Artificial Intelligence in the Work of Ministry

A pastor today has tools on his desk that did not exist five years ago. He can ask a machine to summarize a commentary, draft an email, format a bulletin, or pull together every cross-reference to a single Hebrew word in under a minute. The technology is here. It sits in our pockets. The question is no longer whether pastors will encounter it but what they will do with it.

I want to be transparent here. I use artificial intelligence in my own work. I use it to draft correspondence, to research history, to format documents, to check my own writing for clarity. It has been useful. I have also seen its limits up close, and those limits are exactly where ministry begins.

I have always loved technology, from the time I was old enough to see a computer up close and use one to connect to bulletin boards in the days before the internet, on a desktop running Windows 3.11 (yes, I really am that old). So this article will not tell you to stay away from AI. The goal is to think through what AI is, where it can serve a pastor, and where it must never set foot.

We Have Been Here Before

When I was a young preacher, sixteen or seventeen years old, a well-meaning elderly woman in the church pulled me aside and told me that computers in Bible study were for the lazy. She meant it kindly. She believed she was protecting me from a shortcut. I have thought about that conversation many times in the thirty years since.

Go back a few hundred years and somebody surely warned a preacher that this new Gutenberg invention would ruin the work, that printed books would make men lazy, that real study happened with a quill and parchment. New technology is always a problem for the closed-minded.

The past three decades have settled the computer question for me. I have entire libraries on my computer and even on my tablet and phone. Commentaries from Gill and Owen and Henry and Spurgeon, every cross-reference in seconds, search across the whole Bible in any translation, sermons from godly men preserved for the next generation. None of this has made me lazy. It has made me a better student of the Word. I believe that if those old preachers from the past could see what we have done with their works, their eyes would be wide with amazement and they would nod in approval.

AI is the next step in that same line. It can serve the way other tools have served, as long as we remember it is a tool and use it like one.

What AI Actually Is

The phrase "artificial intelligence" is misleading. These systems do not think. They do not understand. They predict the next word in a sentence based on patterns they have absorbed from enormous amounts of human writing. They can produce text that sounds thoughtful because they have read (or maybe more accurately absorbed) millions of thoughtful sentences. That is a real capability, and it is also a real limit.

It is also why AI is so often wrong. These tools will invent quotes that were never said, attribute books to authors who never wrote them, and cite Bible verses that do not exist. They are not lying. They have no idea what truth is. They produce a sentence that fits the pattern and trust the pattern to hold. A pastor using AI has to verify what it tells him. Every quote. Every reference. Every claim. If you would not stand behind it in the pulpit, do not let it leave your desk.

An AI does not know God. It has no soul. It has never been born again, never wrestled with a passage on its knees, never feared the Lord. When it produces sentences about Christ, it is arranging words. There is no witness behind them. Treating it like a brother in the Lord, or like a teacher, is a terrible error.

A tool can still be useful when it is only a tool. A hammer doesn't love the carpenter. A concordance has never prayed for a preacher. We have always used instruments in the work of ministry. The question is whether we keep them in their proper place.

Where AI Can Help

There are real, legitimate uses.

Administrative work. Drafting routine emails, formatting a bulletin, building a spreadsheet for the budget, transcribing a recorded message, sorting a long document for the section you need. These tasks eat hours that could be spent on prayer, study, and people. A tool that gives those hours back is a gift.

Research assistance. AI can pull together background on a historical figure, summarize a long argument, suggest cross-references, or help you find a quote you half remember. It does not replace careful reading of Scripture or solid commentary work. It can speed up the surrounding labor.

Accessibility. A pastor in a small church often has no staff. He has no editor, no graphic designer, no IT support, no secretary. AI gives that pastor the ability to produce work that used to require a team. That is no small thing for a man trying to serve a flock alone.

A second set of eyes on your own writing. Ask a tool to flag unclear sentences, broken logic, or weak transitions, and it will sharpen what you have already written. The thinking still has to be yours. The tool only points at the rough spots.

These are honest helps. A pastor who refuses to consider them out of suspicion is making his work harder than it needs to be.

Where AI Must Not Go

When the apostles faced a pressing administrative problem in Acts 6, they did not abandon their primary work. They appointed others to handle the daily distribution and gave themselves to what only they could do.

That priority has not changed. Some things in the ministry can be delegated, even to a machine. Others cannot.

The pulpit belongs to the preacher. A sermon is not a document. It is the word of a shepherd who has fed on the Word himself and now feeds the flock. If a pastor stands up and reads what a machine wrote, the pulpit has become a stage. The congregation deserves the labor of a man who has legitimately spent time in the Word, wept over the passage, prayed through it, and let it cut him before he lifts the knife to them. Paul's charge to Timothy still binds every preacher:

A man cannot delegate that diligence. The approval is to God, and God knows what work a man has done. A tool can format your notes, fetch a verse, suggest an outline, tighten a sentence. The sermon itself, the burden, the structure, the application, the very voice of it, must come from a man who has been with God.

Be absorbed in them. That phrase forbids the kind of distance a tool can put between a man and his work. The pastor is made by his labor. The hours in the text, the prayers that hurt, the rewriting until the truth has hold of him before he hands it to the people, all of it is the formation. Skip it long enough and there is no pastor left, only a man who can produce pastoral-sounding output.

Prayer cannot be outsourced. My brothers, no machine prays. A tool that produces words about prayer is not interceding. When a pastor hands his prayer life to a system, he has stopped praying, even when the words it produces still sound religious.

Pastoral care is bodily. A grieving widow does not need a chatbot. She needs a man to sit on her couch, hold her hand, read the Word aloud, and pray over her with a voice that breaks. The hospital visit, the counseling room, the discipline of a wandering member, none of this can be handed to a machine without surrendering the office itself.

A Word on Honesty

If a pastor uses AI to help with his writing or his administration, that is his business. But there is a line he should not cross. He should never present to his people, or to other pastors, work that he did not do as though he did it. What goes out under his name should be his. The tool can help shape the words. The substance has to come from the man.

Use It Like a Tool

Treat AI the way you treat a calculator, a study Bible, or a good reference book. Use it where it serves. Set it aside where it does not. Do not let it replace the labor that makes you a pastor.

The Lord has not changed. His Word has not changed. The call has not changed. New instruments sit on the desk. The man behind the desk still has to be a man of God.

Examples From My Own Ministry

If you have read this far in my article, perhaps you'd like to see some examples of how AI is being used in my own ministry.

Logos Bible Software

I have been a user of Logos for several years. Lately they have integrated AI into their software, and it has been amazing. Here is why.

Smart Search. Instead of searching by a word or phrase, I can search things like theological terms (such as the Trinity or the rapture) or even a phrase like "show me where good was contrasted with evil," or "Tell me all the times John is mentioned in John," and you'll get results with John's name as well as passages like John 18:15.

Summarize Books and Articles. Within Logos, I have thousands of books. Many of them are large and some of them I am not familiar with. With the power of AI, I can summarize a book or chapter before spending my time reading it. This is a huge time saver! Here is an example from John Owen, Volume 16, Chapter 10: Of Excommunication. The chapter runs from page 151 to 183, but before diving in I can click to summarize and get an idea whether it is worth reading.

Study Assistant. This is the newest addition to Logos Bible Software. For those who have used ChatGPT or Grok, this one is very similar. However, unlike those tools, this one is "in house," which makes its results much better. What I mean is, the other tools are pulling from all over the internet, so it's like the Wild Wild West and you could get anything. The results provided might be from a solid theologian or they might be from Connie the Cult Leader. Sadly, most AI platforms don't reveal their sources so you have to be extremely careful with what you get. But with Logos AI, all the results come from the library they have, and you can limit it to the books you own. That does not mean everything will always be theologically correct. However, the results have citations linked to the sources indicating where they come from. This allows for greater accuracy checks and better Bible study and sermon prep. I am even able to narrow my search down using different sets of books. In the examples below I used books from my general collection, then narrowed it to my Baptist Collection, and then to my Puritan Collection, to get outlines for 2 Corinthians 5:18-21.

SermonAudio

Our sermons, in video and audio format, are available online at sermonaudio.com/sgbchortense. If you have never been there, please visit our page. I have been using SermonAudio for well over a decade, and they have integrated AI into their platform.

Auto-Transcription. With this tool, all our sermons are automatically transcribed. In the past, a person could only search sermons by title or preacher. Now you can search for a word or phrase from within the sermon! Go to our sermons page with transcript search turned on to try it out!

Ask. This summer, SermonAudio introduced a new feature called "Ask!" for an additional $10. As soon as I heard about it, I added it to our subscription. It allows the users of our page to simply go in and ask questions in everyday language, and the AI pulls the information from our sermons and articles. What is really neat is that the footnotes take the user straight to the point in the sermon where the information is found, so you can hear it or read it for yourself! Check it out at sgbchortense.asksermons.com.

Claude AI

I am bivocational, and my job does require me to learn Claude AI. It's a powerful tool. So I bought myself a personal subscription and have sought out ways to put it to work. I have found it useful in the ministry. Here is how I have used it.

PowerPoints. We have a TV screen to use on Sunday morning, but by the time I have finished studying the sermon I have had little time for PowerPoint design. With Claude, I can feed it my sermon notes and ask for a PowerPoint presentation based off my notes, and it does a good job. One word of caution here though: I found it did not have access to the Legacy Standard Bible at first, so it used the KJV sometimes, the NASB other times, and sometimes the NKJV, without any rhyme or reason and without warning. I have had to "train it." AI is a tool and it sometimes makes stuff up!

Articles. I take my written sermon notes as I have prepped them, combine them with the sermon transcripts from SermonAudio (because I don't always stick to my notes when I preach), and I use Claude AI to merge them and clean them up into an article format to post on the website. From there, I make the final edits and decide what goes online before it does.

Website design. I know how to use HTML and code, but I do not always have time to troubleshoot or debug issues. I use AI to help here and this has been a great time saver.

Analyze Data. SermonAudio sends us a multiple page PDF with statistics on how many users visit our page each month. I use Claude AI to analyze the data and then compress it into something that can be viewed at a glance on our church website at sgbcbrunswick.com/MinistryReports.

ChatGPT

I use this one for creating images, such as the logo I am using for our church on our church website, and some of the images I have used to go along with our articles.

Both Claude AI and ChatGPT have also come in handy around the house, troubleshooting problems like our A/C, and then helping us find the parts needed to complete the repair. I also get some good tips and tricks for grilling different meats when I am wanting to do something different for supper. (The preacher and his family have to eat!)

These are just a few of the ways I have put AI to work, and maybe you have examples of your own. The technology is in its infancy, and it will only grow more capable from here. What will not change is where the lines are drawn. Let the tool carry what a tool can carry. The work that makes a pastor a pastor still belongs to the man himself, and no machine will ever take it up. May we all use it for the furtherance of the gospel and the glory of God alone!