BY HUNGRY JOE
CUPERTINO, CA—For the second straight week, the Preacher Junk Filter has topped the Apple App Store’s Religion category as Adventist parishioners worldwide downloaded thousands of copies of the app, which allows users to skip the verbose, pendulous, self-promoting amalgamation of random stories, jokes, and fluffy theological heft that pastors are fond of inserting at the beginning of the sermon.
The app, which incorporates the iPhone’s processing power, voice recognition, and noise-cancelling features, uses a simple trick to eliminate the junk that Adventist pastors open their sermons with.
“It was easy,” said Perry Newmore, the app’s developer. “All I had to do was to program the voice-recognition software to ignore everything an Adventist pastor says until it recognizes the phrase, ‘The title of my message is _____. Let us pray.’ That phrase invariably marks the start of the real sermon. Preceding that, the Preacher Junk Filter will emit cancelling white noise and display serene pictures of nature for congregation members to look at.”
Newmore’s inspiration for the app came after hearing pastor upon pastor begin their sermons with puffed-up, lofty stories and other pabulum that didn’t really have anything to do with the main message.
“They’d start telling some highfalutin tale, or some dramatic reenactment of an event that happened during the week, only to insert a pregnant pause, announce the title of their message, pray, and then take off in an entirely different direction. I had to do something about it,” said Newmore.
Far from resting on his success, Newmore is already hard at work on the version 2.0 of the Preacher Junk Filter. This next version will add a feature called Forced Landing, which automatically detects the natural conclusion of a sermon and ends it for the individual user.
“The preacher can circle a conclusion and false-land as many times as he or she wants, but after the first conclusion, the app will kick in, white-noise his or her voice, and offer relaxing musical selections for individual listening pleasure.”
