Ethical Perils of Generative AI in Pastoral Ministry
Why delegating Holy Spirit work to machines is problematic
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to help professional Christian leaders with their workloads. Chances are, you are overworked and have more tasks on your todo list than you have time to do them. Along comes AI with the promise of automating common tasks and it is easy to delegate some of those tasks to AI. The question for you and your ministry is should you? When I am talking about generative AI, I’m talking about sermon drafting, AI scheduling, email responses, basically anything that you use to get AI to write in your place.
There are many positive ways to use AI. Many of them don’t involve letting it do all your writing for you. If you do delegate all your writing tasks to AI, you risk dulling your writing voice and making yourself sound inauthentic. Your people want to connect with you, not a machine’s mimic of you.
When you are writing or public speaking, they expect to be hearing directly from you about topics that have impacted you personally. Ideally, it should be topics through which the Holy Spirit has been teaching, shaping, and guiding you. AI is a sophisticated pattern recognition system. It can take its training data and can then take the data is has been trained on and produce something kind of new. I say kind of new because the Large Language Models (LLMs) have become so good that they often sound human but they are largely borrowing from existing bodies of work previously written by real human beings.
LLMs do not think original thoughts. They actually don’t even have thoughts as human beings do. They take existing work and predict the next words and phrases based on their training data. LLMs have no conscience and are not the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit like you and I are. They are simply sophisticated pattern recognition engines that recombine words and phrases found elsewhere into new combinations. One major problem Christian leaders encounter when using LLMs for sermon preparation is that much of what AI is providing us has been copied from others but without easily being able to give credit where credit is due, leading to unintended plagiarism.
As Pastors, Chaplains, and Church Elders, we are expected to be offering our own thoughts and sharing how God’s Word is impacted our life. The Word of God is filtered through our life experience and then imparted to our people. If you rely on AI to write your sermons, you are short-circuiting this age old process and, as a result, robbing yourself of spiritual growth while robbing your people of shared connection and spiritual insight.
Spiritual growth always happens through hardship. It is basically a law of God’s universe. All good things come through sacrifice. When something is given to you without requiring sacrifice, you will not value it to the same degree you would if it cost you something.
The Dangers that AI Exposes You To
Where do you and I go for our inspiration? Is the Word of God still supreme in your life? Are you still taking time to pray and connect with God in personal alone time with him? I would urge you to guard against using AI as a proxy for approaching God.
Don’t delegate deep thinking. There was a recent study that highlighted the cognitive cost of students using AI to write their essays for them. The results weren’t pretty. Long term harm is potentially possible if you start putting your brain in neutral and delegate deep thinking to machines. The pain and effort of deep thinking helps that information stay in your brain and allows it to be accessed later. If you short-circuit that pain out of busyness or laziness, you will pay a high cost later.
Delegating your writing to AI can, over time, dull your spiritual discernment. If you get into the habit of querying the AI every time you have a question about something, you are training your brain to rely on the AI for your source of information. God cannot be manipulated. He has promised that he will draw near to you as you draw near to him. Sometimes, it is possible to be too quick to search for an answer without allowing time for the question to marinate and for the Holy Spirit to speak to us. Instead of taking time to meditate on the answer to any given question, if you just query the LLM, that process is cut short and the end result is that you don’t learn the lesson God wants you to learn as easily.
Another danger is bias. AI is trained on human data and as such, it is subject to biases. I’ve written before about confirmation bias, just remember that an LLM will give you advice based on the data it has been trained on. Since all humans have bias and the LLM you are using has been trained on human data, be on the lookout for bias. Don’t just accept an LLM’s opinion as fact, push back against it and seek to look at the information it provides from various angles.
LLMs are prone to misinformation. Today’s LLMs simply don’t produce the truth to the degree that merits your confidence for use in spiritual discourse. All the major models are still subject to a not insignificant level of hallucinations. If you ask the same question of it repeatedly, it won’t always answer the same way. It will take credit for work that it just lifts off of websites, sometimes word for word.
Plagiarism is sin. Taking credit for someone else’s work is sin. It violates the eighth commandment and even potentially the tenth. You misrepresent yourself to your congregation and, if the message is being recorded, to the world. We are all busy. It is easy to give in to the temptation to take a shortcut to survive for another day. Resist the temptation. The long-term damage to your reputation isn’t worth the short term help.
Trust takes time to earn and is quickly lost. Your people are expecting to hear from you personally. They expect you to have taken the time to think deeply on the subject you are presenting. If you short-circuit that effort to present to them something hastily generated, you are risking trust between you and your congregation. Once trust is lost, your ministry will quickly be in danger. While congregants may not be able to put their finger on why your message feels off, they will still sense something isn’t quite right with your message. Resist the urge to take the easy way out. Do the work.
Is there any place for AI in the Sermon Preparation Process?
I do believe that AI can help as one of the tools you use while preparing your sermon. While I strongly urge you not to let it do the writing for you, it can be a great tool for generating ideas. If you have taken time to write something out, it can help you edit it, correct mistakes, and even be used to provide you with objections or alternate viewpoints on what you’ve written.
AI can be used to help you synthesize your message down to its core elements. If you use it this way however, make sure to confirm that it is accurately expressing your thoughts. You should always be editing the distilled version to be sure that it represents your viewpoints properly.
There is no substitute for personal time in God’s Word. Other commentaries, books on the subject, personal conversations with others on the topic all add nuance and depth to your sermon. Besides personal time in the Word, make sure you are also taking time to pray about your message and be on the lookout throughout the week at what the Holy Spirit is saying to you that is relevant to your upcoming message.
Be Transparent About Your Usage of AI
Don’t hide your usage of AI from your congregation. If you aren’t comfortable disclosing the use of AI to your congregants, you shouldn’t be using it. You are supposed to be a spiritual guide for your people. Your use of AI should be ethical, otherwise you forfeit your right to be a guide to others on their use of AI.
LLMs and artificial intelligence is here to stay. Your people are using AI in many different ways, even those who are naturally more anti-technology. It is important to talk about the use of technology in one’s faith journey. Technology itself isn’t inherently bad, it is the way we use technology that can be problematic. Your people need guidance. You should live a life of integrity and personally use technology in responsible ways.
No matter how you choose to use AI, if you determine to live a life of integrity, being the same person publicly as you are in private, God will guide you towards making good, wholesome decisions that will please him. Don’t take shortcuts. Instead, pay the price of spiritual growth. In the long term, you will be grateful for the person you will become as a result of working through the challenges of life that will inevitable shape the person you are and will become.
Joseph Duchesne is the creator of The Church AI Guy, a space where faith meets innovation while discussing the long-term impact of AI. A pastor, autodidact, and author of two books—The Last Crisis and Discover the One—he’s passionate about showing how Jesus-centered discipleship can thrive in a digital world. When he’s not experimenting with the latest tech, he’s reading theology, building church community, or spending time with his wife.