TNS
AI has entered the pulpit, helping pastors, rabbis, and religious leaders shape sermons more quickly. But as faith meets machine intelligence, the bigger question is: can technology assist the divine without diluting the human soul?
Did AI write that sermon? Pastors reveal how they use ChatGPT
Author: Jonathan M. Pitts
The Rev. Ben Taylor has spent four decades developing a preaching style all his own, couching the insights of a trained theologian in the soft, relatable drawl of his native Georgia. He has always hoped his sermons contain a touch of the divine.
Now the Presbyterian pastor can draw on another source of power: he runs his writings through ChatGPT, allowing the AI platform to suggest tweaks in phrasing and scriptural sources he may not have considered.
The Timonium resident is fine with using machine intelligence, as he views it, to enhance his sermons and other works.
“I’m careful that the original content is always mine, the result of 40 years’ experience,” said Taylor, a biblical counselor and seminary educator who also preaches regularly. “The beauty of AI is that it can expand the repertoire of things I can borrow from. It can bring up insightful stories, illustrations and points in a way that can help me give even better shape to the final product. AI is a wonderful tool and a big time-saver.”
Taylor is part of a growing population of religious leaders using AI in sermon writing. More than 60% of Christian pastors use it, according to a study conducted last year by AIForChurchLeaders.com, a training platform for pastors learning to use artificial intelligence.
‘Everyone I know is using it’
A February report by Barna, a research firm, said that 60% of church leaders use AI “at least a few times a month,” with only 24% saying they never use it.
No formal studies on the use of AI in Judaism or Islam have appeared, but anecdotal evidence suggests the trend has landed hard in faith traditions across Baltimore.
“Most everyone I know is using it. You have to be crazy not to. The only thing you have to decide is whether to use ChatGPT or [the AI chat app] Claude — and Claude writes better,” said Mitchell Wohlberg, the rabbi emeritus at Beth Tfiloh Congregation and a man known in the local Jewish press as “the master of the sermon.”
The allure of AI to faith leaders is not hard to understand. It can sift through masses of research, generate outlines, translate passages from ancient languages, all with the stroke of a computer key. Using the powerful technology frees up time for already overworked clergy members to attend to their many other responsibilities.
But the advantages beg questions. Can machines access or reflect the divine? When congregants hear a sermon, who is really speaking?
For Wohlberg, the upsides outweigh the concerns.
For others, such as the Episcopal pastor Jason Poling, it’s the other way around.
“When it comes to anything creative — an article, a letter, a sermon — I cannot abide the idea at all,” said Poling, the rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Pasadena and the founding Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute.
“I believe the overarching piece is that AI, like lots of powerful things in our lives, can be a helpful tool or it can be a destructive force,” adds the Rev. J.C. Austin, senior pastor of Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church in Severna Park. “It depends on how we utilize it or allow it to be utilized. The use of AI as a sermon generator in particular obviously raises a lot of ethical questions that we haven’t had time to answer.”
Sermons in the making
AI has hit the world of religion hard enough in recent years that many denominations have rolled out guidelines for using it.
The Vatican warns that AI should be employed to promote the common good and human dignity — and Pope Leo XIV has warned against “naively uncritical” use of the technology, including in the writing of homilies. An Episcopal Church task force appointed in 2022 has passed a resolution asserting that AI should be used to “speak on behalf of the most vulnerable.’
The Southern Baptist Convention has acknowledged “the powerful nature of AI and other emerging technologies” and resolved that “human dignity must be central to any ethical principles, guidelines, or regulations” for its use.
At least one branch of Orthodox Judaism holds that AI should never be called on to replace hard-earned rabbinical wisdom, and Sunni Islamic scholars have written that AI cannot be trusted on religious matters because “artificial intelligence only answers [questions] on the basis of the data that has been fed into it.”
Beyond such guidelines, most faith traditions see decisions on AI use as situational and few have a problem with AI generating newsletters, writing schedules or creating email blasts.
Steven Schwartz, senior rabbi at Beth El Congregation in Pikesville, said AI can perform in seconds the kind of footwork it would have taken him multiple trips to libraries to carry out in the pre-internet days — if, for example, he needs “sources from the Talmud about euthanasia from the rabbinic period” between CE 200 and 400.
“As the speaker, you have a sensitivity to what resonates with human beings emotionally that a computer will not have,” he said. “If someone gets teary or angry, you can feel that change. There’s an emotional component [to sermons] that happens in real time, and that comes in part from doing it for many years. I don’t think a computer is ever going to know how to do that.”
Wohlberg said he has learned enough over the decades to identify and correct the few mistakes he sees AI making. Schwartz advocates rigorously checking the information it feeds.
Those are some of the factors that make Poling an AI skeptic. He also sees sermons as drawing powerfully on the human element.
“Wrestling with God is the heart of what we do as clergy and as preachers, and that process not only cashes out in the pulpit, it cashes out at the bedside and in a board meeting and when we’re writing the newsletter,” he said. “And part of being a pastor is continually being formed as not just a motivational speaker but as a shepherd of souls … If you try to subcontract any of that, I think you’re going to go amiss.”
Building faith muscles
When Taylor and Wohlberg mention their years in the pulpit, they’re touching on another question pressing faith leaders: how will students build that backlog of human interaction?
Luis Vera sees that as paramount in his work.
As a theology professor at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, he teaches the importance of “connecting with other people in a personal and sincere way, addressing their needs, resonating with them” as a way of “building their faith muscles.”
“Project out 20 years, and we’re going to have less and less human contact,” he said. “It seems like a no-brainer for religious communities to embrace the challenge of giving humanity more humanity, not less,” he said.
Others say AI will help that process. Take the Rev. Lorenzo LeBrija, the chief innovation officer for Virginia Theological Seminary in Arlington, Va., and the executive director of TryTank Research Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on “advancing theological research to meet the evolving needs of the church in the modern world.”
LeBrija has led initiatives showing that AI can take a sermon a pastor has written and adjust its language to the most accessible reading level for a given congregation.
To LeBrija, that’s anything but hampering a spiritual message. It’s a powerful new technology that can be used to carry out the mission at the heart of his work: spreading the Gospel to as many people as quickly and efficiently as possible.
It was God who brought AI into existence, LeBrija said, as he did technologies ranging from the printing press and electronic amplification to the internet itself. Now it’s up to human beings to use it wisely.
“I believe God can use any tool for his purposes,” he said.
Credits: TCA, LLC.