One recording, one week of content
The Sunday Engine: how a single sermon becomes a study guide, a YouTube kit, a devotional, and a newsletter — without burning out your team.
Most churches we talk to are running on the same fumes. There’s a pastor writing sermons all week. There’s one or two staff members trying to do social, email, newsletter, livestream, kids ministry comms — usually badly, because there’s not enough time. There’s a Sunday afternoon that already feels like a Tuesday by 3pm.
The Sunday Engine is what we built so a 600-person church doesn’t have to hire two more people.
The premise
The premise is small: a sermon is already content. The recording is content. The manuscript is content. The setlist is content. The pulpit notes are content. The transcript is content.
Every other format the church needs that week — study guide, YouTube video, devotional, newsletter — is just a transformation of those raw inputs. The transformations are mechanical. Mechanical things should be automated.
So we automated them.
Inputs (two)
- The recording (audio or video). Our live stream captures this automatically.
- The manuscript (Word doc, dropped in Dropbox). The pastor was already writing it.
That’s it. Those two files, dropped in two places, set off the engine.
Outputs (eight)
By Thursday afternoon, the manuscript becomes:
- A branded study guide PDF with the main points, key Scriptures, and small-group questions — in the church’s voice, held to a strict theological standard. Hosted on the church’s own site. A short tracking link is printed for the pastor to paste into Planning Center.
- A set of small-group discussion prompts, separate from the PDF, ready to drop into a group leader email.
By Sunday morning, the setlist becomes:
- A Spotify playlist and an Apple Music playlist with the week’s songs.
- A ready-to-post Instagram graphic with the song titles.
By Sunday afternoon, the recording and transcript become:
- A YouTube kit — title, thumbnail concept, description, chapter timestamps — emailed to the team. Approve it, ship it. (The video itself is already captured and archived by the live stream.)
- A transcribed sermon page on the site, topic-tagged and Scripture-tagged, fully searchable.
By Monday morning:
- A five-day devotional email series drawn from the Sunday text, scheduled for the week.
- A “This Week” newsletter built from Planning Center events plus the sermon — ready to review and send.
Zero of those required a staff member to sit at a keyboard.
What the engine is not
It’s not magic. Every output gets a human review. The pastor approves the study guide. The comms director approves the newsletter. The YouTube kit is a draft, not a publish.
It’s not generic. Every prompt that touches Scripture is held to a strict standard — Trinitarian, reverent, gospel-of-grace, Piper/Keller voice. Therapy talk doesn’t ship. Prosperity doesn’t ship. Inventing Scripture doesn’t ship.
It’s not selling sermon clips. Reels and Shorts are commoditized — Pulpit AI, Opus Clip, Sermon Shots. We resell them at margin. We don’t pretend we built them.
What this changes
A 600-person church usually has one full-time comms person. With the Engine running, that person stops being a content factory and starts being a comms strategist. They spend their week deciding what to highlight, what to say, what to launch — not assembling a study guide PDF in Canva at 11pm.
That’s the win. Not “more content.” The same content, less burnout. The studio bought the team a week back.
We turn it on by default on every Custom build. The Starter tier includes the sermon-prep, recommender, and worship-playlist engines; you can add the rest later if you want them.