Sermon study guide generator
A week of study, built from Sunday's sermon.
A sermon is forty minutes of preparation you already sat through. This turns it into something to work through during the week — passages to revisit, a check on what stayed, and steps small enough to actually take.
1 recap left · about 30–60 seconds
Four takeaways, four steps
from a real recap
This is the takeaways section from a message on the Parable of the Sower. Each one is paired with something you could do before next Sunday — the difference between a study guide that gets finished and one that gets abandoned on Tuesday.
- 01
Notice which soil you are this week
Each evening, name one moment the word landed and which soil it met — path, rocks, thorns, or good ground.
- 02
Name your thorns honestly
Write down two good things currently crowding out your time with God, and choose one to prune this week.
- 03
Cultivate root before you need it
Pick one short passage and sit with it daily, so depth is there before trouble tests it.
- 04
Trade dramatic for patient
Commit to one small, repeatable practice for a month rather than a single big spiritual push.
What you get
- 01
Takeaways
Each paired with one concrete step for the week.
- 02
Scripture
Every passage, with why the preacher turned to it.
- 03
Quiz
A few questions to see what stayed with you.
- 04
Key points
The main moves of the message, in order.
- 05
Reflection
Open questions for devotion or a group.
- 06
Transcript
The full text, when you want the exact words.
The problem a study guide is trying to solve
The gap between hearing and keeping is not a comprehension problem. Most people follow the sermon fine while it is happening. What fails is the days afterward, when nothing ever asks them to retrieve it, and by Wednesday the message has flattened into a vague impression that it was good.
That is a well-understood shape. Anything heard once and never recalled decays quickly; the thing that arrests the decay is being asked to bring it back to mind, more than once, spread out over days. A study guide is a structure for doing that on purpose instead of hoping it happens.
Which is why the guide is built around retrieval rather than restatement. The quiz is not a test of whether you were paying attention — it is the mechanism. Answering a question about the sermon three days later does more to keep it than rereading the summary twice.
What the guide contains, and how to work through it
Sunday afternoon: read the summary and the key points while the message is still fresh. This takes five minutes and does most of the work of consolidating it.
Midweek: take the quiz before rereading anything. Getting a question wrong and then finding the answer is worth considerably more than getting it right, so resist the urge to look first. Then read the scripture references in their own context — the sermon quoted them, but a passage read whole usually says more than the verse that got preached.
Toward the weekend: return to the takeaways and pick one action step. One. Four good intentions produce nothing; one small step taken produces the only evidence that any of this mattered.
For groups, for classes, and for one person
A small group can run straight off this: the summary reopens the message, the reflection questions carry the discussion, and the takeaways give everyone something to name out loud before they leave. Groups that do this tend to need less preparation from the leader, because the material is the sermon everyone already shares.
For a teacher or a class, the quiz and the scripture references are the useful half — a ready-made comprehension check and a reading list, both drawn from the message rather than from a general commentary on the passage.
And it works for one person with no group at all. Most people using this are doing exactly that: trying to make Sunday last past Monday, on their own, without adding an hour of work to a week that does not have one.
Common questions
- What do I need to start?
- A YouTube link is enough — the first recap does not need an account. If your church posts the service on YouTube, paste that. Uploading an audio or video file is part of the subscription, for recordings that never go online.
- Can I print it or share it with my group?
- Each recap lives at its own link that you can send to anyone. The page prints reasonably from a browser, and the link is the simplest way to get it to a group.
- Does the quiz have a right answer?
- Yes — the quiz is a comprehension check drawn from what the preacher actually said, and it's scored. The reflection questions are the opposite: open, with no correct answer, meant for discussion or journalling.
- Will it add scripture the sermon didn't mention?
- No. The scripture section lists the passages the preacher actually turned to, with a note on why. We don't supply cross-references the message didn't use, because a study guide that quietly adds its own theology isn't a guide to that sermon any more.
- Can I keep them?
- If you make a free account, every recap you generate is saved to a personal library you can organise. Without an account, the link still works — you just have to keep hold of it yourself.
- Is it really free?
- You can recap three sermons with a free account (the first one doesn’t even need an account). After that, SermonRecap is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Opening a recap someone shared with you is always free.
Three recaps free. Start with any sermon.