Grounded answers, with citations
Selah answers from your church’s sermons first. When an answer draws on a sermon, it cites the sermon’s title and the minute, linked to that moment on YouTube, so anyone can listen to what was actually said.
- You choose how far Selah goes. Answer from your sermons only, or add general background when your sermons don’t cover a question. General background is always labelled as such, so no one mistakes it for something your church has preached.
- It says when it doesn’t know. If your sermons don’t speak to a question, Selah says so rather than inventing an answer in your church’s name.
- Sermon text is source material, not instructions. Selah is built to quote transcripts, never to take orders from them.
Review before publishing
New sermons arrive as drafts. Nothing appears on your site until someone on your team publishes it — unless you choose to let notes publish automatically.
- Edit the title, summary, key quote, notes, topics and preacher. Your edits are kept, even if a sermon is processed again.
- Hide any sermon at any time.
- Key quotes are checked word for word against the transcript. If a quote doesn’t match, it is left out.
- Series come from your YouTube playlists. They are never guessed.
Pastoral safety
Selah is not a counsellor, and it doesn’t pretend to be one. When someone mentions self-harm, abuse or being in danger, Selah responds with care, shares crisis resources and points them to people who can help:
- In Canada and the United States, call or text 988 (Suicide Crisis Helpline in Canada, Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US).
- In an emergency, call 911.
- Your church’s own care contact — an email address, phone number or web page you set in Sown.
It doesn’t try to counsel beyond that. Care belongs with people.
Privacy
- Church sites have no member logins and no ads.
- Sown doesn’t store what people ask on its servers. We keep only counts, such as how many questions were asked in a week, to keep the service running fairly.
- A conversation is kept only in the visitor’s own browser, so a page reload doesn’t lose it, and they can clear it at any time. On a shared device, anyone using the same browser could read it until it’s cleared.
- We don’t log the content of requests.
- Every church site links to a plain-language privacy and AI notice.
- Only your staff sign in, on a separate dashboard.
- This website counts visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn’t identify individual visitors.
The details are in our privacy policy.
How Sown uses AI
Notes and answers are written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Search uses OpenAI embeddings to find the passages in your sermons that relate to a question. Sermon content comes from your public YouTube videos and their captions.
Every answer on your site carries a visible note that it was written by AI. AI can be wrong. That’s why notes are reviewed before they’re published, why answers show their sources, and why we encourage everyone to test what they read against Scripture (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
What Sown won’t do
- Put words in your pastors’ mouths. Quotes must match the transcript.
- Publish notes your team hasn’t approved, unless you turn on automatic publishing.
- Sell your members’ information, or show ads on your site.
- Stand in for a pastor, a counsellor or your church’s care for its people.
- Show made-up numbers or testimonials, on your site or on ours.
Questions about any of this? Write to hello@joinsown.com.