Oh, well, I swore to myself last night as I staggered upstairs to bed* that I wouldn’t write anymore about the church for at least a week. The people will grow tired, I said to myself, of the constant and unrelenting posts about whether or not to go to church. Try to write about something else, I said in a quiet whisper. Your reader Deserves Better.
The problem, O Best Beloved, is that never before in the history of the world and my own life, not to be excessively hyperbolic or anything, have so many foolish things been said about the nature of Christ’s own Body. Truly, in my ever-expanding mid-life crisis, I have never had so much fodder for a subject that already grips me.
You know how almost everyone has their own peculiar fascination? Some people know all about trains or cars or boats. Some know all about gardens and food (my mother). Others know all about how the sound will be heard in every single corner of a building (our organist…he can tell you how the waves will reverberate pew by pew by pew). Some know about math. Others know about linguistics (my father). Others know about how to step on my last nerve (my children). I once asked a friend if she thought I had any particular peculiarity, something that I just wouldn’t shut up about but that I hadn’t, myself, seen as any kind of obsession. “Jesus,” she said—I kid you not. I was smug at first, but then I realized how irritating it can be to have a friend who only talks about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I relate this both to let you know how holy I am, and how exasperating.
So, anyway, I can’t stop blogging about the church this morning, because there is such a gem online. Christianity Today invited a young pastor to write about how he used Chat GPT for six months to help him in his pastoral duties. Duties that included, amongst everything else, preaching and organizing his theological thoughts. Before anything, let me reiterate all my tender feelings of affection for Christianity Today. My review of Kevin DeYoung’s excellent forthcoming book should appear in the print edition soon. I am grateful to them for all the work they do.
Second of all, I must note that the pastor experimenting with Chat GPT is living in Taiwan. I don’t know anything about what it is like to do work there. I can imagine the burdens and pressures of pastoral ministry make every kind of help essential for the success of the work. Anything that takes any burden off so that real people can receive the healing ministry of the gospel is going to be a good thing.
It’s just that, and this is my third thought, the writer betrays a lackadaisical view of the one thing that—and this is such a difficult thing to accept as a Christian no matter where you work or live—ministers balm and help to troubled souls. That thing is the Bible.
If you were to wake up one day and search out reasons for the demise of the church in every place it is crumbling, if you were honest about it, you wouldn’t be able to chalk it up to bad administration, or abuse, or not enough programs, or not being relevant, or not having the right kind of liturgy, or being a hater. If you were serious in your investigation, and fair, you would eventually have to admit that the Word of God had not taken hold and transformed individual people into a church. It is the reason churches are being emptied and sold off. It is why people didn’t bother to come back after covid. It is the reason so many people are wandering around like sheep without a shepherd. Where the Bible is not believed and trusted, where people don’t have direct access to it, gradually they will starve and then, in search of any food, they will wander away.
Worse still, it is in the preaching of the Word of Christ that the Bible is most perplexingly displayed. It is as the preacher rightly opens the scriptures to particular people that those who are far off are brought near by the blood of Christ. It is perfectly reasonable, and predictable, then, that dissipating confidence in the scriptures must intersect with the rise of gimmicky sermon tactics. The sense of unmoored hysteria in so many ecclesiastical corners today comes from somewhere. It is explicable. It happens when the preacher takes the place of the Bible and draws people to himself and his personality, rather than to Christ himself. You can see how the process of unraveling begins in this article. Allow me to pull out a couple of examples:
For many pastors, there is never enough time for sermon preparation. When I was in seminary, one of my classes required students to draw up a schedule of a typical week in a pastor’s life. The professor critiqued the schedule I submitted as having “too much time for sermon preparation.” Indeed, after researching and writing a sermon and dealing with all the administrative work, leading additional ministries, serving as an official of our presbytery, and continuing my education, I find my time for actual pastoral care is very limited. Consequently, pastors often rely on liturgical manuals or official sermon templates, or they recycle their own past sermons for recurring events like invocations, fundraising activities, weddings, and funerals. Yet these tools require additional personalization and human touches too. Thus, it might be helpful to think about what recurring tasks or events might be automated.
What kind of professor, in this excessively biblically illiterate age, would tell a student that he had put in “too much time” to prepare the sermon? Am I reading that correctly? Too much time? I would have thought too little. I wonder how much it was? I wonder how much time this young pastor really has to engage with the text, himself. How much time did it take to learn how to use Chat GPT?
The way this is articulated, however, illumines how most pastors and church-goers think of the sermon time. It is one moment among many. It is not the main event. When this happens, when the sermon is decentered by the pastor and his flock, the new preacher will struggle to find his preaching voice. He will begin to internalize the ultimately exhausting belief that all the tasks have to be jumbled together, one on top of the other. What is described here is the bad business of putting all the sand into the jar first, before the only big rock. In this kind of way of pastoring, of course the preacher will just try to “personalize” the work of another person. It doesn’t matter who the people in front of him are. It doesn’t really matter what the text says. He just has to shove the preaching in along with everything else. Therefore:
When I need examples or applications for a sermon, I go to ChatGPT for ideas. For example, I can ask ChatGPT to write a story of Jesus riding a motorcycle into town based on Scripture and then can add more context and continue to adjust the plot to make my point. In seminary, I wrote first-person sermon assignments with a golden calf as the main character and found the process difficult. When I asked ChatGPT to write a similar type of sermon, the result was actually no worse than what I personally wrote. One habit I implemented when I began my AI experiment was noting reflections and thoughts that occurred to me while having my daily quiet time. Later I input them in ChatGPT to synthesize these thoughts and help build out my sermon.
I don’t understand. Why would you need to have a story about Jesus riding a motorcycle? I just feel so stressed out right now:
Many see sermon writing as one of the most important components of a pastor’s work. Personally, I don’t believe sermon preparation or preaching is a one-person job. A sermon is a representation of God’s revelation. In addition to interpreting the Scriptures, in order for a particular congregation to receive it effectively, the homily must be close to the life and situation of each church member.
What does that mean—“A sermon is a representation of God’s revelation?” I don’t know what that means. The Bible is God’s revelation, and then the preacher takes that revelation and explains it to the people. He makes the meaning clear. He also shows how he came to his interpretation so that the people can check his work and see if he is lying to them or not. If the people can’t come and eat from the scroll of the book themselves, nothing else will make sense.
For a congregation to “receive it effectively” it has to be understandable, even more than it has to “be close to the life and situation of every church member.” What does that look like? The preacher should, certainly, know the people in his care and preach to them and not some other group of people, because the Word is there for them to convict them and build them up.
In addition, sermon delivery is not a one-person affair either. We know that a congregation’s reception is affected not only by the speaker’s appearance but also by the sound control, the slide show, the music, and so on. Because of the pandemic, online services, audiovisual colleagues, and social media editors have become particularly important to online preaching; recent studies have even identified them as co-preachers. Though it is unethical to plagiarize others, it is difficult for a pastor to achieve the purpose of preaching—that is bringing people to God, making the truth clear, encouraging other believers—by relying on his or her own single-person sermon writing. What, then, is the role of the preacher? According to Danish bishop Marianne Gaarden, preachers merely provide their own voices as vehicles for the Holy Spirit to move their congregations to receive the Word individually. In her qualitative research, Gaarden found that when a sermon is given, the church enters a “Third Room … where the listener’s own experiences are met with the words of the preacher.”
I don’t know where this “one-person affair” line comes from. Of course there is a world of other people supporting the preacher. There are all the people who taught him, and the fellowship of scholars through the ages, and all manner of people whom he encounters who teach him things. But when he sits down to write a sermon, he must know that he will be alone with his laptop and all his learning—and God, of course. He has to stare out into the middle distance and consider the people sitting quiet before him, listening, and the text. What will he say to them? How will be translate the Word into the troubled and anxious subtext of their lives? He doesn’t need to just get better examples, he needs to offer himself as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, to usher the flock before him into eternal life. I don’t know who Marianne Gaarden is, but the idea that “preachers merely provide their own voices as vehicles for the Holy Spirit to move their congregations to receive the Word individually” is a muddled and unconsidered and even confused jargon-laden way of talking about the job that pastors since forever have had. You have to explain and apply the Scriptures to a congregation so that they will hear the Word of God.
Preaching—be it preparing a sermon or delivering the words to a congregation—is a process that currently involves a speaker, the influence of numerous people living and dead, and the Holy Spirit. I believe that within these actions, there is room for the work of AI too.
I mean, honestly, given how dire the situation is, maybe go for it. If human people can’t take the trouble, maybe technology will be just as good. But I’m pretty sure that after a couple of months of Chat GPT sermons, the pews will be emptier even than before. And now, if you will excuse me, I have other things to do, like bang my head against a desk or a wall.
Have a nice day!
The idea of using ChatGPT to assist me in writing a sermon make my stomach lurch with revulsion. It takes time to research a passage, explicate it, and speak of some of the ways in which we can apply God's Truth in that passage - but it is essential so that God's people are fed, nourished, and grow from his own Word.
And there is no joy greater than being part of the process of people who know the Lord more deeply and who serve him more willingly and thankfully.
The main event is the Eucharist, the thanks offering, even if you explain it a different way than we do. And God through the Church has given us a main event that is hard to mess up if the priest just says the words the Church prescribes, over the proper elements. But the only reason anyone cares about that ritual is Who we receive, and if they don't know Him it will not be important to them. That is what preaching is for. My Church, I think, is still operating on a model in which everyone there supposedly already knows because they were supposed to learn from their parents and their religious ed teachers, or maybe they are still thinking, from their Catholic school and a Catholic community. But they don't. And even those of us who know something, don't know enough. The priests who do it as well as can be done in 15 minutes, either teach us one small thing, make one application of the text to our lives, or at best exhort us in a way that makes us burn with the desire to find out more ourselves. If what is being said is good I always wish there were more of it.