A pulpit without a context
I asked ChatGPT for a sermon. What it wrote seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
(Century illustration)
The cursor zips across the screen in the video introducing me to AI sermon tech. I watch as a preacher selects a quote from a list and then adds a “social starter” to the page. The sermon manuscript buzzes to completion, followed by offers for related products—creative engagement questions or “viral captions” for social media. The ad is fast-paced and shiny, conveying the promise of the product: to create sermons with greater impact in a fraction of the time.
Ads for AI sermon assistance appear unbidden in my inbox every couple of weeks. One company reminds me of the difficulty of the preaching task, how sermon preparation exacts hours from the preacher’s workweek. No doubt they are familiar with the adage, attributed to John Stott, that each minute of preaching requires an hour of preparation.
These entrepreneurs have noticed that pastors are busy. Who has time to devote 20 to 30 hours a week to sermon preparation? The offers to fix my time crunch are tantalizing. One website offers “preaching freedom,” while another promises to help me rake back my “most limited resource: time.” Another AI tool will let me “spend more time focusing on other aspects of ministry.” I will produce dynamic, thought-provoking, empowering, turbocharged messages and I will do it quickly, outsourcing the research and the outline to my computer.
