Ten Hours of Sermon Research. Forty-Five Minutes. Zero AI in Your Pulpit.

The Saturday-night problem

It’s Saturday night. 9:40 PM.

The outline is close but not right. You know this passage deserves more than you’ve given it — but the week gave you a hospital visit, a budget meeting, two counseling sessions, a leaders’ huddle, and a funeral. The ten hours of study you promised yourself became three, again.

Here’s what nobody says out loud: you were never the problem. Your devotion is fine. Your calling is intact. What you don’t have is what the preachers you admire have always had — research help. Spurgeon had 12,000 books and a staff. Your seminary professors had teaching assistants. The podcast preachers you’re compared to every week have research teams.

You have Tuesday. If Tuesday goes well.

The mechanism

A research agent — not a ghostwriter.

There’s a third option almost nobody is teaching. An agent is simply the AI you already use, operating under a carefully engineered set of standing orders (about 1,500 words of them — you’ll read every line). Those orders turn a general-purpose chatbot into a specialist research assistant that:

• Produces a structured Research Brief on any passage — original language work, historical context, literary structure, canonical connections, voices from church history, and where the traditions diverge — in minutes.
• Tags every historical quote with a confidence label and tells you what to verify — because a fabricated Augustine quote from your pulpit is the nightmare, and this system is built around preventing it.
• Argues with you. Ask it to steelman the reading you disagree with. A research assistant that only affirms you is a mirror.
• Refuses to write your sermon. It’s in the instructions. Ask it for an introduction and it will decline and hand you research instead.

What’s inside

Six modules, three agents, one Vault.

1. The Theology and the Tool — a framework you could defend to your board, plus the printable AI Sermon Prep Covenant.
2. Setting Up Your Workshop — the 20-minute build, click by click.
3. The Sermon Research Agent — the master prompt dissected line by line, the Research Brief, and six interrogation patterns.
4. From Research to Pulpit — the handoff protocol that keeps the sermon 100% yours, plus the weekly Integrity Check.
5. Making It Yours — tradition tuning (Reformed, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, Anglican) and the Tuesday-to-Sunday workflow.
6. Troubleshooting & Growth — every failure mode diagnosed, plus the teaching-team rollout playbook.

Plus The Prompt Vault — every prompt in the course in one copy-paste library, including all three complete master prompts (4,000+ words of production-grade agent instructions) — the Leadership Teaching Bot and Repurposing Bot bonus agents, the 20-Minute Quickstart, and the ChatGPT/Gemini appendix.