If your church uses Planning Center Publishing to manage your sermon library, you already have everything you need for a great sermons page on your website. The challenge most churches run into is getting that content out of Planning Center and onto their site — without rebuilding it every week by hand.
This article walks through exactly how to do that, including the fastest and most reliable method available today.
Why your sermon page matters more than you think
A church’s sermon archive is often the most-visited page on its website after the homepage. It’s where:
- Visitors go first to understand who you are, what you believe, and how your pastor communicates
- Members catch up on messages they missed
- People searching online find you — especially if your sermon titles and series names contain the kinds of phrases people actually type into Google
A sermon page that’s static, outdated, or hard to navigate sends the wrong signal. A page that’s always current, easy to browse, and loads quickly tells people that your church is alive and active. The problem is keeping it current requires someone updating it manually every week — unless you connect it directly to Planning Center.
The problem with manual sermon pages
Most churches start by building a static sermon page: embed a YouTube playlist, link to a Vimeo channel, or paste in the latest podcast episode. This works at first, but within a few months it almost always falls behind. Staff are busy. Updating the website isn’t anyone’s primary job. The sermon from three weeks ago gets posted, the one from last week doesn’t, and suddenly the page looks like the church isn’t active.
The real fix isn’t working harder on website updates — it’s eliminating the need for them.
How Planning Center Publishing works
Planning Center Publishing (sometimes called PCO Publishing or PCO Sermons) is the module inside Planning Center Online that lets you organise your sermon content into channels, series, and episodes. Each episode can include:
- A sermon title and description
- Video (linked from YouTube, Vimeo, or similar)
- Audio files
- Speaker information
- Series artwork and notes
When an episode is published in Planning Center, it becomes available via the Church Center app and website. The content lives in PCO — the question is how to get it displaying on your church’s own website, integrated with your design rather than redirecting people to a generic Church Center URL.
Option 1: Link to Church Center (the basic approach)
The simplest option is to just link your sermon page to your Church Center URL (something like yourchurch.churchcenter.com/publishing). There’s no setup required, but there are real trade-offs:
- Visitors leave your website and land on a generic Church Center page
- You have limited control over the look and feel
- There’s no way to match your church’s branding or integrate it with the rest of your site
- You lose the SEO benefit of people spending time on your website
For very small churches just getting started, this might be acceptable for a while. But most churches quickly find that sending people away from their website is the wrong move.
Option 2: Use PCO Embed (the best approach)
PCO Embed connects directly to your Planning Center Publishing account and displays your sermon content as a native part of your website — same page, same design, no redirects. Visitors can browse your series, watch video, and listen to audio without ever leaving your site.
What the sermon embed displays
The PCO Embed sermon widget pulls your Publishing content live and presents it in a clean, browsable format:
- Current and recent sermon series with series artwork
- Individual episodes with title, speaker, date, and description
- Video playback linked from your existing hosting (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
- Audio playback directly in the browser
- Series navigation so visitors can browse your archive
Because it connects live to Planning Center, the moment you publish a new episode in PCO, it appears on your website. No manual update. No separate system to maintain. The week’s sermon is just there on Monday morning.
What it looks like in practice
Subi Church in Perth, Western Australia — a busy four-service-a-weekend congregation — uses PCO Embed for their sermons page. Every weekend, their pastor preaches a new message. By connecting their website directly to Planning Center Publishing via PCO Embed, the sermons page updates automatically after each service. Visitors can watch video, listen to audio, and browse past series without leaving the church website. The page is always current without anyone on staff touching it.
How to set it up
Getting the sermon embed running takes about five minutes:
- Sign up at pcoembed.com and connect your Planning Center account using your PCO login (it uses OAuth2 — secure, one-click authorisation)
- Create a new embed in the PCO Embed dashboard and select “Sermons” (Publishing) as the content type
- Copy your embed code — it will look something like this:
<script src="https://pcoembed.com/go/js/embed.js" data-type="publishing" data-id="YOUR-UNIQUE-ID"></script>- Paste it into your website on whatever page you want the sermons to appear — your WordPress sermons page, your Squarespace media page, your Wix site, or any other platform
That’s the entire setup. From that point on, your website and Planning Center stay in sync automatically.
A note on where to put it
Most churches create a dedicated “Sermons” or “Messages” page and drop the embed there. But don’t limit your thinking to the obvious. A few creative placements worth considering:
- Your homepage — a “Latest Message” section showing just the most recent episode is a powerful signal to visitors that your church is active
- A series-specific landing page — if you’re running a topical series that you’re promoting, a dedicated page with just that series can work well for outreach campaigns
- Your “New Here?” page — letting seekers hear a representative sermon before they visit in person is one of the most effective things your website can do
Why not just embed YouTube or Vimeo directly?
Some churches skip the Planning Center connection entirely and just embed their YouTube channel or Vimeo showcase on their sermon page. It’s not a bad option, but it has limitations:
- YouTube embeds come with YouTube’s recommended content showing up after each video — including content from other churches or channels you have no control over
- Your sermon data (titles, speakers, series, descriptions) lives only on YouTube, not in a structured, searchable format on your site
- There’s no audio option — if you publish podcast audio in Planning Center, it won’t appear
- You miss the connection to the rest of your PCO data — a PCO Embed sermon widget can sit alongside your events and groups embeds, all maintained through one system
If Planning Center Publishing is where you manage your sermon library, connecting your website directly to it is simply cleaner and more consistent than running a parallel system on YouTube.
What about churches without Planning Center Publishing?
PCO Embed’s sermon embed requires Planning Center Publishing to be active on your PCO account. Publishing is available as part of Planning Center’s Church Center offering. If your church is already using Planning Center for groups, events, or people, it’s worth checking whether Publishing is included in your plan — many churches have access to it without realising it.
If you’re currently managing sermons entirely outside of Planning Center (just a YouTube channel or podcast feed with no PCO connection), PCO Embed won’t be the right fit for this particular need — but it may still be worth exploring for your groups and events pages.
Getting started
PCO Embed includes a 30-day free trial — no credit card required — so you can set up your sermon embed, see it running on your website, and confirm it’s the right fit before committing to anything.
If you’re already using Planning Center Publishing and your website’s sermon page is more than a week or two out of date, this is the fastest fix available. Five minutes of setup, and your sermons page maintains itself from that point on.
Start your free trial at pcoembed.com.