Every sermon filed under the verses it preached
Each passage is stored as a range of verses, so a search for a chapter finds every sermon that overlaps it, whoever filed it and however it was cited.
Where a citation comes from
Ranked by who put it there
- Entered by a person
- The passage typed into the weekly form, an import manifest, or the review screen. Nothing the pipeline finds overrides it.
- Named by the preacher
- A reader that follows fixed rules goes through the transcript for references said in the preacher’s own words. There’s no model in it, so if the words aren’t there, no reference is.
- Suggested by the model
- Passages the model thinks were alluded to arrive on the review screen as suggestions. None is published until someone approves it.
Every passage keeps a note of which of the three it came from, so a librarian can tell a typed reference from a found one, and a suggestion can’t become a citation without a person saying yes.
Overlap
Romans 8 finds a sermon on Romans 8:18–30
A passage is held as the first and last verse of a range, counted across the whole canon. Ask for Romans 8 and you get every sermon whose range touches it, including one on Romans 8:18–30 and one that ran from Romans 5 into chapter 8, without anybody filing either of them twice.
The same question works in three places. Your library has a scripture index, book by book, with a page for every
passage. The public API answers it at /v1/passages/Rom.8, so your own website can carry a scripture
index without building one. And every reference is checked against the book, chapter, and verse counts of the
canon before it’s stored.
Romans 814 sermons2014–2026
Mar 9, 2025Hope That WaitsRomans 8:18–30 Oct 13, 2024More Than ConquerorsRomans 8:31–39 Jan 21, 2024From Adam to ChristRomans 5:12–8:4And 11 more, back to March 2014
An example library’s answer, from the church Figure 1 draws below. The church and its sermons are invented.
The index, drawn
The same church’s whole archive, chapter by chapter
Figure 1
563 sermons, 396 of 1,189 chapters preached. Romans 8 is the most preached, 14 times.
- Not yet
- Once
- 2–4
- 5–9
- 10 or more
Old Testament, 929 chapters
New Testament, 260 chapters
Twelve years of Sundays at one church, one mark for each of the Bible’s 1,189 chapters. The stronger the mark, the more often it was preached. This is an example archive, generated for this page from the way churches preach: series through books, and the same passages every Advent and Easter.
Read the figure as a list
- Romans 8, 14 sermons
- Luke 2, 8 sermons
- Acts 2, 8 sermons
- Isaiah 53, 7 sermons
- Matthew 1, 6 sermons
- Matthew 7, 5 sermons
- Luke 1, 5 sermons
- Luke 24, 5 sermons
- John 20, 5 sermons
- Romans 7, 5 sermons
- Romans 13, 5 sermons
- Revelation 2, 5 sermons
No verse text
It works the same with any translation
There’s no Bible text anywhere in the system, not one verse. What we hold is reference data: which books there are, and how many chapters and verses each one has.
So two churches reading from different translations get the same citations, the same index, and the same API, with no text to license, and nothing to set: the product never asks which translation you read from.
A stored passage
- Reference
- A range of verses
- Source
- Entered, named, or suggested
- Primary
- Whether it’s the sermon’s main text
- Text
- None, from any translation
Tell us about your church
Tell us how your archive is filed today, and we’ll say how its passages will come over.