Born in a choir loft in Lithia Springs, Georgia
Pulpit Bingo is a sermon prediction game built on the Revised Common Lectionary — born from one churchgoer's experiment to see if a preacher's patterns could be mapped, scored, and turned into something that makes you actually listen.
Play This Sunday →Every preacher has patterns. Not bad patterns — human patterns. A favorite illustration. A go-to theologian for gravitas. A story about their kids that always surfaces during Lent. A way of landing a closing prayer you could set your watch by.
One could call this the "homiletical fingerprint" — the unique, unconscious signature every preacher leaves on a sermon. We all have one. Nobody can help it.
So in early 2026, I ran an experiment. I fed twelve sermon transcripts from my church into an AI and asked it a simple question: given this Sunday's assigned scripture — John 4, the Woman at the Well — can you predict what the pastor will preach?
The AI studied the corpus and built a full predicted sermon — structure, content, rhetorical habits, even the pastor's characteristic way of building tension. It predicted he'd focus on Jesus crossing cultural barriers, the woman's isolation at the well at midday, the living water metaphor, and a closing call to share the gospel.
Then I printed a scorecard, walked into church, and handed copies out in the choir loft.
The original experiment was pastor-specific — built around one preacher's corpus. But the insight was universal: every preacher who follows the lectionary is working from the same scripture on the same Sunday. And every passage has a predictable gravitational field — themes that pull preachers toward them, cross-references that naturally surface, theological questions the text demands.
Most mainline churches — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Catholic, and many others — follow a three-year cycle of assigned scripture readings (Years A, B, and C). Every Sunday, churches around the world are preaching from the same texts. Pulpit Bingo's predictions are rooted in those texts, not random buzzwords.
The key decision: no API calls, no live AI generation. Just careful study of each passage, an honest accounting of how sermons actually work, and a static data file that runs on any dumb web server with zero dependencies. The predictions are baked, not generated — which means they're consistent, reviewable, and don't cost a cent to serve.
Sample card for Psalm 23 — predictions change weekly based on the lectionary readings.
It's about the thing that happened in the choir loft — people leaned in.
Churches have a listening problem — not because the sermons are bad, but because passive listening is hard. Your mind wanders. Your phone buzzes. The kid next to you is folding the bulletin into a paper airplane. We've all been there.
Pulpit Bingo gives your brain something to do with the sermon besides drift. It turns passive hearing into active listening. It turns "I wonder what's for lunch" into "wait — is he about to reference Bonhoeffer? That's a Deep Cut on my card."
The people who held the first scorecards said they caught things they'd never noticed. Cross-references between the Old and New Testaments. The way the pastor circled back to an image from the opening. The moment the prayer changed direction. They listened — not despite the game, but because of it.
That's not a gag gift. That's discipleship with a sense of humor.
The current Sunday is always free. Full access to the liturgical year is less than a church potluck contribution.
Current week's card, every week. No account needed. Just show up. The Gospel is a free gift — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are always free too.
Full liturgical year access. Look ahead. Plan your predictions. Nerd out.
One code for the whole congregation. Share it in the bulletin. Make Sunday fun again.
Pulpit Bingo was built by one person in whatever margin exists between dispatching freight trains, volunteering as church IT admin, and raising a kid. There's no venture capital. No pivot to enterprise. No algorithm harvesting your data to sell you a better pew cushion.
The theology is real. The lectionary data is painstaking. The predictions are rooted in actual homiletical scholarship — not SEO-bait buzzword bingo. And the whole thing runs on a server in a home office in Georgia, because that felt right.
If it makes you listen a little harder on Sunday morning — or if it just makes you smile in the pew — then it's doing exactly what it was built to do.
Your pastor preaches like a shepherd. The game just helps you pay attention to the flock.
Curious where you land theologically? Which Pew Do You Skew? is a free companion quiz that maps your instincts across the major Christian traditions. Same spirit, different game.