If you haven’t noticed yet, pastor, the internet is spawning new generative AI-based services for preachers and teachers by the minute. Sermon prep. Outline help. Probably some voice tool to actually preach for you. Like all things AI, opinions, shall we say, vary. To get a sense, we asked three pastors “Would you use ChatGPT for sermon prep?”
I looked at ChatGPT right after it came out and fooled around with it for different applications. I was surprised how orthodox and creedal it was.
But in terms of sermon prep, no I haven’t used it. Even when I gave it a couple of small 250-word prompts for newsletter intros, it was stilted and stale. It lacked depth and ‘voice’ so I quickly realized that if I was going to use it, I would end up spending more time putting myself into whatever I asked it to write than it takes to actually write it.
— Jonathan French is rector at St. Marks Church in Geneva, Illinois.
Yes. I believe it can serve as a great tool to help generate additional ideas in the sermon-prep process.
— Artie Lindsey is pastor of spiritual formation at Tabernacle Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I would never use ChatGPT, or any other AI tool for that matter, to develop my sermon outline or manuscript. Sermon prep is not about the content but the encounter of the preacher with the Word. He preaches from meeting the Lord in that space and hearing from him. That extended time with the Spirit and its forming the preacher is what is primarily brought to the people.
ChatGPT can be a helpful resource for researching non-biblical information such as historical narratives and summaries, book and film summaries and the like. I once used both ChatGPT and Wikipedia to provide a character and plot summary of Moby Dick for an illustration I was creating. That’s like a research assistant, which many pastors use.