Who writes the sermon?
You do, as much of it as you want. What you write, PastorPrep keeps word for word and builds on. What PastorPrep writes, it labels as its own. That's the whole design, and the rest of this page explains how it works and where the lines are.
Why I'm writing this down
Before anyone asks what PastorPrep costs, they usually ask who writes the sermon. It's the right first question, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a slogan.
In September a senior pastor looked at an early version of PastorPrep and found its biggest problem in about a minute. It wrote the main idea and the outline for him, and those are exactly the parts a preacher shouldn't hand over. The study is where the preacher is formed, and the big idea and the outline come out of the study. He was right. Around the same time, the first pastor in our beta told me he writes every word of his manuscript himself and wanted a careful reader, not a drafter.
So we rebuilt how every sermon starts around those two conversations.
Every step has a place for your words
A sermon in PastorPrep moves through three steps: the main idea, the outline, and the sermon itself. At each one you can write it yourself, start from a suggestion and change it, or leave it to PastorPrep. Nothing is required, and nothing nags you to fill it in.
The main idea. One sentence, in your words, about what the passage is saying. When you write it, every outline and every drafted section is built on it word for word, and it prints as the big idea on Sunday's bulletin. PastorPrep then asks four questions of it, taken from our guide to finding the one memorable idea:
- Could a tired congregant say it back on Tuesday?
- Is it a claim, not a topic?
- Is it drawn from this text, not a theme brought to it?
- Is it short enough to say three times in one sermon?
Those are tests, not a rewrite. PastorPrep only offers a sharper version if you ask for one, and that version sits beside yours with its own label. Yours stays until you choose otherwise.
The outline. Write your own, in preaching order, with a note under any section. Or ask for a few outlines, and they'll all serve your sentence, differing in how they get there. If PastorPrep reads the passage's weight somewhere your reading doesn't go, it may show one outline marked "A different reading, on purpose," with a line saying where the two readings part. Treat it like a commentary on the shelf. It's never picked for you.
The sermon. Write it right there in PastorPrep, write it wherever you usually write and bring it back, or have PastorPrep draft it from your outline. When it drafts from an outline you wrote or edited, it keeps your headings as you typed them, adds no new points, and leaves any illustration you haven't written yet as a marked space:
[Your story here: what in your week shows this?]
It doesn't invent a story from your life to fill that space. The most personal part of a sermon should be yours, and if you forget it, the marker prints so you'll see it before Sunday.
"Draft my sermon" is a choice with its name on it
There are four ways to start a sermon in PastorPrep: Help me build a sermon, Draft my sermon, I already have something written, and Write it here from scratch. One of them, "Draft my sermon," means PastorPrep picks an outline and writes the whole thing. It says so on the button and in the line underneath it, before you choose it.
I thought hard about removing that option, and I kept it. A deacon filling the pulpit for the first time often has no sermons to learn from and no idea where to begin. A pastor in the week of a funeral and two hospital visits may need a starting point. Seeing a full draft, then reworking it line by line, is also how some people learn what a sermon is made of.
PastorPrep is a tool, not a disciplinary system. Deciding what's appropriate in your pulpit is your call, and your church's. My job is to make it obvious who wrote what, so whatever you decide can actually be kept.
The labels, and what your elders can see
Every section of the sermon carries a label saying who wrote it, in plain words:
- You wrote this
- PastorPrep's draft
- PastorPrep's draft, edited by you
The main idea and the outline carry the same kind of label, with "suggested" in place of "draft," because a suggested sentence is a suggestion: "PastorPrep suggested this," or "PastorPrep suggested this, edited by you." The labels change as you edit, so a draft you rework shows that you reworked it.
Each sermon also gets a short summary called "What you wrote, and what we suggested." It shows who wrote the main idea and the outline, and how many sections you wrote, PastorPrep drafted, or PastorPrep drafted and you edited. There are no percentages, no scores, and nothing that grades you for how much you wrote. If your church has an AI policy, that summary is something you can show your elders rather than asking them to take your word for it.
You can also export a short AI-use statement with any sermon, to print or share. It reads:
"I prepare my sermons with study tools that include an AI drafting assistant. Every draft is edited in my own hand, every Scripture reference is checked against the [your translation], and the final message is mine."
What PastorPrep never does, whichever way you start
- It never writes Scripture. Every verse is pulled word for word from the translation you chose, and a reference that doesn't match is flagged, never quietly fixed and never shown as Scripture.
- It never rewrites your main idea unless you ask, and it never renames your headings.
- It never changes a sermon you brought in. Its review is a second reader's notes, and your manuscript stays exactly as you wrote it.
- It never uses your sermons to train any AI model.
What it can't do
It can't do your study for you, and it doesn't try. It doesn't know what your congregation went through this week unless you tell it. And a label can tell your elders who wrote a paragraph, but it can't tell them whether you prayed over it. That part was never software's to do.
If you think we've drawn a line in the wrong place, I really do want to hear it, especially from pastors who are wary of tools like this. Email me at hello@pastorprep.com and I'll read it myself.
Vivian