Recently, I was working as a volunteer at an event for a non-profit.  While I was there, I spent some time with a fellow volunteer who asked me what I do for a living.  I replied, quietly, that I was a pastor.  I try not to make a big show of my job outside of church to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable.  

People respond to this disclosure in any number of ways, but what I got that day was something I hadn’t experienced before.  After a few minutes of processing this new information, the man I had been speaking with shared with me a bit of NPR reporting on the use of AI by clergy.  He asked me for my opinion, and I tried to calculate how I wanted to respond.  I barely knew this man, but he presented to me the story of a fellow pastor who had essentially used A.I. to write a sermon which was delivered on Sunday–it should be noted this is a mischaracterization of the NPR report–left me wanting to, well, rage against the machine.        

A.I. is becoming more and more a part of daily life.  From my anecdotal observation, it seems to be the emerging consensus that those who don’t learn how to master A.I. now will fall out of the job market in the future.  It’s also becoming part of our conversation on climate change and the toll humans take on the environment.  And now it’s coming to roost in what is probably the West’s most ancient institution–the Church.  This article from Carey Nieuwhof, a notable leader in the day to day challenge of leading a church, offers a sense of what my industry is facing, as the capacity to think and reflect starts to require less and less organic matter.  In the Article, Nieuwhof is sure to mention that:

“Embracing A.I. fully without thinking through the theological, ethical, and existential questions A.I. poses [creates] difficulties too.  While, in our view, using A.I. for churches carefully and thoughtfully is better than ignoring it, that doesn’t mean you should do so recklessly.”  

I will put my cards on the table here: assuming the ecological issues can be overcome quickly, A.I. does have a place in the future of the church.  The day to day rhythm of ministry work includes a lot of tasks that aren’t considered ‘sacred.’  Tasks like graphic design, research, writing and proofreading official documents, and so on, are part of each week for my colleagues and I.  In many of those areas, I am happy to let A.I. do the job to save me time.  And in the future, if A.I. technology evolves to truly Sci-Fi levels, I will be happy to have a conversation about the personhood of a self-aware machine.  History is generally on the side of those who expand the definition of personhood, not constrict it.  But that’s not what this writing is about.  What it is about is facing the reality that we have reached a point where we apparently must have a conversation about pastors using current A.I. technology not just to help with their research and study, but to write all or part of their sermons.  How many pastors this applies to, I can’t say, but the simple fact that we are talking about it is proof that it is happening.  

This isn’t just a problem, it’s fundamentally wrong.  

I spend a lot of time reading the Bible.  It’s part of my job, and my personal devotional time.  Most of us are taught to read the Bible passage to passage, studying each segment and trying to discern what that particular passage means to each of us as an individual, and to all of us as a species.  In seminary, under the guidance of some truly incredible professors, I was taught to read scripture with an eye towards its historical and literary context.  Essentially, the two questions we were instructed to keep before us were (1) “How does this passage fit into the history of the people of God?” and (2) “How does this passage fit into the story of scripture?”  There are pitfalls here.  The history of the people of God is full of countless twists and turns, and to be honest, it’s up for debate just who that label should apply to, the current worshipping community, or all of God’s children the world over.  Similarly, to assert that scripture tells a single story has its problems.  There are a lot of rough edges to be sanded off, a lot of, well, ‘plot holes’ that have to be accepted.  The Bible was written over thousands of years by countless authors and editors, and even the story of its final composition is full of roads not taken, and of controversy and dissent.  But, if you look for story beats that can be traced throughout scripture, you will find a few.  To me, those through lines are:

1. That we are capable of doing both wonderful and terrible things.  
2. That God is nevertheless fundamentally on our side, and is working for our good.  
3. That this God cannot be understood, but experienced.

These last two points are ones we have lost sight of.  We have turned God into the source of our morality, or into a set of binding dogmas and doctrines.  This approach to describing God keeps us in control, and keeps God distant, safe, simple, and sterile.  In scripture, though, God is not left dissected on the philosopher’s examination table.  Instead, God confidently cuts through humanity’s story with the swagger, confidence, and mystery of a truly compelling main character.  Based on the stories scripture tells us, Jesus was associated with a similar sense of fierce charisma and authority by the people who encountered him.  Indeed, I would argue that the scriptural evidence for Jesus’ divinity is in the similarities between the way the Gospels speak of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and the way the Torah speaks of Yahweh (YHWH is a more faithful transliteration of the Hebrew).  Both are powerful.  Both are gracious and compassionate–although the bounds and nature of that grace and compassion does evolve.  Both confound and mystify everyone they encounter.  Both are clearly, dynamically, in control of the narrative.  And, most importantly, both are here.  The narrative that YHWH, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit drive, from Genesis to Matthew to Revelation is one that plays out among us and around us and in some cases within us.  To be a ‘person of the book’ is to accept that we today are living our lives somewhere between the end of Acts and the start of Revelation, and that wherever we are in that story, God is an actual presence in our lives too.  

And yet, that presence does seem to require a measure of proper training to speak about.  Either that, or I should just retire now.  Scripture affirms consistently and continually that the God who is an actual presence in our lives works through us to accomplish specific tasks in the world, including the task of leading God’s people in their spiritual journeys.  These people have gone by various titles, including “Priest,” “Prophet,” “Apostle,” and “Pastor.”  Whatever the title, what sets these people apart is not first and foremost the training they receive, but their calling from God to serve and lead the faithful in their spiritual journeys.  To put it another way, one of the ways that God takes the side of humanity is by appointing each of us to specific tasks that, when completed, will make the lives of our fellow human beings better.  One of those tasks is the task of leading faith communities.  And within that larger task is the task of preaching.  

What is a sermon?  A sermon has many of the characteristics of a speech, but the term speech seems too broad.  Sermons should be primarily speech about God, but in that case, what is the difference between preaching, and reading scripture out loud, or reading from a book of theology (or perhaps a blog post written by an overzealous United Methodist pastor)?  A sermon becomes a sermon only when it is delivered by a pastor to the people they have been called by God to lead.  Preaching is the pastor’s sacred task of expressing–by appeals to scripture, tradition, reason, and experience–the nature of God’s will for and activity in the lives of the people for whom they have been called to care.  There is no such thing, then, as an objectively good sermon.  All preaching can only be judged by the extent to which it gave the people who heard it what God has decreed they needed to hear.  There is no empirical way to measure whether this effort is a success or a failure each week.  But, perhaps we can say this objectively: good preaching can only emerge out of a sense of deep love which the pastor feels for their people.  In these circumstances, in which the pastor’s love is an extension of God’s love, the congregation is more likely to hear what God really wants to say.  

Sure, an A.I. can write, and it might even write well.. But::

Does ChatGPT love?

Does A.I., in its current state of development, feel a sense of commitment to a specific person or group of people?

Can A.I. generate a sermon based on its well of relationships, intuitions, observations, and shared experiences with a specific group of people?

In the NPR article cited above, NPR quotes a clergyperson who says that preaching is “Like a mini research paper you have to prepare every week…And some weeks…life is just a lot.”  I don’t know her, and I don’t know her story.  I applaud her for her decision to refrain from using the message A.I. provided to her as a sermon, when she could have done so and no one would have been the wiser.  And I agree with her that life, particularly this life, can be a lot.  The paradigmatic example of a Christian leader–Jesus–was abandoned by his followers and crucified by the people he came to help, and while I have been incredibly blessed by the congregations I have served, many of my colleagues are not so fortunate.  Anywhere you do it, being a pastor is a hard job, and the people who do it deserve your grace when they fall short.  This does not change the fact that certain parts of the job are inescapable.  Preaching is one such part.  A good sermon can help people endure grief and hardship, overcome anger, guilt, and shame, and find hope and courage in the harshest of circumstances.  A bad sermon can cause lasting spiritual harm, and devastate a person’s efforts to relate to God and their neighbors.  Simply put, preaching demands human care.  As another pastor asks in the article, “Does AI know the stories of your people? Do they know about the miscarriage? Do they know about the divorce? Do they know about the abuse? How can an algorithm comprehend lived human experience?”  As far as I know, the answers to his questions are no, no, no, and ‘it can’t.’ No amount of entering prompts into ChatGPT can change this situation.  

There will be a place for A.I. in the church’s future, particularly if it can continue to help pastors, staff teams, and volunteers to navigate their jobs and focus on their most important responsibilities in a more ecologically efficient way.  But until A.I. is human enough to be created in God’s image and called by God into ministry, it will be the divinely ordained task of the pastor to write a new sermon each week, and to deliver that sermon to the people they have been assigned to lead and love through thick and thin.