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Sermon Prep

When One Line in Your Report Deserves a Deeper Look: A Guide to Follow-up Research

Every so often, a single line in a report stops you. A one-paragraph background note on “patronage in Romans” — and you can tell that if it were unpacked another page or two, it would reshape the whole sermon. But the report can’t linger there; it has a full passage to cover.

That’s what Follow-up Research is for. Pick up to three topics from a report you’ve already received, and we build a research report that goes deep on exactly those topics — nothing else.

When to Use It

  • A footnote that might be the key to your sermon — one paragraph in §2 background can turn out to be the door into the whole message
  • One week of a series deserves more depth than the rest — instead of requesting a whole new report for the series, dig into just that one topic
  • You need seminar- or Bible-study-grade material — a small-group leader or seminary student needs something with real scholarly footing behind it
  • A member’s question deserves a real answer — “Pastor, where did that point you made last week actually come from?” — now you have the sources

What You Get

Follow-up Research isn’t written to talk to a preacher the way a sermon-prep report is — it’s a research report in academic form, on the topics you named, and it reads that way: declarative, not conversational. It’s grounded entirely in our scholarly corpus (CC-BY, CC0, and public-domain sources), with an independent section for each topic you chose.

Length scales with how many topics you pick:

  • 1 topic: 8+ pages
  • 2 topics: 10+ pages
  • 3 topics: 12+ pages

If the available research can’t fill that floor, we dig further into the research itself rather than padding with unrelated content like sermon application — Follow-up Research is a research report, not a sermon draft.

How to Request One

  1. You’ll need a completed report to attach it to — Follow-up Research is always tied to an existing report.
  2. Go to New Request, expand “Other request types,” and check Follow-up study.
  3. List up to three topics you want to dig into — only the first field is required.
  4. You can also start a follow-up request directly from a completed report’s detail page.

Available on Premium tier and above (Premium, Platinum, Prestige).

FAQ

Can I request follow-up research on any report? Only on a report with status “completed.” Reports still in progress or ones that were rejected can’t be used as a parent.

If I list three topics, does that use three requests? No. One Follow-up Research request uses one request credit, and covers up to three topics within it.

How reliable are the sources? Everything cited is CC-BY, CC0, or public-domain scholarship. Where a direct quote is warranted, we quote the actual source; where only a subscription journal’s public abstract is available, we restate the argument (not the abstract text) and flag it as such.

A free sample is available: Follow-up Research on patronage in Romans. The next time a line in a report catches your eye and won’t let go, that’s the moment to send it to Follow-up Research.

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