sermon-research

sermon-research is a skill for Claude Code from tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills. It costs 40 tokens per session (2,853 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research assistant for understanding a Bible passage before preaching or teaching. It covers commentary insights, historical and cultural background, original-language notes, and related Bible passages.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for researching a scripture passage, its context, possible meanings, language details, cross-references, and questions raised by the text.
Why use it?
It helps a preacher investigate the text without asking the tool to write the sermon itself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Part of the pastor-skills plugin — 15 skills shipped together

Good fit It is for researching a scripture passage, its context, possible meanings, language details, cross-references, and questions raised by the text.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills --skill sermon-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pastor-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for sermon-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for sermon-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills/sermon-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,853 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00040 $0.02853
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01426
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00571
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00285

Measured 12d ago against content hash 22e7ebca1a0e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sermon-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (generate-pdf.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/sermon-research/SKILL.md · 250 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 250 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Sermon Research Assistant

Go deeper into the text so you can preach with confidence.

Before writing: follow the pastor-foundation skill and load the church profile from ~/.claude/pastor-profile.md. If the profile file is missing, run the pastor-setup skill first.


What You Need to Provide

Give me the scripture passage you are preaching. That is the only required input. Everything else helps me go deeper, but you do not need it all to get started.

Input Required Notes
Scripture passage Yes Book, chapter, verse range (e.g., Romans 8:1-11)
Topic or angle No The lens you are preaching through, if you already have one
Series context No What the larger series is, where this week falls
Questions you are wrestling with No Interpretive questions, tension points, things you are unsure about

If all you have is a passage, that is enough. I will not ask you five follow-up questions before starting. Give me what you have and I will get to work.


Research Workflow

Step 1: Passage Context

Every passage lives somewhere. Before you can preach it well, you need to know where you are standing.

This section covers:

  • Book overview. Who wrote it, when, and to whom. The historical situation of the author.
  • Audience. What was the original community dealing with? What were they expecting, fearing, or celebrating?
  • Literary genre. Is this epistle, narrative, poetry, apocalyptic, wisdom literature? The genre shapes how the passage works and what kind of demands it makes on the reader.
  • Placement in the book. Where does this passage fall in the larger argument or story? What just happened? What comes next? Knowing the surrounding material keeps you from making the text say something the author never intended.

Length: 2-3 paragraphs. Enough to orient you, not enough to overwhelm you.


Step 2: Historical and Cultural Background

The Bible was written in specific times and places. Modern readers bring 2,000 years of cultural distance to the text without realizing it. This step closes that gap.

Read the full file on GitHub · 250 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 250 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 22e7ebca1a0e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sermon-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository tkcostello/pastor-ai-skills (52 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 2,853 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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