Generated Mon–Tue.
Generated Mon–Tue after preaching.
Occasional.
Plus: 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: let AI do the legwork. Keep your hand on the wrestling — and on every word that goes out under your name.
Your voice. Your pastoral heart. The wrestling itself — what God is saying to this congregation through this text. The final word on every output. Pastoral care, sensitive members, session deliberations, anything confidential. We never go near any of it.
A research synthesis covering historical and literary context, the major theological readings of the text (and where they diverge), and modern scholarship — pulled together in one document. The Greek or Hebrew on the load-bearing words. A dozen sermon ideas, lectionary or off-cycle, fit to your voice. Cross-references across the canon. Illustrations vetted against your archive so you stop recycling. Optional: a first-draft manuscript you rewrite, not just edit.
The bulletin, the music handoff, the kids' moment, the devotionals, the social posts, the website content, the sermon-promo slides for worship and Facebook, the post-Sunday cascade. All in your voice. All theme-connected. All without your time.
The result isn't "save time." It's "do a tenfold better job in the time you already have" — and punch every content task off your list that you know you're supposed to be doing but aren't.
"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. Mainline style guides. Trained on your voice. 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 sermon 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 your archive. Descriptive, not judgmental — the Spirit is just one of many a mainline pastor commonly under-preaches.
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). Onboarding builds your preaching profile + church profile from your archive and website automatically. Markdown-bundle export anytime.
Most pastors have. Cold ChatGPT has nothing to work with — no archive, no church context, no liturgical tradition. Sermon Helper starts with your full sermon archive and your church website, builds two profiles automatically, and runs every cascade against them. The first cascade you generate 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.
An "eager but sometimes mistaken intern" is the framing pastors keep landing on, and we agree. The sermon is yours; AI does the legwork around it. 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.
No. Your sermon archive is summarized at onboarding so we can build your preaching profile and identify your preaching habits, recurring themes, and topics you may not have covered — then the original files are deleted. The summaries are yours and stay in your account. Sermon Helper runs on Anthropic Claude and xAI Grok via paid API access, and neither provider trains models on API traffic. Your sermons don't end up in someone else's chatbot.
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, even without dates. 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.