Choosing a preacher: how many of their sermons, and whether to keep the audio on your own site.
SermonIndex.net has been preserving the preaching of God’s Word since 2002. This plugin brings that archive onto your own site: nearly 40,000 audio sermons from more than 1,500 preachers, free, with nothing to sign up for.
You choose what you take. A whole preacher, a handful of sermons, or your own curated corner of the archive — the messages your church would actually put in someone’s hands.
Real pages, not embeds. Each preacher gets a page on your site, with their portrait and biography filled in for you and a space at the top for your own words. Every sermon plays on that page — title, description, scripture and topic tags, a player and a download button that live here rather than somewhere else.
Your speaker pages are yours. The introduction you write, the sermons you pick and the order you put them in are your work, and the plugin treats them that way. You edit all of it on a screen built for it, inside the SermonIndex panel — not in the post editor, which has no way of knowing that the preacher’s name and biography belong to the archive rather than to you.
And the Bible. Download any of more than a thousand complete translations to your own site and read them here, with no call to anyone else’s server once they have arrived.
Sermon pages credit the archive. Each one carries a canonical link back to SermonIndex, so search engines attribute the sermon text where it belongs while you keep the player, the download and the visitor. Nobody competes with anybody.
Keep your own copy. You can download the audio to your own site instead of streaming it. It is the recommended setting: your sermons then keep playing whatever happens to anyone else’s server, and one more copy of the archive exists in the world. Check your hosting plan first — a prolific preacher can run to several gigabytes.
What this plugin sends
Nothing about your visitors is sent to SermonIndex by this plugin. But please read the next section: in the default streaming mode your visitors’ browsers fetch audio directly from a third-party host, and that is a connection this plugin cannot make anonymous. Saving the audio to your own site removes it.
Fetching a sermon adds via=wp to the request, which says a WordPress site asked and identifies nobody.
Two optional settings, both off unless you switch them on, and nothing stops working if you leave them off:
- Include this site’s address — adds your site’s host to requests to the archive, so SermonIndex can see how far it has spread.
- Publish a list of what this site holds — creates a public page at
/wp-json/sermonindex/v1/manifestgiving your site’s address, which preachers you have added and how many sermons each has. SermonIndex reads it to see that the archive is being preserved. Anyone who knows the address can read it too.
External services
This plugin relies on services run by other people. Here is every one of them, what reaches it, and when.
1. The SermonIndex API — api.sermonindex.net
What it is for: the catalogue of preachers, the list of a preacher’s sermons, and the text of Bible translations. Without it the plugin has nothing to show.
When it is contacted: from your server, never from a visitor’s browser. When an administrator browses preachers, when an import runs, and once per chapter while a Bible downloads.
What is sent: the page being asked for, via=wp, and your server’s IP address as with any HTTP request. Your site’s address is sent only if you switch on “Include this site’s address”.
Copying permissions — Privacy policy
2. SermonIndex portraits — www.sermonindex.net
What it is for: preacher photographs.
When it is contacted: by your browser while you use the SermonIndex admin screens, once per portrait shown. Once you add a preacher the photograph is copied into your own media library, so pages on your site serve it themselves.
What is sent: your browser’s IP address, user agent and the image being requested. Nothing about your site’s visitors.
Copying permissions and privacy: as above.
3. The SermonIndex audio CDN
What it is for: playing sermons in the default “Stream from SermonIndex” mode.
When it is contacted: by your visitors’ browsers, when they press play on a sermon you have not saved locally.
What is sent: the visitor’s IP address, user agent and the file requested. If this matters to you — and under GDPR it may — choose “Keep a copy on this site” when adding a preacher, or use the Keep the audio button on a preacher’s page afterwards. The files are then served by your own server and nothing leaves it.
Copying permissions and privacy: as above.
4. Internet Archive — archive.org
What it is for: the Download button beside each sermon, and the copy this plugin fetches when you save audio to your own site. The same recordings are preserved there, and serving the large files from the Archive costs SermonIndex nothing.
When it is contacted: by your server while saving audio, and by your visitors’ browsers when they press Download on a sermon you have not saved locally.
What is sent: the IP address and user agent of whoever is downloading, and the file requested.