How KERYGMA PRO works: the sermon preparation process, step by step

A sermon preparation process, not a sermon generator

There is a kind of tool that will take a topic and hand back a finished outline before you have finished reading the passage. Whatever that is, it is not preaching, and the pastors who object to it are right to object.

KERYGMA PRO is built on the opposite bet: that the slow part of sermon preparation is the valuable part, and that what a preacher actually lacks is not content but a companion who keeps asking the next question. So the app asks. You answer. Then it composes your answers into a sermon in expository shape.

Put plainly — the app never does your exegesis. It does not decide what the passage means, it does not settle your big idea, it does not name your application, and it has never met your congregation. You bring all of that. What it brings is the discipline of the questions and the labor of the first draft.

What you supply, and what the app supplies

Every stage below divides the same way. It is worth seeing the whole division at once before walking through it.

You supply

• The passage, and the judgment that this is the text for this Sunday.
• The observation — what the text actually says, seen with your own eyes, from your own reading.
• The interpretation — the author's intent, worked out with whatever tools you already trust: your Greek and Hebrew, your lexicons, your commentaries, your years.
• The doctrine — the enduring truth, stated in your words.
• The application — what this asks of these people, this week. You know them. The app does not.
• The conviction. The sermon is preached by a man, not a machine.

The app supplies

• The passage held in front of you at every stage, so you are never working from a memory of what you read an hour ago.
• The questions — the ones a trusted mentor would ask, in the order he would ask them.
• A record of your answers, kept together and private to your own account.
• A full first draft at the end, in clear expository shape, composed from stages one through five.

Nothing crosses that line. If a sentence in the finished draft sounds like you, it is because you wrote the thought it came from.

The sermon preparation process, step by step: six stages on one passage

Rather than describe the stages in the abstract, here they are working on a text. Say you are preaching Colossians 3:1–4 (NKJV):

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.

What follows is what you would do at each stage, and what the app would do alongside you.

Stage 1 — The passage

You: choose the text. Not a fragment, but a unit that can bear a sermon — a paragraph with its own argument, with a beginning and an end. In Colossians you would notice that verse 1 leans back on if you died with Christ in 2:20, and that verse 5 turns the corner with therefore put to death. Verses 1–4 are one breath. That decision is a pastoral and exegetical judgment, and it is yours.

The app: begins where a mentor begins — with the text you have put before you — and then keeps that passage in front of you from here to the last stage. Every question you answer afterward is answered with the words of the text on the screen beside you.

It is a small thing that turns out not to be small. Most drift in sermon preparation happens because the text quietly leaves the room around hour three.

Stage 2 — Observation

You: write down what the text says, before deciding what it means. Repeated words. Contrasts. Commands. Promises. Connectives. In Colossians 3:1–4 you would be writing something like: above appears twice, Christ four times; the contrast is above against things on the earth; the commands are seek and set your mind; the ground is you died; the promise is you also will appear with Him in glory; and the whole thing hangs on the little hinge if then you were raised — an assumed fact, not a doubt.

The app: asks for those things by name — repeated words, contrasts, commands, promises — and leaves the noticing to you. That is time spent with the text and a pen, and there is no substitute for it, because everything downstream is only as good as what you actually saw.

This stage is the one preachers under deadline skip first, and the one that costs the most when skipped.

Stage 3 — Interpretation

You: determine what the passage meant to the people who first received it, and what the author intended by it. Here that means Colossae, and the men telling that church that holiness could be had by regulation — “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle” (Colossians 2:21). Paul's answer is not a stricter rule but a completed fact: you died, you were raised, your life is hidden with Christ. Seek those things which are above is therefore not escapism and not asceticism. It is a mind brought into agreement with a status already granted.

The app: asks the questions — who is being addressed, what problem the author is answering, what the grammar and the flow of argument will and will not allow, where this sits in the letter. Then it waits. Bring the tools you already trust: your lexicons, your commentaries, your years in the language. The judgment is yours, and the app will not make it for you. Interpretation is the preacher's own labor, and it stays that way.

Stage 4 — Doctrine

You: say the enduring truth in one sentence, in your own words. This is what Haddon Robinson taught a generation to call the big idea, and what older writers called the doctrine drawn from the text — the exegetical idea carried across into a statement that is true for the church in every age, not just in Colossae.

For our passage it might come out as: Because your life is already hidden with the risen Christ, the mind set on things above is not a mind straining upward but a mind agreeing with what is already true of you.

The app: presses you to say it in one sentence, and to say it in your own vocabulary rather than the text's. That is the discipline: a truth you can only state by quoting the verse is a truth you have not yet grasped well enough to preach. The app supplies the pressure of the question. The sentence is yours.

Stage 5 — Application

You: name what this truth asks of these people, this week. Not application in general — application to the man who was laid off in March and is quietly rebuilding his life around the search; to the couple who have made a religion out of the house; to the teenager who thinks Christianity is a list of things she is not allowed to touch, taste, or handle, and who is sitting under Colossians 2 without knowing it.

The app: asks the question and then gets out of the way, because it does not know your congregation and will not pretend to. This is the stage where machine-written sermons are exposed. Generic application is the tell — it is the sound of a sermon prepared by someone who was never in the room.

You were in the room. You sat with that family when their father died. You are the only person equipped to preach this part, which is exactly why the app leaves it to you.

Stage 6 — Composition

You: read, cut, argue with it, and preach it.

The app: drafts a full sermon in clear expository shape, built entirely out of stages one through five — your observations, your interpretation, your doctrinal statement, your application. It does not add exegesis you did not do. It does not import an outline from somewhere else. It arranges your study and writes it up.

Expository shape means the sermon moves with the passage rather than around it. Colossians 3:1–4 gives you a ground, two commands and a promise; a sermon that follows the text will sound like that, whether it lands as two points or four. If it helps to see an expository shape laid out plainly before you try it, the sermon outline template does that.

Then the real work begins, the part no software touches: you take the draft into your study, you pray over it, you cut the paragraph you liked but cannot defend, and you make it speakable in your own mouth. The draft is a beginning, honestly offered as one.

How the six stages map onto the method you already use

If you were trained in inductive Bible study, stages two through five are simply observe, interpret, apply with the doctrinal statement given its own room — because that is where most sermon preparation quietly goes wrong, jumping from what the text meant straight to what the hearer should do, with no truth stated in between.

If you were trained in Robinson's line, stage four is the exegetical idea and stage five turns it homiletical. If you keep a sermon preparation worksheet, you will recognize your own boxes: text, observations, context and intent, big idea, application, outline. The stages are not a new method. They are the ordinary one, held to in order, with something asking you the next question when the afternoon gets away from you.

For the fuller treatment of the craft itself — apart from any software — see the guide on how to prepare an expository sermon.

How long does sermon preparation take?

The honest answer is that no one can tell you, and anyone who quotes you a number does not know your week. It depends on the text, on how long a passage takes to open for you, on the funeral that lands on Wednesday. A man who preaches three times a week does not get three times the hours.

We are not going to tell you the app cuts your preparation in half. What the six stages do is spend the hours in a better order — they keep you from spending the afternoon rereading Tuesday's notes to work out what you already concluded, and they mean the page at the end is not blank.

Whatever you save, the counsel is the same: put it back into the text and into your people, not into a shorter week.

If you are not sure AI belongs anywhere near a pulpit

That is a reasonable concern, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.

The danger is real. A sermon assembled by a machine is not preaching, because preaching is a man declaring what he has seen in the Word to people he knows and loves and will answer for. Delegate the seeing, and there is nothing left worth listening to — the congregation can feel it, even when they cannot name it.

So the seeing is not delegated. Every stage that involves understanding the text or understanding your people is answered by you, in your words, and the composition stage has nothing to work with except those words. The app asks; you answer. That is the whole arrangement, and the plainest way to test it is to take one sermon through it and see whether the draft sounds like you or like a stranger. If it does not sit right with your conscience, do not use it — a preacher's conscience is not something we would ask him to override. There is more on that at AI and sermon preparation.

Beginning your first sermon

KERYGMA PRO runs in a browser — Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iPad — with nothing to install; a Windows desktop version exists as well. Your notes, your stage answers, and your drafts stay private to your own account.

The Founding Beta is open to a limited number of pastors, free to join, with three guided sermon creations included. Bring the passage the Lord has already put on your heart this week and open the app — or read the frequently asked questions first if you would rather know more before you begin.