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Sermon Briefings

Sunday comes every week, and preparation time is always shorter than you'd like. ThAD's sermon briefing pulls together everything you need in one request — the readings, what you've preached before on those passages, and ideas for what you haven't covered yet. It's like having a colleague who did all the background research before you sat down to write.

Just ask:

  • "Give me my Sunday briefing."
  • "What are the readings for this week?"
  • "Help me prepare for Sunday."

A briefing includes

  • Liturgical season and context
  • This week's lectionary readings
  • Your past sermons on these readings
  • Topics you haven't covered before — grounded in current events and pastoral concerns from the news
  • Preaching ideas that connect the readings

For the richest briefings, turn on extended thinking

The current-events research in a briefing works best when the model is allowed to think more deeply:

  • On Claude: turn on extended thinking for the conversation.
  • On ChatGPT: this happens automatically with the reasoning models.

Without extended thinking, briefings tend to skip the current-events research and stick to analyzing your archive only.