I planted a church in Phoenix and led it for fourteen years. Twenty-five years in ministry, all told, with a PhD to boot. I was preaching most weeks, and by most measures I knew what I was doing in a pulpit.
But somewhere in those years, I noticed something I hadn't expected. Nobody was telling me the truth about my preaching. Not because they didn't care, but because they loved me and didn't want to discourage me. The people closest to a preacher are sometimes the worst-positioned to critique him. The congregation loves their shepherd. The staff work for the senior pastor. Is it really fair to ask an associate pastor to deliver hard feedback to his boss, when his job might be affected?
In 2009, we were a church plant, scrambling to get things off the ground without staff and without seasoned elders, and we never built a real mechanism for feedback on sermons. The elders gave generic encouragement, and I'd walk away wondering: are they just being kind?
And here's the one that still stings. I'd preach a message I thought was good, and a few days later I'd ask someone who'd been there what it was about. And they couldn't tell me.
Keep in mind, that wasn't their fault. It was mine. I hadn't been clear about the one main idea I was actually trying to say. I'd lived in the passage all week; they'd heard it once. And somewhere between my study and their Sunday, the main point went cloudy, and nobody would tell me, because the people who love you don't walk up after the service and say, "I'm not sure what that was about."
If you preach, you know the dread I'm describing. The Sermon Coach is my attempt to break it — to hand you what most of us lost the day we left seminary, while there's still time to do something about it before Sunday.
So I built the team of coaches I wished I'd had.
Not an AI sermon writer. I don't want a machine writing sermons, and neither do you. Preaching is a sacred task and a privilege reserved for real-life human beings. But in the world of analytics, I wanted to build something that would take what I'd written and run it through the wisdom of the literature from people I already trusted on preaching: Chapell's work on the fallen condition and the redemptive arc, Robinson's focus on the single idea, Keller's emphasis on getting to grace, Piper's aim for gospel clarity, the Simeon Trust's method on staying tied to the text, and 9Marks' value of preaching that builds a church. I wanted a tool to ask the same kind of questions a sharp friend would ask — if you happened to have one with the time to read every sermon before Sunday.
I ran my own sermons through it first. It caught things. Things I'd half-sensed for years and never had words for. I started using it in my prep, clarifying the main idea and catching drift before it ever reached the congregation. And my preaching got better.