1 Sermon audio
The recording of the sermon you preached. That file is the starting point. The work begins from what was said in the pulpit, not from a topic we supplied or a theme we guessed.
How it works
From the sermon you preached to a page your church has already read.
Sermon Steward starts with Sunday's audio. It reads that sermon, writes the page and the guides from what your church has actually preached, and stops for you before any of it is used or published.
2 Transcript
The sermon audio is transcribed into text, word for word. It is the record of the sermon: the sentences you spoke, in order. It is not a summary, and it is not a guide yet.
3 Homiletical elements
The transcript is broken down into its homiletical elements. Not by the paragraph. Not by the word count. By what you are doing in the pulpit at that moment — explaining the text, making a claim, telling a story, turning to your people.
We are not grading the sermon. We are naming the moves so the writing that follows can stay with the sermon you actually preached. The longer account of that reading is on How we read a sermon. The Hall samples below show the same kind of reading on real sermons.
4 Index
Everything is indexed so it can be searched and drawn from later, by meaning and not only by a matching word. Each piece of the sermon can be looked up alongside the rest of what this church has preached.
When a guide is written, it looks the sermon up in that index and draws from the church's own preaching. That is the whole idea. The writing is retrieved from sermons the church actually preached, which makes it more reliable. It is tied to your pulpit. It is not a draft written as if no sermon were behind it.
5 Artifacts
From that indexed sermon, drafts are prepared for the church to use. Each one is drawn from the preaching, not invented beside it:
- ✓ Sermon page
- ✓ Small group guide
- ✓ Daily readings
- ✓ Family card
- ✓ Couples guide
- ✓ Memory verse
A small-group question should come from a claim you made. A family card should come from the same sermon. A memory verse should be a verse the sermon actually opened.
6 Review
The church reviews all of that content before it is used or published. You read the page and the guides. You can correct a line that does not sound like the sermon, or that you do not want in front of your people. Publication waits on that review.
7 Published page
After the review, the sermon page is published for the church to share, with the guides that belong to it. What the congregation receives is content the church has already seen.