a bible lays open on top of a laptop, symbolizing the supremacy of Scripture to AI

Artificial Intelligence and Preaching

At first glance, artificial intelligence seems an appealing solution and an innovative tool for busy preachers desperately looking for help in sermon preparation. What could be the harm?

Plagiarism

The internet age has provoked a proliferation of pastoral plagiarism. Megachurch pastors and small church pastors alike have been exposed for preaching someone else’s sermons. While few defend pilfering another’s sermon wholesale, pastors nonetheless struggle with exactly where the boundaries lie. On the one hand, perspicuous preachers desire to give credit whenever they use someone else’s intellectual property, but on the other hand, diligent study often yields dozens of sources contributing to the message. How meticulous must acknowledgements be? Should pastors recognize every author who taught them something that helped them, or should they only cite authors of direct quotes? Might the sermon become so saturated with references that parishioners accuse the pastor of trying to impress them with their extensive reading?

The late Presbyterian pastor, Donald Grey Barnhouse, made a distinction between “stealing your neighbor’s roses for your own bouquet” and “using your neighbor’s roses to make your own perfume.” His analogy meant that preaching someone else’s sermon was like stealing a neighbor’s roses instead of doing the hard work and taking the time to grow them for oneself. Using a neighbor’s roses to make perfume, however, meant receiving ingredients contributed by someone else as one ingredient out of many to produce one’s own fragrance.

The temptation of using AI

Plagiarism is an intellectual crime as much as stealing a neighbor’s flowers is a physical crime. It has a perpetrator and a victim. Someone stole something that belonged to someone else. But what if there were no victim, no one whose work was robbed? What if one could simply replicate flowers from nowhere? What if a busy, overworked, underequipped pastor could deliver a truly biblical sermon that did not come from his mind, but neither did it come from anyone else’s? Would that be unethical? From whose roses did he make his perfume?

That rationale is the temptation facing pastors who use artificial intelligence to generate their sermons. They assume that, if they are not stealing from someone, then nothing wrong has happened. If delivering sermons were no more than giving a speech or imparting information, using artificial intelligence to generate the script might be acceptable. Preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, however, is not an ordinary subject, nor is it conveyed by ordinary means.

People are to proclaim the Word

First and foremost, God has ordained that people should communicate the Gospel. God could have used angels to preach, but he used people. He could have handed his Word from heaven as a completed work, but he inspired men to write it. Jesus could have revealed himself cosmically from the heavens, but he came to people. He chose, trained and sent disciples, and he commissioned them to make disciples in turn, baptizing and teaching them to observe everything that he commanded.

Something significant happens when God’s people proclaim God’s Word by God’s power. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Cor 1:21 ESV). Similarly, Paul insisted “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (2 Cor 2:4 ESV). Everything about using AI to write a sermon seems antithetical to Paul’s insistence on refusing man’s wisdom and seeking God’s power. The messenger himself, essential to God’s method of spreading the Gospel, must be saturated with God’s Word and God’s Spirit.

Be a shepherd

But if the messenger is part of God’s plan, so is the motive. Pastors are not mere speakers, but anointed shepherds. The task of leading and feeding is not mechanical, but relational. Nearly every person in every church can easily watch a better preacher on the internet than the one in the pulpit, but no one on YouTube can shepherd them, or pray with them in their distress, or weep with them beside a grave. Amazingly, people come to hear an inferior messenger because of the immediacy and the intimacy of the preaching event. Pastoral preaching is shepherding, overseeing, and providing spiritual wisdom. Those tasks cannot be done intimately by artificial intelligence, but only by those who have been called and empowered by God.

Preaching is most potent when the text and the Holy Spirit have gripped and transformed the heart of the preacher. That happens through study, meditation, rumination, application, and delivery of the Word of God. If preaching were only about imparting biblical content, churches could simply present a set of commentaries to each member and encourage them to stay home and read them. Preaching is about the gathered church experiencing the Word and the Spirit together—both pastor and church members.

The spiritual limitations of AI

In addition to spiritual reasons, the limitations of artificial intelligence are enough to prevent any pastor from relying on it to generate a sermon. I have done extensive investigation into the creative skills of several AI models, and I have yet to find one that approaches the evocative musicality of Yeats’ poetry or the nuanced observations of Joan Didion’s essays. Any honest comparison between James S. Stewart’s sermon, “The Rending of the Veil” and a sermon written by any AI model on the same subject will admit an ocean of difference between them. AI may get better, but it isn’t close yet.

AI lies and has no soul

Furthermore, AI models are not trustworthy. They frequently experience “hallucinations,” confident assertions of fact inconsistent with their training. AI models sometimes pull incorrect figures from thin air, give answers that violate stated criteria, and falsify sources, going so far as to make up journals or cite articles that do not exist. That should not be surprising if indeed they are designed to mirror human reasoning and thought. They are created in the image of their creators.

Though using AI for the building blocks of sermon research or to generate communication points is not inherently wrong, it warrants the same caveats of using any other human source. Commentaries, search engines, Wikipedia, and other tools have inherent flaws and misinformation. AI is by no means an automatic shortcut to good preaching. AI can provide information, but it has no soul.

And who wants to hear preaching without a soul? Church members deserve to hear a message that emanates from the text and through the pastor’s heart.

When Peter exhorted his fellow elders to “shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:1), he based his appeal on his own experience as “a witness of the sufferings of Christ as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed.” His ministry was rooted in his own experiences with Christ. Quoting Psalm 116:10, Paul gave the Corinthians his motive for preaching: “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak” (2 Cor 4:13). Belief—faith—is essential. The right to stand and preach the Word of God is not obtained through something that merely improves eloquence, but through a vibrant faith and a passionate witness of Christ that rooted in intimacy with him.

©2023 Hershael York. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

About The Author

Hershael York
Hershael W. York

Hershael York has served as the 11th dean of Southern Seminary’s School of Theology since 2018, and as the Victor and Louise Lester Professor of Christian Preaching since 1999. Since coming to Southern in 1997, York has authored two books on speaking and preaching and has written dozens of articles in journals and online publications.

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