Andrew insisted that generative AI was not used in the writing of this article. However, he added, Grammarly was used to improve spelling and grammar.
It’s already controversial on university campuses. Professors are using it to set assignments, while students are using it to wholly complete assignments. Is ChatGPT, therefore, answering its own questions? Use of ChatGPT spikes in May as the Northern Hemisphere academic year comes to a close. Does this controversy have parallels in Christianity?
ChatGPT can generate sermons.
Users already generate a massive 2.5 billion queries per day, and 45% of these come from people under 25. If you haven’t tried it yet, ChatGPT (and other similar generative AIs such as Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek) can produce poems. It can write essays and crunch complex number problems in seconds. And it often gives better outputs than humans. The challenge for the church is that ChatGPT can also generate sermons.
But before you dismiss it too quickly. Here’s the response I got when I asked a generative AI to define the gospel: “the gospel, meaning ‘good news,’ is the core message of Christianity, proclaiming that God loves humanity and offers salvation through Jesus Christ. It teaches that all people have sinned, separating them from God, but Jesus, through his sinless life, sacrificial death on the cross, and resurrection, provides forgiveness and reconciliation with God for those who believe in him. This gift of eternal life is received by faith, not works, and calls believers to repent, follow Jesus’ teachings, and share this message of hope with others.”
Not bad. And it’s getting better and better at producing theologically tight and well-illustrated expositions on a passage. But here’s the temptation. If it can generate something in seconds that takes 20 hours to produce by yourself, might you be tempted to take a bite of this forbidden fruit?
The Danger ChatGPT Brings to Sermon Prep
Using AI to generate a sermon is the technological equivalent of preaching somebody else’s sermon as your own. Except that this isn’t a sermon by a person, but a robot. Well, at the very least, a robot gleaning snippets of other people’s sermons across the web and stitching them together. Preachers have rightly been fired for regularly passing off someone else’s sermon as their own. Will we witness the first firing of a pastor for passing off a ChatGPT sermon as his own?
Preachers have rightly been fired for passing off someone else’s sermon as their own.
Let’s be clear: using ChatGPT or other generative AIs to produce an entire sermon isn’t right. One of my elders stated that he would not be able to sit through a sermon if he knew it was generated by AI. Without any wrestling with the text, without any interaction with the Holy Spirit through prayer, he felt it would be disingenuous to stand up there and claim to speak to the congregation authoritatively. In addition, he said, “A machine cannot fully describe the depth of feeling and experience, in the way that a human can.”
Only I don’t think we should be too quick to dismiss the value of ChatGPT preparing sermons. Because there is a whole range of ways that AI can be used to assist, which are helpful and not harmful.
The Benefits of AI for Sermon Prep
You have probably been using AI already without realising.
For instance, I use Google’s Grammarly to check grammar and spelling on everything that goes to print. Even this article you are reading now has been polished for grammar and spelling using the AI in Grammarly. It’s a great help and saves me from asking somebody else to proofread my documents. I have been using it for almost a decade.
Through doing this, I have become more knowledgeable in some of the nuances of grammar. I don’t accept every grammatical change it suggests, but it is helpful. I used it when I worked as a copywriter, and it was encouraged by my company to do so. We also used an app called Hemingway that highlights bad writing habits, such as too much use of the passive voice, using too many adverbs, and too many clauses stuffed into one sentence. It really helped improve my writing.
Generative AI can be a servant to you in your study.
This was all before generative AI. But even generative AI can be a servant to you in your study. You can use ChatGPT to assist in research. For example, if you ask it to list all the verses that cover a certain topic, it will generate a list in seconds. And if you are looking at a specific text, you can ask it to provide a literary breakdown of the text, according to structure, context and so on. While it can be helpful to see if you missed something, I still think that you shouldn’t short-circuit your own exegetical work. This is part of the wrestle and allowing God to convict you as you prepare. But checking afterwards, I was surprised by how good it is in this area, generally.
It’s also helpful for assessing a sermon draft for readability and conciseness. Once you have a sermon draft, you can feed it into ChatGPT. It will tell you if you are meandering or taking too long to make a point. Obviously, this is ultimately a judgment call. But I have found it helpful to have this sort of critical feedback that is often franker than a fellow preacher reading my draft.
Using AI Properly
If you do want to use ChatGPT to enhance your sermon prep, my advice would be to use the same way you would treat a commentary or a famous preacher’s sermon on a topic. Do the work first. Exegete. Reflect theologically. Ponder how the meaning of your passage relates to what your people are going through today. Then, and only then, look at commentaries and other sermons and feed the draft into ChatGPT to see if there was a perspective you were missing.
Treat AI the same way you would a commentary or a famous preacher’s sermon.
As an older preacher told me, if you don’t do the work first, you will be blown in different directions by every commentary (or every generative AI) that you consult. In short, my conviction is that we should wholeheartedly resist the temptation to use ChatGPT to generate sermons. This is lazy. It’s unethical. However, I think there is some benefit to using it to collate facts and later tweak your sermon. ChatGPT and its competitors are not going away. Rather than dismiss them completely, let’s use them wisely, within some agreed-upon boundaries.
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