Preaching Today

What Preaching Today is

Preaching Today is a subscription website published by Christianity Today, the long-running evangelical magazine and ministry. It launched in the late 1990s as a digital extension of the print Preaching Today audio tape series, and over the last two decades it has grown into a searchable library of sermon illustrations, model sermons, audio interviews, and craft articles aimed at working preachers.

The site is built for one specific job: helping someone who has to stand up on Sunday morning and preach a passage find help that is reliable, edited, and short on filler. Everything on the platform is meant to be useful for that person at that moment — illustrations they can drop into a sermon, model sermons they can study for structure, and articles that sharpen their thinking about the craft itself.

Why working preachers prefer Preaching Today

The single biggest practical difference between Preaching Today and the bigger free sermon sites is curation. SermonCentral and Faithlife Sermons are huge — millions of files, every passage covered, every theological angle represented. That breadth is a real strength. But the cost of breadth is that the median item is, frankly, average. You spend time filtering. Preaching Today inverts that. The library is smaller because editors said no to most of what could have been included.

For anyone whose job involves producing a fresh sermon every week, that editorial filter is the value. You search for an illustration on grace, and you get a short list of vetted options instead of a hundred mixed-quality uploads. You read a model sermon, and it is from a preacher you would have wanted to study anyway. This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative — it is the difference between Saturday afternoon spent searching and Saturday afternoon spent writing.

The curated illustration library: small on purpose, useful in practice

The illustration library is the heart of the subscription. Each entry is a short piece of writing — a story, a quote, a statistic, a personal anecdote, an image from the news — tagged by topic, scripture reference, and theme. Pastors search by the passage they are preaching, the doctrine they are teaching, or the human situation they want to name (grief, marriage, doubt, generosity, suffering). Results are short lists, not endless scroll. Each illustration is sourced, so you can see where it came from and decide whether to use, adapt, or skip.

What makes the library work is not the count. It is the filter. The editorial team rejects illustrations that are clichéd, factually shaky, theologically muddled, or just tired from overuse. That means when you find an illustration on Preaching Today, you can use it with reasonable confidence that the story actually happened, that the quote is correctly attributed, and that another preacher who searched the same topic last month did not also pull the same item. It is the kind of quiet quality control that you only really appreciate after a few years of using the alternative.

Preaching-craft articles: the closest thing to ongoing seminary

Beyond the illustration database, Preaching Today publishes a steady stream of articles about the craft of preaching itself — sermon structure, narrative arc, illustration use, voice and delivery, the theology of the sermon, how to preach difficult passages, how to handle controversy from the pulpit, how to preach to a congregation in a season of grief. The articles are short enough to read in a coffee break and substantial enough to leave a mark. Some are by working pastors. Some are by homiletics professors. Some are interviews with veteran preachers reflecting on what they have learned.

For pastors who are years past seminary and not in a study cohort, this kind of writing is the closest thing to ongoing continuing education that fits inside a normal week. The voice is practical — not academic, but not shallow either. It is the thoughtful pastor’s reading list, the place you go on a Tuesday morning when you want to think about preaching itself instead of just preparing the next sermon. Over time, the cumulative effect is real: your sermons get tighter because your thinking about them does.

Model sermons from notable preachers: study how the masters do it

The third pillar is the archive of model sermons from preachers many working pastors already read or listen to. Over the years the archive has included sermons and sermon excerpts from Tim Keller, John Ortberg, Andy Stanley, Haddon Robinson, and a long bench of other figures who shaped a generation of evangelical preaching. The sermons are not just reproduced — they are usually accompanied by editorial notes, structural analysis, or interviews with the preacher about how the sermon came together.

The point of the archive is not to copy. It is to study craft the way a writer studies short stories — to see how a senior preacher opens a sermon, builds toward a turn, handles a hard text, lands an application. Junior preachers and seminarians get the most out of this section, but veterans use it too, especially when they are stuck on a passage they have preached before and want to see how someone whose work they respect approached it. It is one of the most quietly valuable things on the site.

Pricing

Where Preaching Today falls behind

No free tier. This is the most common complaint, and it is fair. SermonCentral and Faithlife Sermons both have huge free libraries; Preaching Today asks for a credit card on day one. The free preview content is enough to evaluate the editorial voice, but not enough to actually preach from. For a bivocational pastor of a small church with no budget, the price is a real barrier, even at $99 a year.

No dedicated mobile app. The site is responsive and reads fine on a phone, but there is no native iOS or Android app, no offline mode, and no integration with sermon-writing tools like Sermonary or Logos Sermon Builder. Compared to the slick mobile experiences on YouVersion or Hallow, the Preaching Today experience feels distinctly desktop-first.

Smaller catalog by design. This is the same thing as the curation strength, viewed from the other side. If you are preaching a niche passage or a specific cultural moment that Preaching Today’s editors have not yet covered, you will hit dead ends faster than you would on the bigger crowdsourced sites. Many pastors end up using Preaching Today alongside SermonCentral for exactly this reason.

Search UX shows its age. The site has been refreshed over the years, but the underlying database feels like a mature 2010s web app rather than a modern AI-search experience. Filters work, tagging works, results are clean — but you cannot ask a question in natural language and get a synthesized answer the way you can on a tool like Pulpit AI. That gap will probably close eventually. It is open today.

Editorial voice is mainstream evangelical Protestant. The illustrations, model sermons, and craft articles reflect that lane — broadly evangelical, broadly cross-tradition within Protestantism, occasionally Reformed but not narrowly so. Readers from outside that lane — Catholic, Orthodox, Latter-day Saint, mainline-liberal — will find some of the material useful and some of it shaped by assumptions they do not share. That is not a criticism, just a description.

Preaching Today vs. SermonCentral vs. Faithlife Sermons

These are the three sites a working pastor most often weighs against each other, and they really do solve different problems. SermonCentral is the giant — millions of free sermons, illustrations, and outlines, all crowdsourced from users, organized by passage and topic, with optional paid PRO tiers for extras. The strength is breadth. Every passage is covered, often many times over. The weakness is the same — the median sermon is uneven, attributions can be loose, and the quality bar is whatever the uploader brought to it.

Faithlife Sermons sits in the middle. It is free, it integrates tightly with Logos Bible Software (also published by Faithlife), and it leans heavily on shared user content with some editorial layering. For pastors already inside the Logos ecosystem, the integration is the real draw — your sermon notes, your scripture passages, and your library all live in adjacent windows. The trade is that the search and discovery experience can feel like it is built for Logos users first and general preachers second.

Different strengths. SermonCentral is broader (every passage, every angle, free, uneven). Faithlife Sermons is better for Logos users specifically. Preaching Today is the thoughtful preacher’s subscription — smaller, curated, edited, with a real archive of model sermons and a steady stream of craft articles. Many pastors end up using two of these together — Preaching Today for the quality floor and one of the free sites for sheer breadth.

Alternatives to Preaching Today