The problem
A church's YouTube channel is a pile of hour-long videos nobody can search. The member who missed a Sunday can't find "the one about Esther 4". The member who can't hear well gets nothing at all. The pastor's own archive is a scroll bar.
What it is
A page per sermon: the audio, the words scrolling with it, a tap on any paragraph to jump there, the verses cited pulled out as cards. One index over all of them with a search that reads every word ever preached and opens the hit at that second. Installable on a phone under the church's own name and icon.
Where it stands
Live for one church since September 2026, on my own hardware, the back catalog filling in a couple of recordings every night. The decision to offer it to other churches was made the night the search went live. The app is free. Donations welcome. Kingdom work, not a revenue line.
What a listener gets
On the left, a sermon page on a phone. The current paragraph is lit and the page follows the audio; scroll by hand and it politely stops following until you come back. On the right, the index: a search over titles or over the transcripts themselves, and a browse by book or series. A hit opens the sermon at the second the phrase was said.
A mockup, not a screenshot: the sermons on the live instance belong to a real church, so the titles here are invented. The shape is exact.
Why I built it
The kit started at work, before there was a church in the picture. A CEO records his meetings on a pocket recorder and wanted the agreed action items to land in his calendar without anyone typing them up. Transcription turned out to be the easy layer; the hard part was deciding who gets to say what an "agreed" item is. That design became a small tool that takes any recording or link and hands back the words with timestamps, and a mode that turns a narrated screen recording into a written procedure.
Then I pointed it at my own church's channel because I wanted to study the sermons with the verses in front of me. The first version was for me. The first night I used it on my phone produced a list of seven things that were wrong with it, all fixed by the next evening. The night the search went live, reading every word of every sermon and opening the exact second, it stopped being a personal tool. Any church with a YouTube channel could have this, and most of them have nobody to build it.
Three people are on my mind when I work on it. The member who can't hear well and has been getting nothing from the recording. The member who missed a Sunday and wants the one about Esther, not a scroll bar. And the pastor, who has been preaching for years into an archive nobody can open.
The shape, without the recipe
Four boxes. The church keeps doing what it already does. The rest happens on a machine the church controls, or on mine while we get started.
Verse references on a public build link out to a reader rather than carrying licensed Bible text. My own copy is for me; a church's copy has to be clean.
Where it stands
The first version. A link or a file in, a transcript with subtitles and timestamps out, on my own laptop.
It became the one transcription tool in my kit. A mode that turns a narrated screen recording into a written procedure moved in from a retired sibling. The meeting-to-action-items design was written for the CEO's recorder.
A night of benchmarking local engines on the new laptop, then the first sermon follow-along page: the audio, the words scrolling with it, the verses as cards.
Version two, from the list of seven things my first phone use turned up. A nightly job that picks up Sunday's recording and works through the back catalog. Hosted from the homelab.
Search across titles and every transcript went live. That night the decisions were made: offer it to churches, free, on their own hardware, with the church owning its data.
Decide where transcription runs once it is more than one church. Find the second church. Then it gets its own name.
For a church
What you get
- A page for every sermon on your channel, old and new.
- Words that scroll with the audio; tap a paragraph to jump.
- Verses cited, pulled out and tappable.
- One search across every word ever preached.
- An app icon on the phone with your name on it.
What stays yours
- The recordings. They never leave your channel.
- The transcripts. They live on your box.
- The congregation's listening. Nobody is tracked.
- The box itself, if you want to run it without me.
What it costs
- The app: nothing. Donations welcome, never required.
- The box in your office: hardware at cost, if you want one.
- The one real cost is machine time for the back catalog. Trim it to last year, let it fill in as time allows, or pay for priority.
If your church has a YouTube channel and someone who runs it, that is all it takes to start. The live instance is my own church; the plan is one more, then whoever asks. Write to j@jadedviber.com.
Also in the kit
Any recording, any link
A meeting, a voice memo, a lecture, a video link. Out comes the text, with subtitles and timestamps, on my own machine.
Screen recording to procedure
Narrate what you are doing once. The kit writes it up as a step-by-step procedure someone else can follow.
Meeting to calendar
The action items a meeting actually agreed on, extracted and placed on a calendar, with a person confirming before anything is booked.
Stack, in outline
The kit is not open source and the recipe is not on this page. What is on this page is everything a church needs to decide whether it wants one.
Built in conversation
Like everything on this site, it was designed and built through dialogue with Claude: which verse formats a preacher actually says out loud, how long a paragraph should be before it stops being readable on a phone, what to do when the audio and the words drift. The philosophy, the homelab that serves it, or what I'm building right now.