Welcome to the Preach360 Community! Our goal is to help you create margin for life & ministry by drafting complete, gospel-driven sermons in a single afternoon using the Preach360 Sermon Studio, which guides pastors step by step through the sermon-building process using the PPGR preaching framework. ☕️ A COMMUNITY VS A LIBRARY Preach360 is designed to be a pastoral community, not just a personal library. Real growth happens when we learn together, share wins, acknowledge challenges, and genuinely engage with one another. To encourage participation, I'm going to use the "gamification" features built into Skool's "leaderboard," not to pressure anyone, but to facilitate connection in a fun way. How to Level Up on the Board. It’s simple. Introduce yourself, ask questions, and encourage others. Engagement is our way of ensuring this remains a vibrant, supportive fellowship of pastors, rather than a quiet library. 👋 IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW ME My name is McKay Caston. Over 30 years as a pastor, author, and seminary professor, I've served churches of different sizes in urban, suburban, rural, and college-town contexts, with my last pastoral call as a church planter in Dahlonega, GA. My life mission is to help pastors preach cross-tethered sermons and live cross-tethered lives. I've been married for almost 35 years and have three adult children. When not here, I enjoy time at home and hiking the mountains of north Georgia. 🚦 Basic community "guidelines." 1. This is a safe place. 2. This is not a place for political rants. 3. Be constructive. 4. Honor confidentiality. 5. No solicitation or spam. HERE ARE YOUR NEXT STEPS ✅ Step 1: Introduce yourself in the comments section below 1. Who are you & where are you serving? (City/State/Country) 2. What is your current preaching context? (Solo pastor, church planter, staff, student?) 3. What is your biggest challenge with sermon prep right now? 4. Drop a link to your church website and/or sermons (optional).

It's always a little concerning when I cannot verify a sermon illustration (usually something purported to be historical and true) from any source other than sermons or sermon illustration sites. Early in my preaching I was not as discerning as I am now. While brainstorming with Preach360 App/Gemini, it suggested a historical illustration that I have seen before. I couldn't find any independent verification. To its (or apparently "his") credit, I asked directly and got this response: "That is a discerning question! To be completely honest with you—as one brother to another—the Waterloo Semaphore story is largely considered an apocryphal 'preacher's story.' While it's a brilliant homiletical illustration, most historians agree that news of the victory actually reached London via a human messenger (Major Henry Percy) who traveled by carriage and boat. There was no direct semaphore line across the English Channel at that time that could have transmitted a message in that specific way." Three things can be true: 1) As communicators of Truth, we should be very discerning about everything we say, including "brilliant homiletical illustrations". You shouldn't use something if you know it to be untrue. 2) We are sometimes lazy regurgitators of untrue stories, which merely causes them to spread more. 3) If you love an illustration that you know is apocryphal and want to still use it, just say at the beginning something like: "this is probably (or is) an untrue story, but it illustrates this point..." and use it. I find it hard to do that a lot, but have done it occasionally. Other approaches or thoughts?

So I got a wild idea that I am trying this week. I often work a lot on my manuscript coming out of the PPG work to get it into my voice. I went on Claude and played around with developing a prompt. Claude asked to upload 20 handcrafted sermons I've done in the past to analyze my voice and style. I've used that to help get my Preach360 manuscript way closer to what I normally do, and I'm pretty stunned with the outcome. For one thing, it was pretty interesting to have Claude analyze my voice and style and to describe it. It was very spot on. And the output is pretty uncanny after I ran it. Has anyone else played around with this?

Trying out turning old sermons into PPGR format by uploading an old audio recording worked really well. Thinking about uploading old outlines next. Has anyone done that yet?

I'd love to hear about any "wins" this past Sunday and/or "lessons learned." Even when things don't go as we'd hoped, that lesson learned can be applied next week, making what feels like a loss actually a win in the long run! - What did you experience that went well? - What do you think you'll do differently this week? - Did you try any new delivery ideas from the workshop? And remember that tomorrow is our workshop on how to plan your sermon prep week. Would love to see you there: https://www.skool.com/preach360/calendar?eid=1557f0f986cf4fd796bc2a8708747665 Yours, by grace alone, McKay