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How a Sermonable sermon is made

You should know exactly what you are reading before you trust a word of it. Here is the whole process, including the parts that are uncomfortable to say out loud.

The short version

Sermons are prepared with AI. We say that plainly on the homepage, in the FAQ, and here, because a faith product that hides how it works has already failed at the only thing that matters. What makes these worth reading is not that a machine wrote them. It is what the machine is bound to.

The five steps, in order

  1. You choose a tradition and a length, and say what you are walking through. What you type is never stored. Not for anyone, not ever.
  2. A passage is chosen for your situation from within your tradition's own way of reading Scripture. One anchor passage, three to twelve verses, not a scattering of proof texts.
  3. The real text of that passage is fetched from the World English Bible, a public-domain translation, and handed to the writing step. This is the step that matters most: the sermon quotes from a retrieved text, never from memory, which is where invented verses come from.
  4. The sermon is written under the constraints of your tradition, rearticulating teaching the church has already tested rather than inventing new doctrine.
  5. Every quotation is marked and cited so you can open your own Bible and check us. The highlighted lines you see are the actual Scripture.

What each tradition is grounded in

Each preset carries the doctrine, the sermon shape, and the preaching voice of a particular stream of the church, named here so you can judge whether we have the right teachers.

TraditionPreaching heritage it draws onWhat shapes the sermon
Non-denominationalCharles Spurgeon, D. L. Moody Plain expository teaching, a clear call to trust Christ, minimal denominational vocabulary
BaptistCharles Spurgeon, John Bunyan Verse-driven exposition, the authority of Scripture, personal conversion and discipleship
Methodist and WesleyanJohn Wesley's Standard Sermons, Francis Asbury Grace at every stage, holiness of heart and life, an invitation rather than a verdict
PentecostalWilliam Seymour, Smith Wigglesworth The present work of the Spirit, expectancy, testimony, prayer as the sermon's engine
ReformedJohn Calvin, Jonathan Edwards God's sovereignty, careful doctrine, the Westminster and Heidelberg confessions in the background
Catholic homilySt. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, John Henry Newman Homiletic form, the Catechism's teaching, sacramental life, the communion of saints

What we will never do

  • Quote a verse we have not actually retrieved. No Scripture from memory, ever.
  • Invent a story, a testimony, or a miracle and present it as something that happened.
  • Attribute a quotation to a preacher who did not say it.
  • Take a political side, name a party, or preach the news cycle.
  • Claim private revelation, or claim to know anything about your life you did not tell us.
  • Give medical, legal, or financial direction.
  • Preach toward harming or manipulating anyone, whatever the request says.
  • Suggest that reading this is a substitute for your congregation. Every sermon ends by sending you back to it.

What it cannot do

It does not know you. It cannot sit at your bedside, baptize your child, counsel your marriage, or bury your father. It has no pastoral relationship with you and no authority over you. It will sometimes get things wrong, and when it does we want to hear about it, which is the entire reason the contact page exists and a person reads it.

How to check our work

Open your own Bible to the citation under any highlighted line. That is the test, and it is the test we would want applied to us. If a quotation does not match your translation word for word, that is usually because we quote the World English Bible; if it does not match in meaning, that is a fault and we want to know today.

If you are a pastor

We would rather be corrected than praised. If you serve in one of these traditions and something in its preset is off, that is the most useful message we can receive. See what we are asking of pastors, or write to us directly.

Read one and judge for yourself

The argument above is only worth as much as the sermon it produces. One free sermon each week, no account needed.

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