The Moody Church Sermon Archive: Complete Guide

Most archives on this site belong to a person. This one belongs to an address. The Moody Church in Chicago grew out of the work of D.L. Moody in the nineteenth century and has been served since by a succession of well-known preachers, which makes its archive a rare thing: a continuous record of one pulpit across more than one hundred and fifty years, with wildly different copyright status depending on which era you are reading.

What Is the Moody Church Sermon Archive?

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) began the Sunday school and mission work in Chicago that grew into the congregation now known as The Moody Church. He was a shoe salesman turned evangelist whose preaching filled halls in Britain and America, and whose sermons, being nineteenth-century, are now in the public domain and widely reprinted. Our D.L. Moody famous sermons profile covers the man and his best-known messages.

The church has occupied its landmark building on Chicago's North Avenue since the 1920s, and its pulpit has been held by a series of preachers whose names carry beyond the congregation, including R.A. Torrey, Harry Ironside, Warren Wiersbe and Erwin Lutzer, whose long tenure ended in 2016. Moody Church Media is the ministry that broadcasts and publishes the modern preaching. The nearby Moody Bible Institute, founded by Moody in the 1880s, is a separate institution with its own archives and its own broadcast arm, and the two are routinely confused.

“The Bible was not given for our information, but for our transformation.”

— D.L. Moody (1837–1899)

What's Inside the Archive

Treat this as three archives stacked on one another: the public-domain Moody material, the mid-century pulpit ministries, and the modern recorded era. The formats and the rights are different in each layer.

• D.L. Moody's own sermons, surviving as printed texts rather than recordings, and in the public domain
• Printed sermons and writings from later pulpit ministers including R.A. Torrey and Harry Ironside, much of it long out of copyright or widely reprinted
• Recorded preaching from the broadcast era, distributed by Moody Church Media
• Erwin Lutzer's substantial radio and sermon output from his decades in the pulpit
• Current services published as audio and video by the church itself

How to Access the Moody Church Archive

Which route you take depends on the era you want. The nineteenth-century material lives in public-domain libraries; the modern preaching lives with the church and its media arm.

Official site: moodychurch.org · Rights: Moody's own sermons are public domain; modern preaching is © The Moody Church

How the Moody Church's Approach Can Inspire Your Church's Archive

A pulpit that has outlasted five generations of preacher has a different set of lessons than a single-voice ministry.

For the full step-by-step playbook, read our guides on building searchable sermon archives and publishing a searchable sermon archive in 30 days.

Frequently Asked Questions

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