Cut sermon prep time dramatically. Never stare at a blank page again —instant sermon series ideas by season. Ready to get your Saturday nights back? Did you know 12 hours per week is the average pastors spend on sermon prep and ministry content? With the right AI prompts, that same work can be done in a fraction of the time—without losing your own voice or theological depth.
So promised a social media advertisement I saw recently. Here was hope for busy pastors. This was so appealing: ministry is hectic, time disappears, pressure builds, and interruptions sabotage the best of our plans. Along comes Anthropic with the solution. I can’t afford to employ more staff—executive pastor, administrator, youth worker, or whatever other role needs filling. But I could afford a $29 a month AI subscription.
I’m just an ordinary preacher, my preparation is often last minute, I don’t seem to be able to inspire people, and I can’t compete with the preachers they follow on the internet. So I get AI to become my sermon assistant. It’s not like I would be stealing someone else’s sermons, is it?[1] I just ask Claude to preach with the logical clarity of Dick Lucas, the motivational passion of David Platt, the apologetic depth of Tim Keller, and I prompt it with the demographic details of my congregation. What a package!
What’s not to love about this? Isn’t this just the best tool ever?
Beware the Slippery Slope
There is a time for AI and a time not to use AI. As with so many things, the promise of good has a shadow side. Preachers will be drawn to AI as Gollum is drawn to the Ring. AI offers something very powerful, but with the risk of preachers becoming correspondingly unfaithful. It is a slippery slope from Claude helping you prepare your sermon, to Claude writing it for you.
Pastor beware! Guard your heart, guard your flock; take responsibility, keep it real. Put in the hours, labour with love. Close your computer, get on your knees and ask God to help you, to speak to you, to shape and reform you. Open your Bible, open your mind, and open your heart.
Labour in Love
Ask: what do the Scriptures say? what do they mean? how should I respond? what is God saying, not only to the congregation but especially to me? Keep it personal: examine yourself, speak to yourself, pray for yourself. Let God have his way with you. Meditate on the passage, look intently at it, don’t forget what it says, but apply it to yourself (Jas 1:22–25). Look for logs before diagnosing specks (Matt 7:3–5). Pray for God’s strength to repent and renew your faith in the gospel.
Then you may take the next step and apply it to others. Then you can say, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). You can preach with integrity, passion, and persuasion. You can model humility before the word of life. You can urge with patience and encourage with hope. You can offer the grace of Christ to the weak and sinful, because you have received that grace and you know it to be liberating. You can preach from your heart, teach with your mind, and persuade with your words. You can point people to Jesus, whom you have met with personally in his word.
As you minister the word of God in your church, make it a labour of love. Make time for it. If you’re preaching on Sunday, don’t leave your prep until Saturday. Start on Monday, or better still start the week (or weeks) before. God’s word was never intended to be fast food. Take it slow and savour the flavours.
Keep It Real
As you do this, especially when you are finding it hard, ask God for insight, understanding and wisdom. Keep prayer as a foundational and repeated step in preparation. Speak with others, consult commentaries, explore cross-references, perhaps even listen to the sermons of others. But keep it real. When seeking help, make the bulk of your preparation interact with the spiritual wisdom of other people, not the artificial amalgamation of a vast dataset. Consult with real people, who’ve done real work, who’ve also had to examine their hearts, who’ve borne the burden of love for their congregations, readers, and listeners.
Please, don’t mistake artificial for authentic. It’s an algorithmic, heartless, soulless, lifeless, impersonal alternative. And don’t mistake intelligence (of an artificial kind) for insight. AI doesn’t fear the Lord, or desire your salvation, or seek your sanctification.
AI may promise to drastically reduce your preparation time, affording you more time for ministries like pastoral care or prayer. But these are false divisions of labour. Preaching is an important aspect of pastoral care, so you need to spend time in the Scriptures and time with your people. God calls you to the ministry of prayer and the word (Acts 6:4). All ministry takes effort and effort takes time. Efficiency is no longer effective if it distracts you from the matters that matter most.
In 2 Timothy 2:15, the apostle Paul calls Timothy to “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” In 1 Timothy 5:17 he writes, “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honour, especially those who labour in preaching and teaching.” Preachers are called to be workers, handling the word of God without shame or pretence. Don’t make efficiency your idol; be careful in looking for short cuts. Ask for help if you need it—workshop with colleagues and friends; maybe even seek out a preaching coach. But whatever steps you take, please stay committed to labouring in your preaching and teaching, lest all the honour be given to some tech company.
[1] However, the results from AI applications arise from dubious data scraping that have trained the AI tools. It is arguably the fruit of questionable treatment of other people’s intellectual property.
