About this index

Sermons preached at The River Church, transcribed and indexed word by word: 378 messages so far, across 2 series, 34 preachers and 9 locations — 265 hours and 2,362,896 words, from 27 Apr 2025 onwards. It grows on its own: a sermon appears here because it was transcribed and pushed, not because anybody edited a page.

The rule that governs everything here

Only what our pastors used and spoke on. Every headword in this index came out of somebody's mouth in one of our buildings. Nothing is imported — not a printed concordance, not a lexicon, not Strong's numbers, not a dictionary definition. Not for the headwords, not for the topics, and above all not for the definitions.

Where a printed concordance gives you a definition, this one gives you how our pastors defined it: the actual lines where a preacher stopped and explained a word, attributed to the preacher who said it. Where nobody defined a word, the entry tells you nobody defined it. That is a more honest answer than a borrowed dictionary line, and usually a more interesting one.

What this index covers, and what it does not

Every message in here has been transcribed from its recording. The church's archive of recordings is much larger than the part that has been transcribed — many times larger — and more are added every week, so this index is a growing slice of what has been preached rather than the whole of it.

That is why the totals below say transcribed rather than preached: they are exact counts of what is in the index, not of everything said from our pulpits. A series page is the exception, and says preached: it counts only that series' own messages, which for a finished series is all of them. A series still being preached is missing its most recent Sundays until they are transcribed, and its message count — printed beside the word count — is what tells you how many it is counting.

Nothing about this changes what any individual line says. Every quotation, count and citation on this site comes from a recording somebody actually made; the caution is only about reading a total as the church's whole output.

What the numbers are

Those last two are different numbers and the difference matters. “Words transcribed” is every word spoken from the pulpit in these 378 messages — 2,362,896 of them — counted off the recordings themselves, and it excludes the pre-service announcement, which is read by a volunteer rather than preached. “Indexed word occurrences” counts only the words that have an entry in this concordance: function words — the, and, you — are counted separately and are not in it, which is why it is much the smaller of the two. We would rather give you two numbers that each mean something exact than one that means something vague.

What is deliberately left out

• The pre-service announcement. A fixed script read by a volunteer before the sermon starts, on most recordings. It is excluded from every count, every concordance line and every search — otherwise the same paragraph would appear to have been preached hundreds of times. It is still shown on each sermon page, collapsed, so nothing is hidden and a wrong mark can be spotted.
• Unverified references. Where a reference was expected but the recording does not support it, it is never published as a citation.
• Held summaries. A sermon summary is shown only once it has passed an automatic check. 13 of 378 messages have no published summary, and those pages simply do not carry one — a summary a check refused is held text, not publishable text, so you will never see it here.
• Unconfirmed locations, as fact. 1 recordings carry a campus that was worked out from the recording rather than confirmed by a person. Those are always marked, never printed plainly.
• Function words as entries. The, and, you and about two hundred others are counted but have no entry — a concordance line for the sixty-thousandth the tells you nothing. Their counts are published separately.
• Scripture text, from the index. The ESV text is shown beside the sermon lines and never counted with them. A book of the Bible is a few thousand words; the sermons run to 265 hours of speech. Index them together and every count here would be quietly wrong, with no way for you to tell which words were preached and which were merely printed.

How a claim is backed up

Every line on this site carries its citation: the preacher, the date, and the second it was said. The timestamp is a link into that sermon's transcript, landing on the line itself. Where we hold the public page for a message, there is also a link to listen to it.

Where the words come from

The audio is transcribed automatically and every claim on this site is checked back against the transcript before it is published. The topical index is accurate but not perfect, and the definitions rather less so — which is exactly why both of them always show you the quote and the speaker rather than an assertion. If something looks wrong, you can see that it is wrong.

Spot something that does not match what was said? Tell the church office — corrections are made at the source and flow back here, not patched on the website.

Putting the search on another page

The search box on this site can be dropped into any page of theriverchurch.cc with a single script tag. The snippet is here.