About

Methodology

How a sermon recording becomes a study guide. The AI pipeline, the human review, and how to flag a correction.

How a sermon becomes a study guide

Every published sermon on Sunday is processed through a four-phase pipeline. The pastor records the sermon as usual; everything below happens automatically after upload, in a matter of minutes.

Transcription

The audio is transcribed into words with timestamps, sentence by sentence. Filler words and stutters are preserved at this stage — we do not yet edit.

Reading the sermon

A summary, key themes, and clip candidates are drawn from the transcript. The system is instructed to read the sermon as a careful study tool, not to summarize it as if for a press release. Clips are aligned to natural sentence boundaries so they start and end cleanly.

Scripture retrieval

Bible references the pastor cited are matched against canonical text in our scripture index. Each reference is tagged as either explicit (the pastor preached on this passage) or related (mentioned in passing or thematically connected). Only explicit references appear on cross-church scripture pages.

Discussion questions and review

Discussion questions are generated across observation, interpretation, and application. Every question and every scripture reference then passes through an independent, automated review that rewrites or removes anything that falls short of our quality bar.

How we use AI

Sunday is built on established, industry-leading AI providers. We do not train our own models, and we do not train anyone else's on your content. The audio you upload, the resulting transcript, and the AI-generated study materials are stored in our own database.

Audio and transcripts are sent to our providers only to produce your study guide, and only through interfaces configured to opt out of any provider training. Your sermons are never used to train external models.

Where the AI ends and the pastor begins

Sunday's philosophy: the teaching belongs to the pastor. AI is the packaging.

We use AI to scaffold what the pastor said — extract clips, identify the scripture being preached, write a summary and a study guide, propose discussion questions. We do not use AI as a substitute for the pastor's teaching. The pastor's voice, framing, and theology are the sermon; the AI organizes that material into a form a small group can study during the week.

Concretely, the AI generates the summary, the themes attached to related scripture cards, the clip titles, the discussion questions, and suggested cross-references. The full transcript and the words inside each clip come directly from the audio. Scripture quotations come directly from canonical Bible text.

Before a study guide is published, the pastor can edit any section in the Sunday dashboard.

Accuracy and corrections

Transcription is good but not perfect. If a transcription error makes it to a published study guide, the church is responsible for the fix — either by editing the AI-generated sections that depend on it, or by unpublishing the sermon while the issue is resolved.

Pastors and church admins have full editorial control over everything Sunday generates. The summary, themes, clip titles, discussion questions, and scripture references can all be edited in the dashboard before or after publishing. If the AI got something wrong, the church owns the fix.

If something is wrong, or shouldn't be public

Pastors can unpublish any study guide at any time from the sermon's dashboard page. An unpublished sermon disappears from search engines, scripture pages, sitemaps, and the church's public page within a crawl cycle.

If you spot something wrong on a public study guide and aren't sure who to contact, reach us at support@sunday.study and we'll route it to the church, or unpublish it ourselves while we do.

What we do not do

We do not publish on our own. Sunday is tooling for churches to publish their own sermons. The church is always the publisher; nothing goes public until they publish it themselves.
We do not train models on sermon audio.
We do not write new theology, new doctrine, or new interpretations. AI-generated content is scaffolding around what the pastor preached, never a replacement for it.