AI And Sermon Prep

My co-worker asked me today about using A.I. as a resource in preaching. Great question.

I did this once, and I don’t see myself doing it again, and here’s why:

When I entered a bunch of my writing into ChatGPT in April 2023 and asked it to generate a sermon about stewardship of the earth, it spewed back a nicely organized set of sentences and paragraphs that kind of sounded like me. It was certainly readable prose. But was it deliverable prose? Was it sermonic? No. Nope.

That is because Artificial Intelligence is not alive, and a sermon must come from the life force: the preacher’s living connection to their body, their life in relationship to the Holy Spirit, the ruach hakodesh, the cosmos, creation. I cannot deliver something that was not born but generated. Jesus said that thing about not feeding our children stones when they ask for bread. Stones actually have a lot more life force in them than does AI.

What do you believe about the transmission of life, hope, love and wisdom-giving energy through the generations, through the natural world, the sacred realm and through and among human beings? The way you answer that question will inform your decision to use or not use AI as a resource in your preaching. For myself, I do not want to begin with something dead and inert and have that enter my brain and creative process. It felt to me like gulping a meal of concrete. After reviewing my ChapGPT-generated sermon, it took considerable time and intention after that consumption of cement to get a sense of the blood flowing through my veins and the creative channels opening. Such a strange sensation, to feel a sense that I need to recover from ingesting inert reproduction of my own syntax and ideas.

I want to explore the fantastic potential of AI but I will not be using it as a resource for sermon preparation.

2 Replies to “AI And Sermon Prep”

  1. You’re probably right. I am typically the first to defend AI and tell people to give it a year or two for more specialized versions to emerge. I think people are way too rough on AI poetry. (Sure, when it tries to imitate Mark Twain, it sounds like a witty high school kid trying to sound like Twain–but that’s pretty good.)

    But I think that this is the last type of writing AI will get good at, at least in part because the financial incentive to make a specialized model won’t be there.

  2. I find my preaching is relational. Having me read an AI generated script, isn’t different from me reading a pre-scripted sermon prepared by another person. Both are composed without the relationship between preacher and congregation. Serviceable, but lacking that intimacy of relational preaching.

    I won’t be using such tools either for preaching. Simply because it isn’t the right match between the tool and the task.

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