Pastors are using AI to write sermons — and it’s destroying the church

AI is infiltrating the church, and most Christians have no idea.

A recent Barna study found that while only 1 in 10 pastors (12%) were comfortable using AI to write sermons, 2 in 5 (43%) believed it was OK to use AI to research and prepare for a sermon.

The study also found that 3 in 4 U.S. pastors (77%) agree that “God can work through AI,” and 58% said they “are comfortable using AI to assist in some form of communication.”

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is horrified.

“Spiritual maturity is not going to happen through telling ChatGPT, ‘Write me a three-part sermon on gratitude,’ and then reading that off to the congregation,” she comments.

“Plus, using ChatGPT or any AI to write your sermon is dishonest because everyone is assuming that that’s something that you wrote that God revealed to you through his word and through prayer,” she says. “But it’s not. It’s not revelation from God, a special revelation that we find in Scripture.”

“It is something that was summarized by a computer, and it is also taking someone else’s work. Again, all of these artificial intelligence machines are just taking ideas that have already been iterated by someone else,” she continues.

“It also bypasses the pastor’s own engagement with Scripture and the work of preparing the sermon himself. You want your pastor to be sanctified and washed in the word. You want him to be engaging with Scripture. ... You want him to be further ahead spiritually than you are,” she adds. “And that cannot happen if he is outsourcing that sanctifying act to AI.”

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