About this archive

I was fifteen when my father died in February 2003, three weeks after preaching his last sermon. He was 50, and he had been preaching for over twenty years, and he kept everything he wrote.

People still tell me what his preaching meant to them, and that's why I built this. His teaching helped a lot of people while he was here and I'd like it to go on doing that. He was the senior pastor of three congregations: Lynbrook Baptist Church in Lynbrook, New York (1986 – 1993), First Baptist Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania (1993 – 1998), and Erindale Bible Chapel in Mississauga, Ontario (1999 – 2003). I've written more about his life on the front page.

The files

He wrote every sermon out in full and filed it away on a Macintosh, in whatever word processor he had at the time: MacWrite, then WriteNow, then ClarisWorks, and finally Microsoft Word. Every one of those formats died, and the files went from Mac to Mac for twenty years and eventually into the cloud, most of them losing their file extensions on the way and some of them compressed with software that no longer exists. I tried a few times to convert them and got nowhere, so they sat and gathered dust.

With LLMs I was finally able to build a pipeline that worked out each file's format from its first bytes, pushed it through software that still understands those formats and turned the result into plain text, then read every document to pull out the title, the date, the scripture text and the church he was at.

Some of the dates posed a challenge. Where he wrote one on the manuscript that is the date shown, and otherwise it came from the filename or from the file's last-saved timestamp, which is marked approximate here because a timestamp is usually the right year but rarely the right Sunday. Where the manuscript gave a clue of its own — the occasion, a piece of news he mentioned, a reference back to last week's message — I went with that instead.

What's here

546 sermons, spanning 1988 to 2003, none of them rewritten unless noted: page headers were stripped and characters the old fonts had garbled were repaired, but otherwise these are his words as he typed them, unfinished sentences and all. A small selection of personal writings sits alongside them, each one reviewed separately for privacy.

Corrections

If a date looks wrong, or a sermon is garbled, or you were there and remember it differently, I'd like to know; and if something here names you and you'd rather it didn't, tell me and I'll take it down.

Contact

You can reach me at tom@tmcknight.dev, whether that's a correction, a memory of him, or a question about the archive.

— Tom McKnight