As I’ve discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, AI offers incredible opportunities to assist church leaders in the ministry functions of the local church. In Part 3 I began to discuss the ethical considerations of AI use in ministry. In this final installment, I want to offer cautions and opportunities for consideration for how church leaders should (and should not) integrate AI in the sermon writing process.
AI as the Sermon Maker
Of all the many responsibilities of a pastor, few require more spiritual focus and sheer time than sermon preparation. We who declare God’s Word take seriously Paul’s challenge to preach the Word (2 Timothy 4:2). This is a great honor and a great responsibility. The weight of this can open a pastor to potential dangers when using AI.
Forty years ago, if a pastor hired an assistant to write sermons without some sort of disclosure, it would have been scandalous. In the early 2000s, more than a few pastors had difficult conversations with their elders and boards over downloading sermon outlines from the internet, sometimes even passing off other pastor’s personal anecdotes and illustrations as their own.
Yet, church leaders find themselves with a host of pressures and expectations that pastors did not have forty years ago. Today’s pastor must be one part theologian, another part leadership guru, one part visionary entrepreneur, with a dash of social media influencer. The pressures of ministry are more complex than ever before.
So there is a very real and serious temptation that exists to move one’s dependance on the Spirit and time in the Word to a few prompts with one’s preferred generative AI application. The weightiness of ministry amplifies the issue of potentially giving AI more power than it can faithfully deliver. People look to ministry leaders, not an algorithm, for a word from God. As much as AI can help in ministry, it has certain lanes in which it needs to stay.
The temptation of generative AI is to let it write entire sermons or a large portion of them. Whenever we give up the hard work of ministry to an impersonal technology we deviate from our calling. Whenever a pastor takes content from another source, whether another preacher or the algorithms of ChatGPT, the sermon becomes ceases a message from God given to the shepherd entrusted to lead God’s people. It is functionally an echo. It is yesterday’s manna. AI can multiply your ministry, but it cannot replace it.
In sermon preparation, I like to think of AI as having the role of an editor for an author. The author is the creator of the work, but the editor helps in shaping and fine tuning the content. AI can help give ideas for outlines, headings, illustrations, and more. It can analyze the sermon you’ve prepared against existing theories of change and motivation and offer suggestions. It can give feedback as to whether your language choice and exegesis are talking over peoples’ heads or is too simplistic. It can analyze your sermons, providing feedback after the fact. And a host of tools exist now that can splice your sermon video into clips for social media, rework your content for small group outlines, and even translate your sermon int other languages.
But, when used ethically, AI is not creating a sermon for you. You, in prayer and study, are the originator. But AI can assist in the ideation phase to move past writer’s block, giving ideas or fresh angles to consider. But like the author of a book, the author ultimately determines the final content. The editor is a crucial component of the process, but he or she cannot write the book for the author.
While AI use in sermon writing can be dangerous, it also can be helpful when stewarded properly. I want now to discuss a few ethical, and practical, dangers and opportunities to consider.
Dangers of AI in Sermon Writing
Danger 1: AI can take a pastor away from the crucible of sermon planning.
Anyone who has preached for any length of time understands the wrestling in prayer and in study that takes place in the sermon preparation process. While it is easy to view this as a barrier to overcome, if we dispose of it too quickly and jump to AI prompting solutions, we lose something essential. The process of wrestling through the beginning of a sermon requires that we begin the preparation journey in reliance upon the Holy Spirit. While we begin to form the sermon, the Spirit, in turn, forms us. The frustration we experience in the process humbles us. The doubt with which we wrestle forces us to confront the ever-present reality that when we step into the pulpit we do a very holy thing––a thing that shouldn’t be taken lightly. We shouldn’t run from the early stages of wrestling by attempting to bypass it with AI.
Danger 2: AI generally makes a terrible theologian.
Nuance and depth are not generally the strong suits of generative AI. In the sermon writing process we should be reminded that inasmuch as theology is a science, it is also an art. Art requires passion. It requires unction. It requires instinct. And if we outsource the exegetical process of the sermon to AI, we may find that we end up with sermons devoid of anything that resembles art.
Danger 3: AI often plays footsie with plagiarism.
AI algorithms cull from online sources, including sermons. In an overreliance on AI, you could be plagiarizing another sermon or sermons without even knowing it. The ethics around plagiarism and sermon delivery are a hot topic in itself, but nevertheless, when you pass off as yours that which God gave someone else––with or without their permission––you are stealing. Currently, generative AI possesses very few guardrails to ensure thoughts from other preachers are accurately represented and credited.
Danger 4: AI can never fully understand your church.
You know the couple seated toward the right who lost a child recently. You are aware of the cancer diagnosis of a key leader. You recognize the joy of a newly engaged couple. These and other examples represent some of the most vital aspects of ministry which AI simply cannot replicate. How we preach should, in part, be informed by those to whom we preach. AI can source statistical data about a group of people but it can never instinctively know a group of people like the pastor to whom those people have been entrusted.
But AI also presents opportunities to consider:
Opportunity 1: AI can make sermon writing more efficient.
Whether it is helping to broadly plan your church’s annual sermon series calendar, identify key resources you can use in study, and more, AI can make the process more streamlined. While it’s been popular to encourage pastors to spend a day or two of their work week solely devoted to the sermon, this can be taken to such an extreme that pastors forfeit spending time with people in an effort to prepare to preach to people. The consequence is that they wind up preaching to people they don’t know. AI can streamline some processes to give you back margin in your calendar for the task of pastoring.
Opportunity 2: AI makes a good research assistant—as long as you trust by verify!
AI can work like a research assistant giving illustrations, information from surveys, and help with alternative wording for sermon points or ideas for application you can then apply to your situation. AI can give feedback like you might get from a focus group or a sermon preparation team. It can generate preliminary outlines, titles, and more. These may be helpful and thought-provoking, and they may not be useful at all, so in every instance discernment is important.
I know of a pastor who struggled to make his main sermon points clear, brief, and memorable. He couldn’t seem to write heading less than a long sentence in length. He began asking AI to shorten his points into no more than eight words. He found 1) some ideas given fit well with his content, 2) by doing this he became better at coming up with his own shorter titles.
Opportunity 3: AI can multiply your sermon’s impact.
As noted previously, AI applications can take your sermon content and splice it for Instagram and TikTok, create discussion outlines, small group curricula, translation into other languages and more. This requires proper oversight and checks and balances, but several AI applications can make your sermon content go farther after it has been delivered in an effort to maximize its impact in provoking change.
There are several companies that do this, but the largest is Sermon Shots, which is what I use (and recommend). It gives the church (and me) complete control over their content, ensuring it aligns with their message and values.
If you use GPS on familiar routes that are often affected by traffic, a GPS can help warn you of traffic issues and offer alternatives. But you ultimately decide the route you take. GPS doesn’t drive the car, but it does assist you. Similarly, AI can provide importance assistance to ministry, but you are the arbiter of that assistance.
While we never give AI the final say in content preparation, it can assist in how we prepare that content, and even what we do with it after the fact. It can help with ideas and alternate ways of saying things, but we must remain responsible for the final content.
Like any good organization, success comes from balancing efficiency with quality. For the church, this necessarily includes a balance of disembodied automation with the personal interaction of God’s people. It requires that the preacher consider how AI can reinforce biblical priorities of what a pastor has been entrusted to do rather than erode or replace those priorities.
Practical Implementation Tips
- Always review AI-generated content before integrating it in your sermon or sharing it with your church.
- Maintain your involvement in the crucial spaces of the sermon writing process.
- Start small and expand gradually, using wisdom and discernment. You might begin with using AI for help with stewarding your sermon content after it is delivered.
- Establish clear review processes and operate in transparency.
- Regularly evaluate its impact on your ministry and your own communion with the Lord.
Remember, AI is your assistant, not your replacement. It’s there to help you serve your congregation better, not to substitute for the personal touch that makes your ministry meaningful.
Ed Stetzer uses AI every day and is a partner with Sermon Shots.
When does AI in usage in the church go to far see the final installment in this series here to learn.
