Should I Use AI to Help Me Write Sermons?

If a pastor decided he was going to outsource his sermon prep to ChatGPT or the like, here's what I'd expect:

1. Not having put in the time to interact with the text, I'd expect him to be reading a lot verbatim, stumbling over the words, and not making much eye contact.
2. Regarding the content of the sermon, I'd expect it to be fairly banal, a repetition of what others have said, and often in a way that could be wildly inappropriate--say Catholic interpretations being inserted into a sermon given for evangelicals.
3. Every once in a while, AI generates what is known as "hallucinations", so I'd expect that periodically, you'd have a whopper of heresy unloaded on the congregation.
4. When called upon to apply the text in counseling with a member, that pastor will tend to fall flat on his face because he's never learned to think on his feet.

Now perhaps we have too many pastors who already fall into these traps by simply parroting what the big church pastor says about the matter, but the reality is that the use of AI can make the situation far worse by isolating the "pastor" from the Word of God he's supposed to be expert on.

I’d say it depends a lot on what part of the prep process you use AI for.

I think it could be great for feeding it a text and getting a list of resources to look at, neatly organized. … which Logos has done for years without calling it “AI.” But now we call every algorithm that includes some machine learning “AI.”

It could also be useful for things like “Write me a good transition sentence between these two points.”

It could also be really good for guys who have a hard time with the concept of hierarchical outlines. A lot of people struggle with that, so they have a three point sermon, for example, and point 2 doesn’t have the same organizing principle as the the other two points. Or it half overlaps with point 1 or 3, etc.

This leads to messier delivery and saps energy and focus from the message.. and makes listening more work.

So ask the AI: “Can you see any ways to improve my outline?”

If it’s smart enough, that could be great for a lot of guys.

If the preacher is a manuscript preacher rather than extemporaneous, that opens a whole new can of worms for AI usefulness but also AI ethical problems. Probably also sermon quality problems.

One thing an AI can never do for a preacher—as Bert noted—is internalize the text for you. (This is like asking someone to eat for you.) In addition it can never grip you with why the text matters, and what propels you with a drive to communicate. Nobody who isn’t you—human or software—can do that for you.

So in a lot of ways it’s the same old problem preachers had if they tried to pull a sermon from a sermon collection book. If it’s not yours at the soul level, ,it’s just not going to work, even if it’s ‘objectively’ great.

The original question asked if it was ok to use AI as a help to prepare a sermon. As Piper expanded on it, he got to the place of asking if AI could write the whole sermon. I agree with Piper’s conclusion about that.

But as a tool for research, I think AI offers a lot of potential. It sounds like Piper is himself using it somewhat like that. It’s sort of like paying an assistant to do research, then publishing the resultant book and putting your name on it. (Anyone know of folks doing that?)

There are some interesting possibilities with it. GFA has a recent podcast on this (check back a couple of weeks on it). And see our current series on it at P&D. I think it’s worth thinking about.

Here are some questions I’ve thought of:

Would it be ok to submit an outline to an AI and ask it to improve the logic?

(Sometimes when I look back at an old message, I go, “What was I thinking?”)

What about using AI to find relevant illustrations? (We’ve got an upcoming episode touching on that.)

What about using AI to summarize a pile of articles on a subject to speed up your research? The AI might be able to give relevant citations. Sometimes I try to wade through a series of journal articles and find it a tough slog, especially if it is for just a single message. The GFA podcast touches on this.

...I am reluctant to endorse AI evem for the smaller parts of sermon prep that Don and Aaron mention. If a person needs AI to help with sermon outlines, research, and such, I've got to first ask "how did this person get through freshman English/rhetoric in college?", and second "is this person really qualified to be a teaching elder, apt to teach?".

It's really a rhetoric case of something I've observed ever since I was in college; when people start to rely on calculators to perform arithmetic, they lose the ability not only do to arithmetic, but also higher mathematical functions. Same thing will apply with AI-generated text.

A final note is that AI really doesn't do well at creativity--in effect "searching outside its current sample space"--and tends to be incredibly unreliable that way. To me, that's a deal killer for the pastorate.

And I bet a lot more preachers are using some aspect of AI in sermon prep than you realize. Logos has incorporated AI into its software. I haven't found much use for that as yet, but probably a majority of pastors use Logos.

And again, listen to the GFA podcast on this. Here's the link: Gospel Fellowship Association Missions (I was on my phone posting earlier.)

Yes, there is a creative process that must take place, but like all our tools, there is a right and proper way to use them.

BTW, think about how "non-AI" computing has improved writing and sermonic preparation. You could ditch the computer entirely, go back to a pile of paper books strewn all over the desk, use only pen and ink (or a quill) and do it the old fashioned way, the way creative juices "really" flow, or you could just use the tools the Lord has provided.

I use AI only for grammar (I use Grammarly). I honestly don't care if it is good at thinking. I want to do that.