Nowadays, a frequent conversation among pastors concerns the use of AI platforms—like Gemini or ChatGPT—for sermon preparation. Everywhere I turn, church leaders are wowed by these tools’ generative capability, and understandably so. The sophistication of these platforms in responding to specific prompts delivers wildly impressive sermon outlines, illustrations, commentary, and application. Their capacities are astonishing.
Should pastors use AI to generate their sermons? The most common posture I see among pastors is cautious but open. Some say it’s OK to use the tools to generate ideas, suggest an outline, or provide illustrations, as long as you reserve the bulk of your preparation for the hard work of exegesis and don’t rely on these platforms to write your sermons.
Skill-Based Caution Will Not Hold
What strikes me about these conversations is how skill-focused they are. Pastors know it’s vital to put blood and sweat into sermon preparation—a responsibility that cannot be outsourced to robots, lest we lose the capacity to rightly handle the Word. What’s more, it’s essential to know our people well—their particular needs, temptations, and desires. We can’t lose sight of the personalized touch a good sermon requires. This is the common refrain: We don’t want to lose these skills, which is why we should proceed with caution.
Here’s the problem. These cautions aren’t going to hold. Not long-term. These reasons will not persuade most pastors and church leaders to reject these tools. It’s like telling college students it’s bad to use ChatGPT to generate an outline for a paper. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the importance of developing and cultivating certain skills in analyzing and outlining, but in the end, if you’re already using other tools to make your process more efficient and effective, why not incorporate just a few more? We’ve already crossed the Rubicon.
Missing Element: Worship
That brings me to John Piper’s recent counsel when asked about using AI to write sermons. Piper comes at this conversation from a different angle.
“AI” stands for artificial intelligence. It can map out and predict word patterns with uncanny accuracy, simulating human learning and problem-solving. But artificial emotion is another thing. Robots cannot feel. Robots cannot worship. Only humans can know God and enjoy him. Robots can simulate word patterns of adoration or appreciation, but only humans can adore and appreciate.
“Worship is not simply right thinking, which computers can do,” Piper says. “Worship is right feeling about God.”
Why does this matter? Because preachers don’t merely deliver information to a congregation. Our calling goes beyond providing commentary on the biblical text or repeating or summarizing what dictionaries, encyclopedias, or books say about Bible words and passages. We’re exegetical escorts, in the words of Robert Smith:
The exegetical escort . . . will usher the hearer by the Word of God into the presence of Christ, the Son of God, by the power of the Spirit of God, in order that we might have transformation as a result.
Mere words don’t fulfill this calling. Worship is the prerequisite and pinnacle of preaching. This is why I often say that whether or not we can carry a tune, every pastor is a worship minister. We’re all in the business of worship ministry. We’re leading hearts to sing the praises of King Jesus. Theology is meant to fuel worship. The goal of mission is worship. The point of preaching is worship. The ultimate goal of a sermon is to behold the glory of Jesus Christ, to stand in awe of his goodness and grace.
Why AI-Generated Sermons Fall Short
Robots cannot worship. Therefore, relying on a robot to prepare your sermon is to excise an indispensable element of good preaching—the heart.
For this reason, Piper says, it’s wicked to rely on a robot to generate the first draft of a sermon, even if you then walk back through it and tweak it here and there. Why such a strong word? Because “neither God nor his people speak in a way so as to bring about in the minds of other people thoughts that are not true about us or what we say, or feelings in them that are not appropriate about us.” Preaching means more than regurgitating and delivering facts about a Scripture passage. It involves feeling the emotions the passage intends to elicit so we can then “explain it to others clearly, illustrate and apply it for their edification.”
God forbid the next generation inherits doctrinally sound, artfully illustrated, perfectly polished sermons . . . that have no heart. Sermons that string together words of emotion but don’t arise from a heart set on fire by the biblical text. Sermons that follow a penitential script yet bear no wounds from the passage itself piercing the preacher’s soul. Sermons that stack up words of adoration and awe delivered from preachers who have yet to tremble at the weight of glory they hold out to their hearers.
Preaching without heart is preaching without power.
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