There seems to be a lot of discussion about whether or not Christians should make use of AI in sermon and service preparation. Some people have expressed fear that allowing AI to take over could be dangerous. I have no worries on that score. See my article here.
In fact, to be clear, I’m very positive about use of technology, I’m a technophile having worked prior to church work in the electronics and avionics industry, my focus being on implementing IT and business systems. Tech can certainly be helpful and I’ll come onto that shortly.
The reason, I’m not about to start using AI for sermon preparation is quite simple. I can’t see the use of it. When it comes to the kind of skills and gifting needed in that area, it just isn’t that good. It’s fairly obvious when something has been written by computer. You end up with something pretty bland because essentially what it is doing is not creating but synthesising. As I mentioned before, AI isn’t really intelligence in the same way that human intelligence is. The computer isn’t really doing the thinking, feeling and creating. It’s generating the thoughts and feelings of its creators and of the knowledge they had access to and fed into their databases.
Some people have suggested that AI can help in the synthesising and summarising aspects of sermon and study presentation. However, I’m sceptical here too. First, because I worry that if we see it as helpful here then we may well have missed the whole point of sermon preparation. I don’t go to ChatGPT to do the preparation for the same reason that I don’t go straight to the commentaries and the same reason that I don’t collect sermon illustrations from the internet or those little books of quotes that predated google.
You see, sermon preparation is first of all about the preaching taking time to prayerfully engage with the text of Scripture, to see what it says, understand its meaning and hear what God is saying to your own specific church congregation through that text. This means that their job is not to synthesise the words of others but to prioritise hearing God through Scripture and preparing to communicate that message.
My friend Steve Kneale makes a case for AI tools helping us to summarise our messages here but I’m still not convinced. I’d still argue that this is something a good preacher should be able to do well for themselves. Indeed, if you cannot summarise your message in one or two sentences then you are not yet ready to preach it. If AI has done the summarising for you then you are still not ready to preach it.
There is one area where technology might help us and that is in analysis. If you are wanting to look ahead and plan a healthy teaching programme going forward, then you may want to look back and check whether there are any gaps or deficiencies in terms of where you’ve placed the emphasis doctrinally and pastorally (application). Analytical tools that can cover written scripts and audio recordings may well help you to look back at what you’ve been doing over a few years to help you plan forward over the next year or so.
Faithroots 