How to Review, Edit, and Publish Sermons from the Dashboard

When you type a query and press Search, the page ranks every sermon by a relevance score. Title matches are weighted highest, then pastor name, then tags, then verse references, then summaries, then transcript text. A sermon whose title matches "grace" will always rank above one that only mentions grace in a long transcript.

You can also pass multiple terms by separating them with commas. The search treats commas as AND — every comma-separated term must match somewhere in the sermon for it to appear in the results. "marriage, parenting" finds sermons that touch both, not sermons about either one.

Above the sermon results, three controls work together: the published filter (All, Published, Unpublished), the sort selector (Sermon Date, Date Uploaded, Title, Length), and the small arrow button that flips ascending and descending. The published filter is the one most admins set first when they are reviewing recent uploads.

Date Uploaded versus Sermon Date is worth calling out because it is easy to mix up. "Sermon Date" is the date the sermon was preached. "Date Uploaded" is when the file landed in Sermon Mind. They diverge whenever you upload an older archive sermon, and members usually expect the sermon date in the public library.

The Bulk Edit Current Results button opens a dialog with three actions: publish everything, assign a pastor, and add tags. The critical detail is the scope. It only affects the sermons currently shown by your search and filter combination, not the entire library.

If you want to publish every sermon in the library at once, clear search, clear tag filters, and set the published filter to All before opening Bulk Edit. If you want to publish just a series, filter by that series tag first. The dialog shows the current scope ("affects N results") so there is no guessing.

Each sermon card has a Publish toggle. Switching an unpublished sermon to published makes it appear on the church homepage (if the church is public) and the searchable library (for any signed-in member). It also triggers a "ready for publishing" email to every admin in the church who has that preference turned on.

That email is admin-only, controlled per user on the Users page under "Ready for Publishing emails". It is a useful safety net for small teams where one admin uploads and another reviews — but it can become noisy at scale, which is why each admin can turn it off individually.

The Share icon on each sermon card creates a sharable URL that opens a single-sermon page anyone can use, even if your church is private. The link comes with an expiration date so it does not become a permanent backdoor into the library.

Use share links when you want to pass one specific sermon to someone outside the church, without changing the visibility of the entire workspace. The link will stop working after the expiration date, and you can always create a new one.

The Delete (trash) icon on each sermon card asks for confirmation, then permanently removes the sermon record. The deletion is not just the row — it also clears the transcript and notes data, sermon tags, verse references, share links, processing records, member bookmarks, and listening progress for that sermon, and removes the stored audio file from storage.

There is no undo. If you might want the sermon back later, switch it to Unpublished instead of deleting. Unpublished sermons stay in the workspace for review but disappear from the member-facing library.