Pete Killingley: Can I use AI to write my sermon?

Should preachers consider using tools like ChatGPT when preparing sermons?

At first glance it may sound like a paradigm shift—even a disruption—but at the end of the day this conversation isn’t about replacing the preacher, it’s about empowering the preacher; it’s not about outsourcing spiritual insight, it’s about enhancing preparation; it’s not about diminishing the sacred task of proclamation, it’s about leveraging innovative tools to maximise impact.

Yes, you guessed it, that paragraph was written by AI. Let’s see what a human thinks instead! This article is my attempt to answer the question of when, how and why we might use AI in preparing a sermon…and when we should leave well alone.

Part of the problem is that people use AI in different ways, at different stages in the process, and for different reasons. We need to recognise that not all AI use is equal.

What are you using AI for? Is it to help you with exegesis? Is it to come up with headings or a title for your sermon? Is it to review what you’ve written, asking for clarity and feedback? Is it to suggest illustrations… or applications? Is it to finish your sentences, or paragraphs? Is it to write the whole thing? You can see how different the ethics are depending on your answer to those questions.

Why are you using AI? Is it to enable you to cover more ground when you study, so that you interact with a wider range of sources? Is it because you are overstretched and this gives you more time to visit people in your congregation? Or is it because you manage your time badly and this enables you to catch up and make sure you’ve got something ready for Sunday morning? The answer to these questions may not drastically alter where we draw the line, but God is interested in our motives, not just in the actions themselves.

What does your conscience tell you? One pastor might think that using AI to prepare and write a sermon is wrong, but then they do it anyway. Another might think it’s legitimate. The first person is violating their conscience and hardening their heart, while the second might be merely acting foolishly.

What does your congregation think? If there are some who feel very strongly about any use of AI, even in minor ways, you need to consider whether this is a hill you want to die on. Is it worth putting a stumbling block in between them and the preaching of the Word?

I’m sure you’re starting to see that this is much more complex than just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. We’re not going to finish the article with some kind of table which enables you to look up what type of AI-use is acceptable in the situation you find yourself in.

Rather, we need wisdom. The good news is that wisdom is something that God offers us, freely and abundantly!

For the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. (Proverbs 2:6, NIV)

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. (James 1:5, NIV)

We also need to clear away a few distracting arguments. I’ve heard all of these in defence of using AI, but they don’t take us very far, because they don’t really get to the heart of the issue.

• “God can speak through an AI sermon.” Well, of course he can! He also spoke through Balaam’s donkey (Numbers 22:28, 30). The fact that God is able to speak through an AI-prepared sermon doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to think through this question properly.
• “Using AI to help prepare a sermon is no different from using a commentary to help.” Not true – there are substantial differences. With a commentary, you know who wrote it and you know who published it, which enables you to evaluate the accuracy of what it says. AI-generated content is synthesised from a million different sources.
• “I tried asking ChatGPT to generate a sermon…and it was actually pretty good”. I’ve seen this argument so many times in online discussions, but it misses the point. Maybe the sermon was good. Maybe your congregation wouldn’t have known the difference. But pragmatism isn’t the best argument in favour or against.

The Bible doesn’t mention AI, but it does give us principles about preaching that we can apply. Here are a few:

Faithfulness and accuracy. The preacher is responsible for rightly handling the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15). It’s a serious and weighty charge that Paul gives to young Timothy. James warns that teachers will be judged strictly for what they have taught (James 3:1), and Jesus reserved some of his harshest words for those who taught others while leading them astray (Matt 15:14). When it comes to what we teach, we need to recognise that this is a holy responsibility.

You could theoretically use AI to write your sermon and then double-check it for accuracy, but the problem goes deeper than that. Generative AI has a serious problem with truth and accuracy. You don’t have to use it for long before you start to spot this, and I find that the more I interact with AI, the more I am suspicious of the answers it gives me. AI’s tendency to give false answers (with great confidence) should lead us to be immensely distrustful of what it tells us.

For example, I’ve tried asking AI to give me an illustration of the Trinity. It explained that God is like H2O - sometimes ice, sometimes water, sometimes steam. That’s an old heresy that misrepresents God, because God doesn’t switch between his different forms like that. He is always Father, Son and Spirit.

I’ve tried using AI to do Hebrew word study. I asked it for a list of all the times a specific Hebrew word was used in the Old Testament. It missed many examples and made up some more.

It’s entirely possible that using AI can suggest insights into the Bible we’ve never seen before, without us realising that the reason we’ve not seen them before is because they’re not really there!

And who is responsible when errors creep into our teaching? There are examples of lawyers submitting arguments to a judge that include made-up cases and precedents. When it comes to light, who does the judge blame? Not the makers of ChatGPT or whichever AI was used. Rather, the lawyer who submitted the document is held accountable! In the same way, God holds each one of us accountable for how we teach the word to others. If AI is a tool that is as likely to lead us astray as in the right direction, what benefit do we gain by using it?

As it says in 1 Corinthians 3:10, “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care”.

Weakness. Part of the appeal of using AI to write a sermon is that it can produce a more eloquent message than you could have done yourself. Forget for a moment that AI has a predictable cadence and tone, which, once you notice it, is very obvious and off-putting. Even if AI does write better messages than you can, is that what we want?

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is instructive. He writes that we are to “preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” (1 Cor 1:17). A few verses later, he points to his own example when he was in Corinth: “When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” (1 Cor 2:1). In fact, it was quite the opposite: “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words…” (1 Corinthians 2:3–4)

There’s a strange tension here. We want to preach the best messages we can. We want to teach in ways that are intelligible and engaging. Just as Jesus was a storyteller who transfixed the crowds, so we want to tell the story of Jesus in a way that intrigues and excites our hearers. Yet… we are weak. Our messages are sometimes stumbling and lacking in worldly wisdom. We are not impressive. And that’s okay.

The message of those early chapters of 1 Corinthians is that God delights to work through the ordinary words of the ordinary preacher, rather than the polished prose of ChatGPT. He delights to work through weakness.

There may be a place to use AI at times in your sermon prep, but be careful not to fall into the trap of using it so as to produce more impressive messages. God delights to work through the weak and inefficient, the fearful stumbling. Why? So that it is clear that our “faith does not rest on human wisdom (AI wisdom?) but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:5).

Dependence on the Spirit. God looks for us to be dependent on Him when we preach. Does using AI help or hinder our dependence? Too often, I fear it’s the latter.

What does dependence look like? For a start, it involves prayer. On one occasion, after helping me refine the headings and structure for a talk, ChatGPT wrote, “Praying it goes really well.” I challenged it on this statement, and it responded,

“I don’t pray in the way you do, because I’m not a person. But I said that because I know prayer matters deeply to you, and I wanted to express hope and support in a way that’s meaningful in your world.”

Well, I hope we can agree that AI isn’t actually praying for us or for the impact of our message! But praying as we prepare to preach isn’t just an afterthought. It’s an essential part of the process…from start to finish. We need to be shaped by the Word ourselves. We need to be understand the Word rightly. We need to listen to the promptings of the Spirit so we know how the Word applies to this congregation at this moment in time. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians,

“as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him— these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:9–10)

How often have you heard a sermon and thought, ‘That was just for me?’ Sometimes it’s a throwaway remark, sometimes it’s an old truth that hits in a new way. How did that happen? The Holy Spirit has a message for the people who will hear your talk.

It is the Spirit who reveals the true meaning of the Word, and the Spirit is not given to the machine. The work of the Spirit and the work of the algorithm are two very different things. AI may be able to produce words that are true at an intellectual level, but to think that this approximates to true preaching completely misunderstands the role of the Spirit in proclamation.

Empty words and itching ears. Jesus contrasts how believers should pray with the practise of unbelievers – “when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.” What are the words of AI except empty words? They have no intent or purpose behind them.

And the Bible also cautions us against having ‘itching ears’: 2 Timothy 4:3 warns that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions”. AI has a tendency to tell us what we want to hear, reflecting back our own thoughts and desires. It learns our predispositions and biases, and while it will sometimes challenge them, it will more often reinforce them. Yet the word of God should and does challenge us. It tells us things we’re uncomfortable with, where we’ve fallen short and where we’ve strayed from the path.

It’s not so much that the use of AI is forbidden by God, and somehow would lead to him refusing to use a sermon that was tainted with its use. Rather, the issue is that the use of AI tends to cut against the Scriptural principles God has given us.

So what can we use it for? There are some clear lines we must not cross, but often it will come down to wisdom.

To write your talk for you? I’d say this is almost always a ‘no’. Perhaps if you’ve got a mental block and can’t work out how to finish a sentence or a thought, you could copy and paste what you’ve already written and ask AI to give you some possible suggestions.

To research the Bible? Don’t use AI for anything where you can’t check its working and wouldn’t know if it was right or wrong (e.g. Greek or Hebrew word study). I have sometimes asked AI to list 20 verses that reference a particular theme, a bit like a book of cross-references. Think of AI like a research assistant you’re sharing an office with. It’ll sometimes trigger connections you hadn’t thought of.

To come up with illustrations? On the whole, I avoid this because it’ll usually provide me with generic stories that aren’t true, that don’t feel relevant to my time and place, or don’t connect with my listeners. But I will occasionally ask it to give me true stories that illustrate the point I’m making. Most of them can be discarded, but in that list will be some that could work. (I’ll also double check their authenticity, though).

To improve your talk? For me, this is the best use of AI in preparing a Bible talk, and it’s the only one I use regularly. If you’ve written your talk out in full, you could upload it to AI and ask it to point out areas where you ramble or are unclear. Perhaps ask it to show you what could be cut to reduce the talk to the appropriate length (don’t do the opposite, that’ll just add meaningless padding). Ask it to point out areas where you’ve fallen into error (and check whether it’s right). Ask it what the major objections to your talk would be from an atheist/Muslim/agnostic.

At times I’ve asked AI for five pieces of feedback to make my message more accessible to those who are unchurched. I’ve used it to make my point headings more memorable. On occasion, when I’ve got to the point where my brain is turning foggy, I’ve uploaded the paragraph I’ve just written and asked ChatGPT the simplest of questions, ‘Does this make sense?’

I’m sure you can think of other ways you may or may not want to use AI to help you prepare a sermon. This list isn’t exhaustive. But I hope it helps you to start thinking about some of the Biblical principles involved, so that with wisdom you can make these decisions for yourself.

One last thing to mention is transparency. When I was pastoring a church, on the rare occasions I borrowed a sermon outline from another pastor, I’d say so in the introduction. Would anyone have known if I hadn’t? Probably not. Would it have violated my conscience to say nothing? Yes.

What would that look like with AI? I wouldn’t start every sermon with a caveat, ‘AI was used to come up with this illustration’ or ‘ChatGPT has refined some of the text of this talk’. I don’t think that’s the most helpful approach, in part because the topic is emotive and it reignites the debate every time.

Perhaps produce an AI-policy for your church, with an agreed standard: these are the areas where we think AI is appropriate in church life; these are the lines we will not cross.

If that seems too formal at this stage, maybe tell people once a term. Explain your thinking and reasoning.

Transparency is key, because it minimises the risk that people will feel deceived, reduces the possibility of misunderstanding, and honours God.

Some of the material from this article is taken from Pete's chapter on preaching from 'A Christian’s Guide to AI', which will be published by The Good Book Company in Oct 2026