The latest iteration of the chat bot can apparently produce sermons. You tell it your passage, how many points you want and point and shoot and away it goes. What you end up will be grammatically correct and may read well, though I think it comes across as a bit sterile. But to think that it is a sermon is to think wrongly about what preaching is.
What is preaching? What is it for and who is it to? I wonder if the reason there are some who think AI may be helpful for writing sermons is because we’ve developed a misshapen view of the sermon. It’s not an academic piece of writing. It’s not mere information retrieval, arrangement and then download/sharing. It is the word of God at work to transform the preacher in his spirit filled wrestle to understand the text and what God is saying through it both then and now and so fill his heart as applied by the Spirit so that he can bring God’s word to God’s people so they in turn are transformed by God’s word and become more like Christ.
That means there ought to be something transformational about the nature of sermon preparation itself that leads to worship, repentance and prayer in a way other work does not. When I was a teacher my lesson preparation did not lead to worship, repentance and prayer. But preaching is a different task all together. I don’t want to mythologise it, but I also don’t want us to think it is just like writing any other speech or presentation.
In the same way the act of preaching ought to drain us. I am often physically and emotionally drained after preaching simply because I have worked hard emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually to discharge the burden that God has been laying on my heart for the people he has given me to shepherd from his word and that is no easy thing and nor should it be.
None of that can be replaced by AI. And if our sermon prep could, if it’s little more than information collection and our sermon delivery is little more than an information dump. Then maybe, just maybe, preaching isn’t for us.
Al Gooderham 