Hello Adrian,
I assume that when you say "shortcodes won't help me" that you have already looked at the both the [sermon_images] shortcode and [list-sermons] shortcodes on our sermon shortcode KB page and decided against both of them?
Several people have asked for a way to paginate the results of [sermon_images] or [list_sermons] and if anyone comes up with a simple solution please share. Our devs are really busy with other WPFC projects right now but if a working solution is offered we would gladly roll it into the next update.