Questions pastors ask

A sermon-building tool for everyone. It gives you a three-year preaching calendar: 156 messages across 40 series, through the whole sweep of the Bible: and a builder that walks you through the five COBRA moves (Connect, On-board, Bible, Response, Aspire) for each message. You answer prompt questions in your own words, and your answers assemble into a manuscript you can preach, print, or export to Word.

No, and that's the whole point. Modern Witness gives you scaffolding, not scripts: prompt questions aimed at you, key verses, core insights, and mentor-style teaching prompts. The stories are yours, the words are yours, the voice is yours. Two pastors using the same week's scaffold will preach two very different sermons, and both will sound like their own shepherd. The COBRA course shows how that works.

Sermon subscription sites hand you a finished sermon to preach. Modern Witness hands you the raw material and the right questions, and you build the sermon. The difference shows up in the pulpit: a downloaded manuscript sounds like the stranger who wrote it; a Modern Witness message sounds like you, because the stories, the wording, and the applications are yours. You're not renting sermons week to week, you're building a shelf of your own.

You're the one in the pulpit, and your conviction, tested against Scripture, is the final word, not the outline. The scaffold is a starting point and a set of suggestions from a mentor who isn't in the room; you're the shepherd who knows your people and answers for what's preached. So reword it, reframe it, lean on a different key verse, or set an angle aside entirely. And if something doesn't sit right, trust the text over the tool: read the passage for yourself and preach only what you can stand behind.

Nothing. Modern Witness is free for everyone, always. That's not a launch special; it's the promise this project is built on. Down the road there may be paid options for churches and teams, and a way for pastors who love the tool to support the work, but any preacher building messages week by week will never hit a paywall.

No. Everyone follows one shared cycle on a common calendar, so the seasonal series land where they belong, Holy Week at Easter, Emmanuel in December, no matter when you join. You simply pick up at the current week (the calendar always knows which message lands this Sunday), or browse the Library and preach any series you like.

No. The three-year journey is a guide, not a boss. The Library organizes every series with its own overview page — what it covers and where it's headed — so you can follow the calendar week by week, or jump straight to the series your church needs right now. Your progress is tracked either way.

The journey doesn't expire, it comes back around. You can start the three years again from the top: you'll be a different pastor, shepherding a church in a different season, and the same texts will preach differently in your hands. Or roam the Library and preach any series in whatever order fits where your people are. The 156 messages are a well you keep drawing from, not a track you finish and retire.

Nothing breaks. The calendar keeps showing which message lands on which Sunday, and you decide what to do: swap a week, skip one, or double up later. Occasionally a calendar year has 53 Sundays instead of 52; Modern Witness marks that extra week as an open Sunday, a built-in slot for a guest speaker, testimony night, or one-off message.

Every message includes: a fresh title and passage, a one-sentence big idea, a prompt question for each COBRA step, and a rich Bible scaffold: the context to open with, two to three movements through the text with key verses and core insights, and 15–20 teaching prompts written the way a mentor would coach you. Roughly a thousand words of raw material per message, before you write a word of your own.

Scripture quotations in the scaffolding generally follow the NIV. You preach from whatever translation you and your church use, the scaffold gives references for every key verse so you can read them in your own text.

Modern Witness is written to be gospel-centered and usable across evangelical traditions. The scaffolding teaches the text and drives to Christ; the application — how it lands in your context, your tradition, your town — comes from you. That's by design.

Yes. Your manuscripts are saved to your own account and are readable only by you, every draft is protected at the database level. Autosave means your work is stored a moment after you stop typing, and you can export a Word copy of anything you write at any time.

You do. Every word you write in Modern Witness is yours, your manuscripts belong to you, not to us. You can export any message to a Word document whenever you like, so a copy always lives on your own computer, in your own files, independent of this site. Your three years of work is never trapped here.

Yes, Modern Witness runs in the browser on any device. Draft on your laptop Tuesday, polish on your phone Thursday, and preach from your tablet Sunday: preach mode gives you a clean, large-type view of your manuscript with adjustable text size, and it keeps the screen awake while you're in the pulpit.

It grew out of its founder's Doctor of Ministry work in Biblical Studies: a conviction that pastors don't need borrowed sermons; they need a framework, a long-range vision through the Bible, and the right questions asked at the right time. COBRA and the three-year journey are that conviction, built into a tool.