Albert N. Martin Sermon Archive
A 46-year preaching ministry given a permanent home: 2,967 sermons transcribed, understood and made searchable with AI.
- Client
- Albert N. Martin Sermon Archive · in honor of Pastor Martin, 1934–2026
- Location
- Montville, New Jersey
- What we built
- AI archival · full-stack build · preservation
- Stack
- Astro 6 · Whisper · Gemini · pgvector
A home for a life’s work
Pastor Albert N. Martin preached at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey, for forty-six years. When he passed away in April 2026, nearly three thousand sermons existed only as audio: no transcripts, no index, no way to find a sentence without listening from the beginning.
The work had two callings: a worthy, permanent home, because this archive is a memorial as much as a library, and access, turning more than 2,500 hours of the spoken word into something a person can search, read and share.
“Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory.”
- 2,967 sermons preserved across 225 series
- 46 years of ministry one pulpit, one man
- 26,452 illustrations indexed stories, quotes, analogies
Source: the live archive and its source project, September 2026.
From a phrase to his voice
Most sermon sites let you search titles. This one searches every word he preached, and every result leads back to the moment he said it. Choose a phrase to search.
Matched in a sermon transcript
- Transcript · Play from 67:18 Puritan Evangelism “When I have shot and spent all my gospel bullets and have none left and little effect seems to be made upon my hearers, I then put myself in the gun and shoot myself at them.”
Matched in a sermon transcript
- Transcript · Play from 48:49 Puritan Evangelism “Never think you can convert yourself. If you would ever be savingly converted, you must despair of doing it in your own strength. It is a resurrection from the dead, a new creation, a work of absolute omnipotence.”
125 sermons contain this phrase
- Matthew 28:16–20 Missionary Commissioning Service for Steve Hofmaier …There are those who oppose the gospel. But we fear God rather than men. And we know that there is nothing too difficult for him…
- Ephesians 2:11–22 No Crisis Experience Commanded #7 From the series Principles of Christian Living
Illustration of the archive’s search; the results and screens are from the live archive.
Teaching a machine to listen
We ran the whole corpus through Whisper, a speech-recognition model, so every paragraph has a timestamp; that is what makes each line click-to-play. Then Google Gemini read every sermon and pulled out its structure: summary, topics, the passages it expounds, an outline, application points and every illustration he used. That single step created the archive’s 26,452-strong Illustrations Library.
Ask the Archive, held back
We also built a research tool that answers a plain-language question entirely in the preacher’s own verbatim words, each quote linked to its audio. An archive of a real person’s theology can’t afford an AI that paraphrases, so the rules are strict:
- Verbatim only. Every quoted block must be an exact substring of one real transcript paragraph.
- Curator, not speaker. The AI may only write short bridges between quotes; a linter rejects any doctrinal wording it wasn’t given.
- Care rails. A keyword filter routes a person in crisis to a gentle care response, even if the AI is offline.
It is built and ready to switch on.
Built to outlive us
The archive lives at the church’s own domain and depends on no single company staying alive. Audio sits on independent storage behind its own hostname. The database backs up nightly, the audio replicates weekly to a second bucket, and a full restore was rehearsed end to end: 338,688 paragraphs recovered from a real backup in about 19 minutes. It scores 100 for Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO in Lighthouse, and its word search keeps working even if the server is offline.
For engineersTranscription, enrichment, search and the player
Transcription. faster-whisper with
whisper-large-v3 (float16, beam 5, VAD) across 12+ rented GPU instances,
sharded by modulo with a mop-up pass. Segments were regrouped into paragraphs on a
1.5s+ pause, four sentences or 45 seconds. About $20 of compute for the corpus.
Enrichment. gemini-2.5-flash (temperature 0.1, strict
JSON) returned summary, 5–12 topics from a 180-theme vocabulary, classified Scripture
references, an outline with paragraph ranges, illustrations, verbatim key quotes and
application points. Each carries a paragraphIndex, the hinge for
click-to-play. References were checked against 66-book canonical data and quotes
against the transcript. About $50.
Search. Pagefind for static full-text search; Fuse.js for faceted filtering; for Ask, 338,688 paragraphs embedded as 768-dimension vectors in PostgreSQL + pgvector (HNSW), fused with a FlexSearch keyword index by Reciprocal Rank Fusion.
Site. Astro 6 pre-renders 8,297 pages, with Preact islands only where needed. The audio player keeps its state in Nanostores so it survives navigation, and uses the Media Session API for lock-screen controls. Hetzner and Caddy, Cloudflare R2 for audio, Doppler for secrets.
We take something hard, a huge, messy, important archive, and use AI with real craft and real restraint to make it useful, beautiful and built to last.