Using Grok to Prepare to Teach Sabbath / Sunday School

Or any other online available group lesson study

Sabbath School, or if you come from a Sunday church, Sunday School is meant to be a time when children and adults get together to learn about the Bible. Traditionally, and this has remained unchanged in the Adventist church for many decades, adults are asked to study their lesson guide during the week. Then, on Sabbath, everyone gets together to discuss the contents of the lesson for that week. The Discussion is meant to help the group hear what each of us has learned. The facilitator is also supposed to help the participants apply the principles we find in those lessons to our everyday lives.

Many times, I have found the lessons lacking on good, easy to understand, open-ended discussion questions. Often, I have found the questions leading or, they are just too complicated for those members who are not university educated. Most members I know would rather be a part of a good, stimulating discussion than to hear the ‘facilitator’ dominate the study and ‘teach’ instead of helping guide the discussion to be most profitable for all.

Grok to the Rescue

Over the last few months, I’ve been using Grok to draft a lesson guide for me to use when facilitating sabbath school. In my experience, I’ve had more success getting Grok to help but your experience may be different. I encourage you to try both and decide for yourself.

Like any use of a Large Language Model (LLM) like Grok or ChatGPT, your prompt and the skill you use in crafting the prompt can make a huge difference in whether you’ll get maximum use out of an LLM or just quit in frustration. LLMs today are capable of creating lessons on any Bible topic for any age almost out of thin air. Give it some guidelines and it can spit something out in minutes that would take the average human many hours of work.

For our purposes here, and for me to demonstrate how I do it, I’ll walk you through the prompt I use to get the LLM to give me a usable study / facilitator guide.

Take this past week’s sabbath school lesson and turn it into a facilitator’s guide that will help me lead my sabbath school class this week. I’d like you to give me an overall five to seven sentence summary of the overall lesson, then I’d like a breakdown of each day’s lesson including the title, two to three sentence overview of that day, a key principle from that day’s lesson that we can apply to our daily life, three open-ended discussion questions relevant to the day’s lesson and one application question for each day. Offer this guide and the relevant content at a grade eight reading level. Take the lesson from https://ssnet.org/lessons/25d/less02.html

Now, when using this prompt, if you are just going to copy and paste it, make sure to change the link at the end to the actual lesson you want to process. For whatever reason, if you are not specific and do not provide a link to the actual lesson, Grok like many LLMs is very much prone to just making up its own lessons with unique titles for each week and unique content. This won’t help you lead a sabbath school class where everybody has studied a common but different topic.

After you’ve generated the lesson study and it looks the way you want it to, enter this prompt in the same chat window (when using Grok):

Generate a PDF of this lesson with LaTeX formatting

If Grok behaves, this will create a PDF that you can then download and print out for your preparations.

Feel free to experiment with the main prompt above to customize the resulting PDF any way you feel is useful to you. I urge you to always double check the guide to the actual lesson study to make sure it is accurate and that it hasn’t hallucinated what isn’t there.

This hack has saved me time when preparing for the sabbath school lesson. This hack does not substitute your time with the lesson study or reading and studying it yourself. What it does do is make a task that many find difficult, coming up with good, relevant questions that generate discussion, much easier.

Please leave me a comment if this worked for you or even if it didn’t. My intention with ChurchAIGuy is to develop a community of like minded people looking to use AI in church ministry contexts.

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.