I was ordained at a church in South Carolina in 2015, and for five years I led a home church that gathered every week. Every week brought the same quiet, holy assignment: sit still long enough to hear what God was saying, and find a way to put it into words my people could carry through their week.
Some weeks the message arrived on its own. The Spirit would press something into my mind so unmistakably I couldn't have ignored it if I tried. Other weeks it came slower—usually standing in the kitchen over dinner in a messy house, talking the idea through with my wife until it finally took shape.
But there was always so much vying for my attention. A full life, a hundred good things pulling at the hours. The hard part was rarely the studying or the praying—it was finding the space to focus. To let a half-formed idea sit long enough to become something clear enough to preach.
Then I started thinking about it differently. A few years ago I watched a video about the value of a thought partner, and it named something I'd been feeling for a long time. So many of us treat AI like a search engine—a kind of magic genie we pepper with questions, waiting for it to hand back the perfect answer. But what if that was the wrong way to use it entirely? What if you didn't need it to be right—you needed it to listen? To reflect back what it heard you say. To take a passionate, tangled stream of thought and give it just enough shape that you could finally say what was on your heart, clearly and compellingly. So I decided to build it.
These are holy moments.
Because here is what every preacher knows in their bones: Sunday is always coming. The next message can feel like a mountain hanging over your head. And yet the platform we've been given—and the words we speak from it—carry tremendous weight. We sit with our people in what they're walking through. We know their struggles. We celebrate with them in the good moments, and we weep with them when life doesn't go the way they planned. It is one of the most important jobs there is, because it has to do with the tending of someone's soul.
The line I won't cross
I've come to believe preaching was never about speaking the perfect words, or crafting the cleverest outline, or even getting people to remember what you said. It's about faithfully listening to God's Spirit, and being obedient to what he places on your heart. That's the very reason I would never build something to write your sermons for you. The wrestling is the point. The listening is the point. A machine can't be obedient to what God put on your heart—only you can. The most it should ever do is help you say it more clearly.
So I asked a different question. What if you could bring that kitchen conversation to everyone? What if preparing a sermon could feel less like staring down a blank page and more like coffee with one of your most trusted friends—someone who asks good questions and helps you find the words? What if there were a space built to draw out what was already in your heart, so you could faithfully communicate what God was whispering to you?
The idea dropped into my mind one night while I was putting one of my children to sleep. The moment they were down, I sat at the keyboard and frantically banged out code—watching the thing take shape right in front of me. When I finally tried it, it worked. It wasn't writing my ideas for me. It was helping me shape the message that had been swirling in my head for a month, until at last I could see it clearly.
And so Sermons.app was born—not as a product from some corporate conglomerate chasing a market, but as a project from one pastor who loves the Lord, and who genuinely longs for more people to know and follow Jesus. Built so the men and women who tend his people each week can do it with a little more clarity, and a little more room to listen.
—Jon Horton
Pastor & Founder, Sermons.app