I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on how you handle reading longer texts in your church services and sermons. I typically prefer to read all the text at once but as I’m thinking through our Christmas series this year I’m wondering if breaking up texts in the middle of the sermon, or even have it read entirely by another person would be beneficial. What’s everyone’s practice and preference? How can we help our people best hear and receive God’s word around this?

What is an anchor image you've used recently that you found helpful? How did it carry the passage from beginning to end. Examples of these cases really help new folks see what anchor illustrations are and how they work. I'll go first. In a sermon on Psalm 51, I used the image of someone knocking on the front door while you're sorting dirty laundry in the den. What do you do? Hide? What if you could be free enough to open the door and say, "Come on in, excuse the mess." This carried because I was able to come back to the image over and over, the emotional issues related to it, and the concrete action of opening the door. The mess is real. Confessing the mess is hard. Jesus comes in to clean the mess for us. Now, we can be real, confessing the mess but celebrating the one who bore the stench in my place.

It's Wednesday. I hope you've made good progress for Sunday. 😃 If you have your text, keyword, and PPGR outline and you're willing to share it, post in the comments below. Let's see and celebrate our progress together!

Here's an interesting tool to evaluate your sermon manuscript, if you do what is often referred to as "scripting" or writing the way that you speak. While my sermon never sounds exactly like my manuscript, I do write the way I speak. Writing for the ear and the eye are very different and thankfully no one is judging my grammar! https://www.jeravalue.com/en/text-music From that website: "Each sentence is highlighted by its length so you can see the rhythm of your prose — a wall of one colour is monotony; a healthy mix is music." Simply paste your text and it will show you the rhythm of the writing. Whether in your writing or not, rhythm and variation of it in your preaching is important homiletical technique, in my opinion.

For those interested in what web app construction looks like, here's what happened this week under the hood. As always, if you come across any tech bugs, let me know and send a screenshot if you're able. By the way, a huge shout out thank you to our developer genius, @Michael Byrd, who went WAY above and beyond this week. - Fixed the Sermon Builder walkthrough freezing after a fumbled confirmation — step completion is now driven by the confirmed field, so a stale step self-heals on the next confirmation - Fixed confirmations dead-ending on "ready to move on" — the AI now opens the next step's coaching in the same reply, using scripted wording and never inventing options - Fixed manuscript generation failing on a desynced walkthrough — blocked generation attempts now heal the step index at the end of the turn - Fixed duplicated chat bubbles caused by sends racing an in-flight response stream, and repaired already-corrupted saved conversations - Fixed repeated coaching messages by pinning the Vertex provider SDK to the last good version, plus a filter that suppresses any verbatim repeated text - Fixed silent content-tool failures behind "manuscript won't generate" reports — unavailable tools now explain themselves and guide the walkthrough forward, mistyped tool parameters are auto-repaired, and AI usage is recorded on aborted streams - Fixed production log issues: client error serialization, /projects hydration mismatch, and AI SDK patch updates - Required every numbered coaching part to be answered before a manuscript section can be drafted - Stripped echoed session-context blocks from model output and healed already-saved histories - Surfaced mid-stream generation failures (e.g. rate limits) with the real reason instead of silently claiming success - Guarded the admin prompt fragment editor against silent save loss — unsaved-changes confirmation when switching fragments, and stale-tab saves now detect conflicts instead of overwriting newer work