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Private Homiletic Memory

Private Sermon Memory & Archive Search

Every sermon you have preached, quietly cross-referenced — searchable by Scripture, topic, illustration, and theme.

Most pastors lose sermons the moment Sunday ends. Notes go into folders. Folders become drives. Drives become forgotten. PewPad treats your archive as a living resource — every sermon indexed, every illustration retrievable, every Scripture reference cross-linked. The work you have already done becomes useful again, on every new week.

Search the way pastors actually think

PewPad's memory layer indexes every sermon's Scripture references, topics, and illustrations as structured entities. Search by passage ("every sermon I have preached on Romans 8"), by topic ("sermons on suffering"), or by illustration ("have I told the lighthouse story this year?"). Results combine literal token matches with semantic similarity, so paraphrased or themed queries still surface the right sermon.

Recency-aware illustration suggestions

While you write, the editor shows a quiet suggestions strip when an illustration in your draft echoes one you have used recently. A 14-day recency guard keeps suggestions from being noisy, and a per-session dismiss control keeps them from being annoying. The goal is not to police your preaching — it is to help you avoid the moment a member says "you told that story last month."

Scripture coverage at a glance

A coverage heatmap visualises how often you have preached each book of the Bible. Untouched books are surfaced gently. Over-covered passages are visible without judgement. Series planning becomes a conversation with your own preaching history rather than a guess.

  • Index of Scripture references, topics, and illustrations per sermon
  • Semantic similarity search (sentence-pooled embeddings)
  • Recency-aware illustration echo suggestions
  • Scripture coverage heatmap
  • Tag-based and series-based filtering
  • Memory tags surfaced in the library view
  • Auto-reindex after editor saves
  • Local-first; no archive ever uploaded

Indexed locally — your archive is yours

All embedding, entity extraction, and similarity search runs on device using Apple's NaturalLanguage framework and local sermon storage. There is no archive sitting on a PewPad server, no "sermon graph" available to anyone but you, and no third-party processor with access to spiritually sensitive content. iCloud sync, when enabled, uses your private CloudKit container.

Frequently asked

About private homiletic memory.

What does sermon memory do?

It indexes every sermon's Scripture references, topics, and illustrations into a private, searchable memory. You can find what you said about a passage, recover an illustration, or see how often you have preached a book — all on device.

Will it stop me from reusing illustrations?

It will quietly remind you. The editor shows a suggestions strip when a draft illustration echoes a recent one. A 14-day recency guard prevents noise, and you can dismiss suggestions per session.

Is the search semantic or exact-match?

Both. PewPad combines literal token-set matches with sentence-embedding cosine similarity, so paraphrased queries still surface the right sermon.

Does my archive ever leave the device?

No. Embeddings, entities, and search all live in local SwiftData. iCloud sync, if enabled, uses your private CloudKit container; PewPad does not see its contents.

Closed TestFlight · iPhone, iPad & Mac

Make every sermon you have ever preached useful again.

Join the closed TestFlight to turn your folder of past sermons into a private preaching memory.