Illustrations get vetted against your archive so you stop recycling. The music director gets her list four weeks out. The bulletin gets done before Friday at 9. None of that was happening before. The sermon gets better, not faster.
"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 needed a 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.
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 one sitting. Free with every plan.
Self-image vs. corpus reality. Most preachers think they preach broader than they do.
Cosine-similarity clustering catches recycled stories. Tells you what to retire.
Theme gaps surfaced against a Reformed coverage frame. Honest, not judgmental.
Plus a Preaching Plan output: a forward calendar with text + theme suggestions that close the gaps the report surfaced, biblical books and themes you haven't preached on, and series ideas. Runs on 30+ sermons. Regenerate any time.
Annual billing saves ~17% (pay 10, get 12). 14-day free trial on every plan. No card required. Cancel anytime.
Image overage: $0.15 / image (Pastor) or $0.10 / image (Pastor Plus). All plans include the 90-minute onboarding conversation that builds your preaching profile + church profile. Markdown-bundle export anytime.
An "eager but sometimes mistaken intern" is the framing pastors keep landing on, and we 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.
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 traditions (SBC, Pentecostal, non-denominational) work, 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. 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.
Run a cascade on this week's sermon and see what your preaching looks like in aggregate. If it's not for you, walk away — nothing was charged.
Built by Pastor Dave Baker, M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary, working PCUSA Stated Clerk.