A pre-Sunday Bible study tied to the text. A children's moment that connects to the sermon. A bulletin liturgy actually theme-matched. A music director who has the hymn list four weeks ahead, not Wednesday afternoon. Social posts that aren't just "service is at 10am." Most of this falls through — not because it doesn't matter, but because there's no one to do it.
Twelve to fifteen hours of sermon prep is already inside a pastor's week. Add the bulletin, the kids' moment, the newsletter article, the social plan, the slide deck, and the post-Sunday content — and Saturday becomes a scramble. The sermon suffers. The prayer life suffers. The pastor suffers.
You don't want a tool that hallucinates Bible verses, reads as generic-evangelical when you're Reformed, posts to your church's Facebook on its own, or trains on your sermons to feed someone else's chatbot. You want a tool that knows your voice, respects the tradition, flags what it's guessing about, and lets you be the one who decides what goes live.
You'd never preach what an intern wrote without reading it. Same here. The work is still yours — your voice, your pastoral heart, your knowledge of your people. AI handles the busywork so you can focus on the ministry.
This isn't a productivity hack. It's a workflow that gets the entire staff onto the same page — musicians, children's ministry, communications, AV, education — by giving them weeks of lead time on every theme. The pastor's prayer life can deepen because the sermon prep grind is reorganized.
One-time onboarding. We analyze your full sermon archive and build a preaching profile — your vocabulary, sentence rhythm, illustration patterns, theological framework, the phrases you actually reach for. We also build a church profile — your hymnal, communion frequency, congregation size, the recent repertoire your music director is drawing from, your liturgical season patterns. Without these, AI gives you generic Reformed boilerplate. With them, AI sounds like you preaching to your people.
Paste your manuscript or upload a Word doc. Pick a mode — pre-Sunday (Bible study, devotionals, bulletin liturgy, music handoff, kids' moment, social meditations, slide deck), post-Sunday (blog post, video metadata, video clips, pull-quote graphics, archive entry), or both. AI does about 15 minutes of work in the background. Outputs land in your account — markdown files, a downloadable .zip, ready-to-post social cards, and a deep link to each one.
You're still the pastor. Nothing auto-publishes, posts, schedules, or sends. You read each output, edit what needs editing, hand the music director her hymn list, drop the kids' moment script in your folder for Sunday, and post the social meditations on the days that work for you. About 30 to 45 minutes of review replaces three or four hours of writing.
| Old way | New way |
|---|---|
| Saturday-night sermon scramble | Sermons drafted weeks ahead |
| Music director gets hymn list Wednesday | Music director 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, illustrated |
| Disconnected staff work | Whole-staff alignment around the calendar |
The killer feature. AI knows your hymnal (Glory to God, PH 1990, The Hymnal 1982, etc.), the last 2–3 years of your repertoire from your bulletin scan, your top 30 congregational favorites, and your familiar-tune catalog. It hands you 5–7 hymn picks, plus 3–5 familiar-tune substitutions — HYFRYDOL, NETTLETON, BEACH SPRING — with less-known texts on those tunes, so the congregation sings a melody they know cold while encountering new words. Most music directors don't have time to do this matching. AI does it in seconds.
Trained on the Book of Common Worship. Real Call to Worship, real Prayer of Confession with Assurance, Prayer of Illumination, Pastoral Prayer in your voice, Affirmation of Faith from the Book of Confessions, full Great Thanksgiving on communion Sundays (Sursum corda, Preface, Sanctus, Words of Institution, Memorial Acclamation, Epiclesis, Doxology), Charge & Benediction. All theme-connected to your sermon. Confessional references accurate. Not vague evangelical prayer fragments.
A single 60–75 minute session held Wednesday or Thursday that prepares the congregation for what's coming Sunday. Not a 4-week series (unsustainable). Not a sermon recap (no point). A study that primes the room. With opening icebreaker, leader background notes, observation/interpretation/application questions, facilitation guide for each question, closing reflection, closing prayer in PCUSA voice, and a Zoom adaptation.
Upload your full sermon archive once. Sermon Helper extracts metadata (title, scripture, date, themes, 50-word summary) for every sermon. From then on, every cascade and every prep session sees what you've preached. "You haven't preached on lament since 2023." The AI won't re-propose Romans 8 if you preached it three weeks ago. It won't suggest Christmas-Eve illustrations for Easter morning. The whole archive becomes context.
Every Bible verse, every illustration, every "according to," every quote attribution — tagged verified or needs pastor verification. AI hallucinates Scripture. It will confidently misquote Calvin and slightly alter Brueggemann. We tell you when we're guessing so you can check before you preach it.
Sermon Helper never auto-publishes, never auto-posts, never auto-sends. Outputs go to files and to a downloadable .zip. You generate, you approve, you decide what goes live and when. The trust ladder — manual review → light review → confirmation-gated → pre-approved policy — is a setting we'll add later. Auto-publishing pastoral content is a line we don't cross.
Generated Monday–Wednesday of the preaching week.
Generated Monday–Tuesday after preaching.
Optional. For pastors who want the prep itself to be a structured workflow — not just "AI write me a sermon."
Phase 1 is idea generation pulling from the lectionary, current events, and gaps in your prior teaching. Phase 2 picks the texts. Phase 3 does the research — original languages, historical and literary context, four to six commentaries synthesized, modern scholarship, news connections, cross-references. (This phase replaces 4–6 hours of commentary work with about 5–10 minutes.) Phase 4 is your turn — AI captures what struck you, where the Spirit nudged, the pastoral context this week; AI does not generate. Phase 5 produces 3–4 outline options. Phase 6 finds illustrations matched to your voice with hallucination flags. Phase 7 either hands the work back to you to write, or drafts a manuscript in your voice that you rewrite (don't just edit).
Each phase has an "ask the AI a follow-up" chat — drill into a commentator, ask for elaboration, talk through implications. The conversation persists across visits. At any point in any phase you can change direction.
Your preaching profile, your church profile, your bulletin profile, the sermons you upload, the cascades you generate, your edits. All yours. Export anytime as a markdown bundle.
Your raw archive uploads (we extract metadata and discard the originals). Pastoral counseling notes. Specific congregant names with sensitive details. Confidential session deliberations. Personnel files. Member giving records. Disciplinary case material. Sermon Helper is forbidden from generating content involving these.
Anything pastoral. Outputs land in your account; you decide what gets posted, scheduled, sent, or printed. The product has no "connect to Facebook and post on Sunday" button. We treat that as a hard line.
We use Anthropic Claude and xAI Grok via paid API access — tiers that are not used to train future models. Your sermons don't end up in someone else's chatbot.
| Stakeholder | Lead time they need |
|---|---|
| Music director | 4–6 weeks |
| Christian Education coordinator | 2–4 weeks |
| Communications | 1–2 weeks |
| AV team | 1 week |
| Bulletin office | 3–4 days |
Sermon Helper assumes you want to be 6–8 weeks out on themes — so every member of the staff gets what they need on time.
Sermon Helper is a labor of love — built by a Stated Clerk for the pastors he sees every month. While we tune the product, we're keeping it free for the Presbytery of the Peaks. Use the full pipeline. Ship a Sunday's worth of content. Tell us what's wrong.
Pastors outside the Peaks: we're inviting a few testers from neighboring presbyteries. Email Pastor Dave to be considered.
Pricing for the post-beta release will be announced as the cohort matures. Beta participants will get a meaningful discount on whatever we land on.
No. AI is your seminary intern — the work that gets to the pulpit is still yours. Sermon Helper handles the derivative content (bulletin liturgy, social meditations, kids' moment, music handoff) so the sermon itself can have your full attention. If you opt into the prep pipeline, AI does the research and offers outline options — but 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 — so the first sermon cascade you run already sounds like you preaching to your room. The difference between cold-prompting and profile-aware is the difference between a generic Reformed sermon and a sermon for this congregation on this Sunday.
Sermon Helper is forbidden from generating content involving pastoral care, counseling, or confidential session deliberations. The skill is explicit: nothing about specific members, no private prayer concerns, no session details, no personnel files. We're a pastor-led product — this is a hard line, not a feature flag.
Default is PCUSA Reformed, with bulletin liturgy trained on the Book of Common Worship. We support UMC, Episcopal, ELCA, RCA, ECO, EPC, ACNA, evangelical Presbyterian, and most mainline traditions. Non-mainline traditions (SBC, Pentecostal, non-denominational) work, but onboarding takes a longer conversation about the congregation's worship culture.
That's the typical case. We support .docx, .pdf, .txt, and .md. Upload everything you have — even if filenames are inconsistent, even if some are scanned — and Sermon Helper extracts what it can. Date-uncertain sermons get flagged so you can fix them inline. The profile gets sharper with every sermon you add. Most pastors hit the "this sounds like me" threshold around 30 sermons; the recommendation is to keep adding.
Profile build is one Saturday-morning conversation (about 90 minutes), plus AI processing time. After that, every sermon 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 materials only the first week, add the Bible study the second, social meditations the third. Two-month adoption curve, then full pipeline.
Yes to both. While we're free for Peaks beta there's nothing to cancel; once we charge, it's month-to-month, no contract. Your preaching profile, church profile, sermon archive, and all generated cascade outputs are yours from day one and exportable as a markdown bundle. You keep what we built.
Three things. Profile-aware: we start with your voice and your church, not a generic template. Tradition-faithful: we write real PCUSA bulletin liturgy with a full Great Thanksgiving, not vague evangelical prayer fragments. Music director handoff that actually uses your hymnal — Glory to God, PH 1990, the last 2–3 years of your repertoire, your familiar-tune catalog — not generic CCLI suggestions. We're newer than Pulpit AI but built more deeply for the mainline-Reformed pastor.
Sign in to the beta and run a cascade on this week's sermon — or schedule a 20-minute demo with Pastor Dave on a sample sermon from your archive. No card. No pitch. Just a working pipeline running on real text.