Hi First name / friend,

 

Using AI for sermon and homily development has become such a problem, even the pope addressed it. My direct messages regularly harbor questions from concerned congregants, each wondering how to talk to their pastors about AI usage in sermons. Some say the sermons transformed overnight—such an obvious change from usual preaching, the only viable explanations are supernatural empowerment or artificial intelligence.

 

And this strikes the heart of it: We have traded the empowerment of the Spirit in ministry for the efficiency of AI. We aren’t interested in doing less better. We want to do more faster. And the only way to accomplish the latter is to keep pace with the prevailing “tools” offered to us.

Whenever I bring up my hesitations about AI and ministry, the response is always: “It’s a tool, like anything, it can be used for good or bad!” It’s true, AI is a tool—and as you’ll see in my ministry AI policy below, I believe it has some helpful uses, mostly within the realm of data analysis and SEO. I am not opposed to the use of AI for impersonal, administrative tasks. But calling it a “tool” as code for “morally neutral” and “usable in all settings and for all purposes” is undiscerning and irresponsible. It smacks of asking forgiveness instead of permission. 

 

When ministers write sermons, they, too, are building something. We’re building a biblical case for the topic. We’re building a message of truth and grace. Most of all, we are building up our hearers in the Spirit. This is a heavy responsibility. Teachers are accountable for how and what they teach (James 3:1). Preachers of the past reveal how the process of sermon development is vital to both the sermon and the preacher. Shortcutting this process (read: shortcutting study skill, focus, hermeneutics, and the struggle of writing) doesn’t just hollow out the sermon; it hollows out the teacher. John Wesley said this about preaching:

 

“It is no marvel that the devil does not love field preaching! Neither do I; I love a commodious room, a soft cushion, a handsome pulpit. But where is my zeal if I do not trample all these underfoot in order to save one more soul?”

Spurgeon said something similar:

“A man ought always to be good company for himself, and he ought also to be able to catechise himself; he who is not fit to be his own schoolmaster is not fit to be schoolmaster to other people. If you cannot catechise your own heart, and drill a truth into your own soul, you do not know how to teach other people. I believe the best preaching in the world is that which is done at home.”

This was said about Jonathan Edwards’s preaching process:

“You can only preach what you know, so Edwards worked to know much about God and Scripture. This was not knowledge for its own sake, but to deepen his relationship with God and to share his findings with his flock. That sharing generally took the form of extended sermons, written word-for-word, which he would quote and read to his people. He followed the pattern of preaching in his day: explanation of the text, development of the doctrine there, and an extended application. He usually prepared three, hour-long sermons each week. Around 1,200 of these works have survived.”

 

 

The “itinerant” part of my ministry has been spent mostly in evangelicalism, and it is sad to say most American pastors, teachers, and leaders aren’t looking to preachers of centuries past as a model for lasting ministry. This is a shame; the work of Wesley, Spurgeon, Edwards, Booth, Allen, and Jasper have much to teach us. There is a reason those sermons are still bearing fruit centuries after their speakers lay silent. But to most evangelicals, these works are irrelevant, out of date, and hard to read. Instead, pastors are modeling themselves after Judah Smith, Craig Groeschel, Levi Lusko, Andy Stanley, and the like—the gurus of Christian cultural engagement. I’m not saying these pastors are universally flawed; God can and does use all kinds of kinds to bring people to the truth. But I think it’s worth noting that Big Evangelicalism’s obsession with relevance and modernity, its rapacious need for content, was an onramp to its acceptance of AI.

 

Before AI was even on the scene, evangelical preachers (male and female) were already maximizing efficiency in their preaching. It’s not a big jump to have AI help you write, create, and innovate new messages when the accepted attitude among leaders is “efficiency first.” But what if the canned message isn’t what this particular congregation needs? Did you even ask the Lord His opinion? Did you pray for the people about to hear you? Did you ask the ministry team what they’ve been discipling their people into, or what these men and women have gone through in the last year? Ministry coaches will tell you to do what “makes sense” and allows you to do more, faster. Evangelical church culture is painfully corporate in this way. We come to it with good hearts and big dreams and are crushed by the magnitude of work to be done. The answer, we’re told, is to farm out our brains and hands and souls to the machine. It’s just a tool. We’ll reach more people this way.

It is more work, and slower work, to write sermons and messages the old-fashioned way. But it’s work that forms you. It’s partnership with the person of God. There is no greater joy than to struggle and study a message, then to see the uplifted faces of women (in my case) rapt with attention on the Word of God. How could I compromise their trust? How could I let a machine outline a message, then attempt to stamp it with the Spirit? In our quest to make AI morally neutral for creative pursuits, we’ve forgotten that writing and preaching are forming practices. They form our hearers. They form us. Like it or not, using AI to write, outline, and exegete spiritual work is forming us away from the image of God and toward the impersonal. In our quest to reach the many, we’ve forgotten about the one: individual souls who need truth thoughtfully stewarded, and our own soul, whose ability to live the Scriptures written about is directly affected by idolatry of efficiency.

 

To read the full article (the above is excerpted) and EWAT’s AI policy, click here:

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