Here’s a stat that should bother every pastor: the average church member forgets 60-70% of a sermon within 48 hours. Not because the message was bad. Not because they weren’t paying attention. It’s just how memory works. Sunday comes and goes, Monday takes over, and by Wednesday the sermon might as well have happened three months ago.
We knew this was a problem at our church, but we didn’t really know what to do about it. We tried emailing sermon recaps. Nobody read them. We tried posting discussion questions on social media. Maybe four people responded, and two of them were staff members. We even tried a weekly devotional email. Open rates started at 35% and dropped to 12% within two months.
The thing that finally worked wasn’t adding another communication channel. It was putting study resources right inside the sermon notes people were already looking at.
What Changed: Study Resources Attached to Each Note
The idea was simple. After someone reads through the sermon notes — which they’re already doing on Sunday — what if there was a section right below with everything they’d need to go deeper during the week? Not a separate email. Not a different app. Right there.
We started adding a Study Resources section to each week’s note in FaithNotes. It includes three or four discussion questions tied to the sermon, a short daily devotional for the week, a relevant video clip (usually 2-3 minutes), and sometimes additional Scripture passages for further reading. Small group leaders love it because they don’t have to come up with their own questions anymore — they just pull up the same note their group already has.
The AI Thing Actually Works (And I Was Skeptical)
I’ll admit I rolled my eyes when I first heard “AI-generated study questions.” Sounded like a gimmick. But here’s the reality of being a pastor or ministry leader: you’re already spending 10-15 hours on sermon prep. Writing discussion questions, devotionals, and finding supplemental resources on top of that? Some weeks it just doesn’t happen. And when it doesn’t happen, there are no study resources that week, and engagement drops.
FaithNotes added an AI feature that generates study content based on the sermon note you already uploaded. Discussion questions, devotional prompts, reflection exercises — it produces them in literally seconds. And here’s the key: they’re actually good. Not generic “what does this passage mean to you” stuff. They’re specific to your sermon’s points and Scripture references.
Our workflow now takes about 5 minutes after uploading the sermon note. We click the AI generate button, review what it produces, tweak maybe one or two questions if we want, and publish. That’s it. What used to take 45 minutes (on the weeks we actually got to it) now takes 5 minutes every single week without fail.
The Results Surprised Our Whole Staff
Within two months of adding study resources to every note, our small group leaders reported something we hadn’t seen in years: people were actually coming to group having already looked at the discussion questions. Not all of them, obviously. But enough that the conversation started differently. Instead of spending 15 minutes getting everyone up to speed on Sunday’s sermon, they could dive straight into application.
Our note views on Monday through Thursday went up 40%. That’s people coming back to the sermon note after Sunday specifically to access the study material. That number used to be basically zero. We also added a short devotional video each week — just the pastor recording a 2-minute followup on his phone — and the play rates have been wild. Over 60% of the people who open the note during the week watch the video.
The Bigger Picture
The real lesson here isn’t about technology. It’s about meeting people where they already are. Our congregation was already opening sermon notes on Sunday. The study resources are just... there when they come back. No friction, no extra login, no additional app to download.
If midweek engagement is something your church struggles with (and statistically, it probably is), I’d really encourage you to think about what you’re already doing that’s working and build on top of it. For us, that was digital sermon notes. The study hub was just the logical next step.
FaithNotes makes it stupid easy to add all of this — the questions, the devotionals, the video embeds, the additional resources — and the AI generation means you don’t need extra staff hours to pull it off. Try it free for 30 days and see if it changes your Wednesday the way it changed ours.
