preaching-workflow

A workflow for preparing sermons and reflections in your own voice, with an AI collaborator (Claude Code) that works as a tutor, not a ghost-writer.

It gives you a staged process (devotional → exegetical → hermeneutical → homiletical → critique → final cut), a "Constitution" that refuses the ways AI-assisted preaching could go wrong, and a Critic that scores your draft on voice and theological completeness without rewriting a word of it. The point is not throughput. The point is to help you see the text — and your own voice — more clearly.

[Human note from the author: the majority of this repo is written by Claude Code with my guidance. It is written for humans but, I tend to rely on the ai coding tools to understand most of it rather than reading everything manually. The central idea here is to spend more time on reflecting and understanding, and less time on the painful parts of writing]

Why it exists

AI will happily write you a sermon. The result is fluent, generic, and not yours — and it shortcuts the very work (sitting with a text until it grabs you) that preaching is supposed to be. This workflow inverts that: the AI asks questions, holds the discipline, and scores the draft, but you write the words. Your voice is captured up front from samples of how you actually speak and write, and every stage is measured against it.

Quickstart

1. Clone this repo and open it in Claude Code (or another coding agent).
2. Say: "help me get started." Claude runs the setup-preacher onboarding skill — it asks for two or three samples of your real writing or speaking, builds your frameworks/voice-profile.md from them, and scaffolds your first reflection's brief.
3. Work the stages with Claude in tutor mode: 01-brief → 02-devotional → … → 07-final. Read the Constitution first.

That's it. No build step, no dependencies for the core workflow. (The optional Notion sync needs Python 3 + certifi — see CLAUDE.md.)

What's in here

• PREACHING-CONSTITUTION.md — supreme law: voice non-negotiables, theological frame, process discipline, the Critic's scoring instrument. Read first.
• CLAUDE.md — the operational guide: stage flow, what to read at each stage, the optional Notion sync, the onboarding gate.
• frameworks/ — the voice instrument, the 100-point voice rubric, a synthesis of Darrell Johnson's theology of preaching, blank stage templates, and an example voice profile.
• exemplars/ — one fully-fictional worked reflection through all seven stages, so you can see the method end-to-end before you run it.
• scripts/ — optional, on-demand Notion sync (treat Notion as an editing surface while the repo stays canonical).
• .claude/skills/ — the onboarding interview and the Notion-review discipline.

Make it yours

This is a template. The voice work is built to be filled with your voice — the example profile and exemplar use a fictional preacher you should replace. The theological frame draws on one particular teacher (Darrell Johnson); if you preach from a different tradition, swap the references and keep the discipline. See NOTICE.md for attribution and licensing. If you don't use Notion, you could try Google Docs or some other online collaborative tool. The idea is that, you still need a surface to write on and make comments on that an ai can sync with. Tools like claude code and codex can relatively easily build those sync tools for you, especially if you point them at this repo as an example.

Licensing (short version)

• Prose, frameworks, and docs: CC BY 4.0 — use and adapt freely, with attribution. See LICENSE-CONTENT.
• Code (scripts/): MIT — see LICENSE-CODE.

Full attribution and a disclaimer of affiliation are in NOTICE.md.