Why AI should never write your sermon

12 June 2025

Since the interview released and I gave it another listen I’ve been reflecting further on trust & the output of AI, especially in relation to sermons. If you’re using it for research for all sorts of things then it’s worth taking time to check sources, check facts, ask the LLM for accessible sources that you can follow, ways to check the veracity or otherwise of what you’re being told. It should be able to do that and so should you.

But what if you’re asking AI for a sermon? Because you could equally ask it for a Buddhist mantra, an Islamic sermon, a New-Age spell, or Atheist apologetics and it would give you what you asked for with equal authority. I think Christians are making the mistake of thinking because it is giving you content for Christians that it is Christian content. I’m not so sure it is.

I think the source matters. Would you have a spiritual director that could guide the Buddhist towards nirvana as well as they could the Christian towards heaven? Would you trust your pastor if they weren’t just working in the church but moonlighting in the coven? Because that’s what AI is doing. It’s not just offering sermons to Christian pastors but also sexually explicit material, wiccan insights, prosperity messages. AI is an utterly promiscuous when it comes to serving up spiritual insights. It will even persuade you that you are god if that’s what you want. Still trust it to lead the hearts of your church?

Turning to AI for sermons also betrays what we really believe about preaching. That it is merely information delivery. I suppose AI can scrape from humans what we have learned about transformation and about devotion and about worship. Perhaps it can give you better and more flowing words. But it is scraping from humans and you are a human and you can do what AI can never do: believe, experience, connect, wrestle, feel, worship. And why do you need better words when your words and mostly importantly God’s words will do just fine.

AI can write something like a Psalm but never an actual Psalm because what pit has AI been in? What miry clay? When has AI ever had feet placed upon the rock? When has AI thirsted like a deer? Had enemies surround it? Known the joy of answered prayer and promised deliverance?

When has AI considered the grass of the field and the birds of the air? It doesn’t know what either of those things are. Streams of living water can’t flow from ChatGPT and it can’t think about the things that are excellent. It cannot fear the Lord, it cannot endure, nor can it trust. There is a great cloud of witnesses and AI is not among them.

A preacher is called to wrestle with God and His Word, to listen to the Spirit and help their fellow humans trust, hope, love, forgive, endure, adore, serve. To bring them peace, call them to goodness and kindness, urge them to walk in humility and mercy. And there’s not a single verb here that AI can do or know. But you can.

And if you want to know what ChatGPT thought of this blog post then you can here.

Here’s the interview again.