Pastors are not mere speakers, but anointed shepherds. The task of leading and feeding is not mechanical, but relational. Nearly every person in every church can easily watch a better preacher on the internet than the one in the pulpit, but no one on YouTube can shepherd them, or pray with them in their distress, or weep with them beside a grave.

At first glance, artificial intelligence seems an appealing solution and an innovative tool for busy preachers desperately looking for help in sermon preparation. What could be the harm?

Plagiarism

The internet age has provoked a proliferation of pastoral plagiarism. Megachurch pastors and small church pastors alike have been exposed for preaching someone else’s sermons. While few defend pilfering another’s sermon wholesale, pastors nonetheless struggle with exactly where the boundaries lie. On the one hand, perspicuous preachers desire to give credit whenever they use someone else’s intellectual property, but on the other hand, diligent study often yields dozens of sources contributing to the message. How meticulous must acknowledgements be? Should pastors recognize every author who taught them something that helped them, or should they only cite authors of direct quotes? Might the sermon become so saturated with references that parishioners accuse the pastor of trying to impress them with their extensive reading?

The late Presbyterian pastor, Donald Grey Barnhouse, made a distinction between “stealing your neighbor’s roses for your own bouquet” and “using your neighbor’s roses to make your own perfume.” His analogy meant that preaching someone else’s sermon was like stealing a neighbor’s roses instead of doing the hard work and taking the time to grow them for oneself. Using a neighbor’s roses to make perfume, however, meant receiving ingredients contributed by someone else as one ingredient out of many to produce one’s own fragrance.

The Temptation of Using AI

Plagiarism is an intellectual crime as much as stealing a neighbor’s flowers is a physical crime. It has a perpetrator and a victim. Someone stole something that belonged to someone else. But what if there were no victim, no one whose work was robbed? What if one could simply replicate flowers from nowhere? What if a busy, overworked, underequipped pastor could deliver a truly biblical sermon that did not come from his mind, but neither did it come from anyone else’s? Would that be unethical? From whose roses did he make his perfume?

That rationale is the temptation facing pastors who use artificial intelligence to generate their sermons. They assume that, if they are not stealing from someone, then nothing wrong has happened. If delivering sermons were no more than giving a speech or imparting information, using artificial intelligence to generate the script might be acceptable. Preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, however, is not an ordinary subject, nor is it conveyed by ordinary means.

People Are To Proclaim the Word

First and foremost, God has ordained that people should communicate the Gospel. God could have used angels to preach, but he used people. He could have handed his Word from heaven as a completed work, but he inspired men to write it. Jesus could have revealed himself cosmically from the heavens, but he came to people. He chose, trained and sent disciples, and he commissioned them to make disciples in turn, baptizing and teaching them to observe everything that he commanded.

Read More