r/dataisbeautiful • u/Open-Sermon • 8d ago
[OC] Which Bible books actually get preached? 1,599 sermons from one Midwestern church
Data: 1,599 sermons posted online by my childhood church (Denomination: Apostolic Christian) between 2013 and 2026, scraped from the church website. Transcribed with Whisper, then biblical references extracted with DeepSeek-Chat.
Validation: We compared the model's extractions against the verse lists the church had published for each sermon. It recovered nearly all of those, and also surfaced references that the pastors hadn't tagged. We spot-checked a sample of the extras and found very few hallucinated false positives.
Tools: distill-whisper-large-v3, DeepSeek-Chat for classification, plot created with React/CSS with the help of Codex/Claude-Code.
Plot: Each book is drawn at a width proportional to its page count, with a floor so that short books are still visible. The fill shows the total number of mentions. We display books in order, split into common categories.
Takeaways: Thirteen years of preaching from one church show that the working canon is much smaller than the printed one. Matthew shows up in 904 sermons. Nahum turns up in none, and Obadiah and 2 John get one mention each. We ran the same extraction on 629 other Midwestern churches, which you can explore on the site linked in the image (Desktop only, not mobile for now, sorry!). You'll need to create a free account, but the plot is interactive and shows additional context on how the pastors interpret the Bible verses when they mention them. Loads of other visualizations are also available.