Years ago I meticulously maintained this website as a lectionary preaching blog where I posted a sermon-starter each week, and preachers across the country and across the globe would engage with it. It was a fun time, and lots of interesting connections were made, but there were also two major disappointments.

First, every single week I would notice that the traffic on the blog would spike on Saturdays—in fact, traffic would reach its peak on Saturday nights. More people would engage with my content on Saturdays than the rest of the week combined. The consistency of this pattern taught me that many, many preachers were leaving their sermon prep to Saturdays. They weren’t even just writing their sermons on Saturday, but they were beginning the brainstorming process then.

Second, there was an incident of plagiarism. A reader of my blog informed me that there was a clergy person who was taking my writings and posting them on their own church’s website. This clergy person was doing this week after week, and they never once attributed the work to me. Nor did they ever indicate on their website that the writings weren’t original to them. This clergy person unambiguously presented my work as their own.

Together, these two disappointments pointed to the sad fact that there are clergy out there who are not taking their preaching responsibility as seriously as they could. At best some were procrastinating, at worst some were being dishonest.

I’m in my 25th year of ordained ministry, and so I know all-too-well the challenges of the job. Especially when you’re a solo pastor in a small-to-medium sized congregation where you aren’t just the one giving sermons, leading liturgies, and doing pastoral visits—but where you’re also the one answering the phone, putting together the bulletins, unclogging the toilets, and mowing the church lawn.

The burnout rate for clergy is high, and it’s only gotten higher in the post-covid and crazy-political age that we’re in.

Enter AI.

I am firmly opposed to using AI to generate sermons, clergy letters, prayers, and the like. As clergy we have been formed by the church and are compelled to continue that formation. It is that formation, spiritual growth, and connection to the Holy Spirit which should shape our preaching, our praying, and the words we lead congregations with.

From my own experience I fear that clergy who are prone to put off their sermon prep to Saturdays could be quick to employ AI to do heavy lifting in the creative process. I am very concerned that clergy who struggle with honesty would simply have AI write their sermons in full.

The temptation of this (artificial) fruit could be intoxicating to some.

However, I am reticent to say that priests and preachers should never use AI in their creative process. There is currently a pledge circulating where clergy can vow to never use AI in the sermon crafting process—from the beginning to end.

This pledge gives me pause because it strikes me as reflexively anti-technology when the Church has always been on the cutting edge of technology: The shift from scroll to codex, from hand-copying texts to the printing press, to television, the internet, social media, video livestreams, podcasts, and bulletins delivered by QR code. Every single one of the technological adoptions of the last century (and there’s been a few!) has drawn stark criticism. And every time the Church voiced its disapproval, it has looked remarkably out of touch.

Preachers used to sit in dusty libraries—do we need to forbid the use of online academic databases? No more Googling? Should we sign pledges to never get a sermon idea from TikTik or Instagram? No e-books? Do we go back to Latin?

How far do we need to go to stay “human”?

Most of the time when I use AI, I employ it like a super-charged search engine. Whereas I would have once have put “Prodigal Son” into Google and see what popped up, now I might ask Claude “What’s the most recent scholarship on the Prodigal Son?” Or, I might have a faint memory of some ancient Church Father who said something about the parable, and so I’ll ask ChatGPT “What did the third century church say about the Prodigal Son?”

The results are ultimately similar to what I’d get from a Google search, but whereas I’d have to scroll for a while through the pages of results or keep refining the search, AI does that for me.

Different preachers have vastly different sermon-crafting processes. Some begin at the keyboard. Some start with the Greek and Hebrew texts. Some scan blogs or YouTube. Some take a long walk in the woods.

Some preachers write their sermons as word-for-word manuscripts, some have notes or bullet points, and others (like myself) memorize the arc of a sermon and deliver it without notes.

I can see some preachers remaining “old school” and preferring books and commentaries, while some might mix AI into their process, and others will sadly lean on it more than is healthy or holy.

Of course there are legitimate systemic concerns with AI: it’s massive use of energy and resources, its own reliance on the work of others which borders on plagiarism, its proclivity to not challenge us but rather flatter us, and the fact that it is sometimes just plain wrong.

But, to swear off AI completely feels like a position that leans towards Luddite. We might as well swear off YouTube (which employs its own AI algorithms), or Instagram (where AI has been used to edit pictures and videos all through the feed), or Zoom (which uses AI for note taking).

We can find a middle ground. We can find healthy and human ways of using AI in an honest creative process. And, we can be aware that there will be some who will cross this line, as they have crossed other lines before them.

I will absolutely commit to never having AI generate a single sentence, a single paragraph of a sermon, a podcast, an email to the parish, or other similar things. There should never be a moment where I copy-and-paste from Claude into a sermon or letter.

But, almost every Sunday I preach I use an online database of academic articles in my research. I listen to YouTube videos and podcasts of other commentators and preachers while I drive around. I Google resources and find Kindle books to read and shape my preaching and teaching. And, as AI develops I will probably use it lightly as a tool in my creative process, all the while ensuring that every word I speak or publish will always be mine.

Photo by Ron Lach, courtesy of Pexels.