Real Preachers Don't Need AI
The danger of shaping Christians from the Cloud
The other day I received an email from a ministry resource promising to help me regain time for fruitful pastoral engagement by utilizing AI to help write my sermons. I am busy, pastoral ministry is challenging and sermons take time.
It was tempting.
To scream profanity, that is.
Ok, it wasn’t really.
But I still didn’t. Instead, I shook my head, deleted the email, and thought, “The day I use AI to write a sermon is the day I’m hanging it up, and if I were a church member who discovered that my pastor used AI to write their sermons, I would be throwing up the deuces and heading somewhere else.”
That’s because real preachers—and really, pastors more generally—don’t need AI to get it done.
Of course, some important caveats are in order. I am not condemning the use of AI as a research tool. After all, ChatGPT is what Ask Jeeves always yearned to be. It’s very helpful to ask ChatGPT what you might otherwise type into Google to remember that date of this, the name of that or the source of a quotation. It’s far more powerful than a search engine despite being far from perfect.
Fine.
Further, AI likely has some good uses in ministry more broadly. It’s great at checking for errors of spelling and grammar in written content. It can summarize shows, movies, and books that pastors don’t have time to watch or read (and in some cases, shouldn’t). AI can even distill a nice outline from a piece of content, and so on.
Fine.
But what no pastor should be using AI to do is write a sermon manuscript (or extended outline, or whatever). Richard Hanania recently wrote in the Boston Globe that having AI write content for people isn’t necessarily bad and may be positively good. He argues that a lot of people have great ideas but are just bad at writing. AI helps bridge the gap so the best ideas aren’t sidelined simply because the folks who have them can’t put together a paragraph.
Maybe in some cases that observation holds weight. But if a pastor finds themselves unable to give verbal expression to their exposition and application of the text of Scripture, they don’t really have the ability to teach and, therefore, need to go do something else (1 Tim. 3:2).
Why? There are multiple reasons. Three stand out.
AI Doesn’t Know Your People
No matter what prompt you feed AI, it really cannot handle the diversity of listeners in your congregation. Linda’s grief. John’s anger. Tim’s failing marriage. Sarah’s abusive father. Ian’s 80-hour workweeks. John’s promotion. Suzanne’s wayward children. And on and on.
AI knows facts and probabilities, but it isn’t a person, and it certainly doesn’t know the person sitting in the front row on Sunday (or Wednesday night, as the case may be). Sure, a pastor shouldn’t be crafting sermons as a slave to what this or that person may think, but they should preach a sermon with their congregation (or sometimes, audience) in mind. Sermons crafted with a generic audience in mind often feel just that—generic, plug-and-play, tone-deaf.
In other words, AI threatens one of the greatest gifts a pastor can give his congregation: preaching like a shepherd who is attuned to his own sheep as much as he is attuned to God’s Word.
AI Makes You Lazy
Writing is hard. Good writing is harder. I’m an above-average writer, but I’m not great and probably never will be. Having said that, writing a sermon—or a Substack piece—is an opportunity to earn it in the dirt. The hard work of crafting a message that faithfully delivers a text with conviction has a lot to commend it beyond simply connecting with your audience.
Writing sermons forces you to clarify your own thoughts and positions and demands that you be able to actually articulate the ideas in your head. As they say, if it’s mist in the pulpit, it’s fog in the pews.
Writing sermons is also an occasion for fantastic meditation on the text of Scripture. Further, it allows an opportunity for prayerful reflection and personal application of God's word spread over multiple hours (and often, days) that few other opportunities can match. My view is that pastors should enjoy the sermon preparation process to a degree that rivals or is equal to their enjoyment of the delivery process. When a pastor intimates that the pulpit thrills but the study bores, I begin to worry.
What an edifying honor it is to pore over Scripture, prayerfully hoping to honor God’s Word in the presence of the congregation. When AI takes over sermon production, all of this disappears. Not only do AI-written sermons represent the pinnacle of laziness, they also rob pastors of the spiritual formation wrapped up in the process itself. Pastors using AI to write sermons do so because writing good sermons is hard, and AI can probably write something that sounds better than they could come up with anyway. But they do so at tremendous cost and eventually, the lazy and empty fruit of having sermons written by a network of servers will sink their ministry.
AI Isn’t You
Before we heard talk of pastors using AI to write their sermons, it was pastors getting caught plagiarizing entire sermons in the hopes that their congregations were insular enough that their deceit would never be discovered.
And one day they discovered that someone in their congregation also listened to John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul.
Whoops.
I pastor multiple people who have this story as a part of their background in church. One of the ways these pastors were caught was the discrepancy between the voice and style of the person they were plagiarizing and their own. With AI it’s worse.
Sure, a pastor can ask AI to compose something in the style and theology of D.A. Carson, as John Piper recently demonstrated. But the problem is they can’t ask AI to compose a sermon in their style and theology because odds are they aren’t known well enough for AI to even get off the ground with the project. I asked ChatGPT if it could write a sermon based on “Tyler Krug’s theology and style” and after providing an admittedly accurate description of my style from whatever sources it analyzes, it “confessed” that the only way it could write such a sermon was by having me upload multiple sermon transcripts to then clone (or something close to it). In other words, someone who hasn’t written their own sermons wouldn’t even have a place to start.
But more to the point, a pastor trying to have AI write a sermon in the style and voice of some superstar preacher or theologian is, eventually, going to be found out. Maybe people will grow suspicious of their vocabulary. Perhaps the format will give things away. Maybe no one will believe that they actually read Goethe. Maybe the application will sound a little bit too insightful. Maybe it will sound polished but out of touch with the congregation. But one way or another, the pastor who delivers cloud-forged sermons will eventually be exposed as someone who has donned the verbal, rhetorical, and theological equivalent of a Halloween costume.
AI is a powerful tool that has much to commend it. But pastors using it to write their sermons will—regardless of intention or justification—be outsourcing their God-given responsibility to a server in a data center and in so doing, will neglect both their flock and their own spiritual development.
May it not be so in our churches.