Life is busy. It’s busy for all of us, whether we are doctors or teachers or students or retailers. Life is busy too, for pastors and priests. While clergy may have a bit more flexibility, a little more agency over what they do with each hour of each day, there is a commensurate posture of “on call” for a variety of emergent circumstances.
And no matter what family crises, building crises, or even deaths happen during the week, we have regular deadlines: Christian education preparation, including materials for others to lead, worship planning and coordination, weekly parish communications, supervising (often part-time) staff, working with volunteers to manage finances, prepping for productive (not merely functioning) vestry meetings, and always a sermon. At the best of times, a thoughtful pastor can be nimble, navigating meetings, attentively listening to parishioners, responding to crises, and still squirreling away long enough each week to write a prayerful, winsome, and exegetical homily.
Add to this family life, household management, and dealing with health and wellness means most weeks the schedule is full.
But let’s be fair. So is the schedule of the people to whom we minister.
But imagine the week when there’s a sick child in the house (or more realistically that illness runs through the house) or too many unexpected pastoral calls or car trouble, or any other single thing that eats up the precious margins. The pastor might start to panic.
In such a pinch, one novel solution might be to offload even one of the most sacred tasks to Artificial Intelligence. During a particularly heavy week, it would be easy for the pastor to use ChatGPT or some other AI program to write a sermon or prepare a Bible study. It’s likely nobody would ever know.
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I seriously doubt any reader is unaware of AI, namely the ability of computer programs to produce what appear to be human thoughts, stories, and arguments. The programs are still clumsy and sketchy, but we are told that in time these details will be smoothed out.
There are all kinds of questions one might ask about AI in the church. One question is whether it’s appropriate for pastors and priests to use it in their preaching and teaching.
The answer for me, as a pastor, is a resounding no.
My resistance to such an option does not emerge from an aversion to technology. The smartphone in my pocket and my ever-ready laptop get heavy usage!
Still, the relationship between a reader and writer, and especially between a pastor and congregation, is one of trust. Each week I have the sacred burden and privilege to study Holy Scripture, to pray, to draw from literature and experience to share a message about Jesus that by God’s grace might be used by the Holy Spirit to open our hearts to live more fully in the love of God. And the good people at Christ Church in Tyler, Texas, have the burden and privilege to listen to me.
I know they are busy, that they have demands on their lives just like I do. Moreover, there is a lot they could be doing with their time on Sunday mornings. They’ve made an effort to honor God by coming to worship him on the Lord’s Day. They’ve come to receive the sacrament, but also to hear the Bible, God’s Word, preached. So the last thing I want to do is pass the buck to a computer to write a script for me to read.
It’s not that I have some special insight into the world of the Bible, some kind of access that they don’t have to stellar commentaries or interesting meditations. In fact, many people who listen to me preach are smarter and better read than I am. Some, by the long practice of discipleship, understand the way of Christ better than I do.
But, like other clergy, I was ordained not just to administer sacraments, but also to preach. In the Book of Common Prayer (1979), after the laying on of hands, the bishop presents the new priest with a Bible and says, “Receive this Bible as a sign of the authority given you to preach the Word of God and to administer his holy Sacraments. Do not forget the trust committed to you as a priest of the Church of God.”
And the faithful preacher has eyes on the text in the midst of a living community. Good preaching is the place of connection between a living and active Word and the people who need to receive it. What I have to offer comes not simply by being a pastor, by being one issued a Bible, but rather by being their pastor. We have a life together. Everything in life, every pastoral conversation, every reading at Morning Prayer, every hospital visit, filters its way into my mind and spirit. So when I pray and read and write, the words are not perfect, but they’ve grown out of local soil, and so they mean something to the people I’ve come to know and love. For this time and this place, they are what nourish us.
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One might counter: I use AI judiciously, only to gather some details here and then, and then I craft the sermon. In other words, this is the use of AI as the basis of a project, one that then can connect with a congregation. This might not be quite as reliable as turning to trusted commentaries, but it seems in the same basic category. Occasionally, I use AI-generated images to illustrate sermons. When I do, it’s usually for comedic effect and I always make it clear that the images are AI-generated. But I know if I were to rely on AI to compose my sermon, I would feel like I’m cheating the people I care about. I would feel like an imposter. I would feel ashamed.
I don’t want to live like that. I would rather be a mediocre priest who offers middling homilies born from a place of love, effort, and prayer than to shine up some pristine ready-made thing and pass it off as my own.
So I have decided I will not be using it in my writing, and that my folks don’t have to worry about me using it. Even though I have these powerful tools at my fingertips, I plan to write and teach and preach the old-fashioned way. To borrow a title from a book by Leif Enger, I see what AI offers me and “I cheerfully refuse.”
For those pastors who feel otherwise, who believe that there is a place for AI in their sermons, I am ready to listen to their rationale and to be charitable with their conclusions. But if they take that route, I think they need to be transparent about it with their people. No one should feel hoodwinked when they come to hear the church’s preaching of the Word of the Lord.
The Rev. Dr. Cole Hartin is an associate rector of Christ Church in Tyler, Texas, where he lives with his wife and four sons.
