Surprise, surprise: it doesn’t always go as expected. Some are wary of this brave new world.
The Wall Street Journal talked with some Protestant pastors who are learning that the hard way. (Gift article):
On a Saturday afternoon about 20 hours before he was due to preach, Darrell Stetler II sat behind a two-monitor workstation crammed into the sound booth of his church, a slide deck glowing on one screen and ChatGPT open on another.
A sermon titled “Forged,” part of a summerlong journey through the Book of Proverbs, was taking shape somewhere between his own notes and a handful of AI chatbots.
When he opened Claude, it greeted him by name: “Back at it, Disciple-maker.”
Stetler has spent more than two decades building Oklahoma City’s Bible Methodist Church, where he is lead pastor, largely from nothing. He is also part of ChatGPT’s top 1% of users, runs a Facebook group of 500 pastors experimenting with the technology and has built a tool that can spit out dozens of sermon illustrations in seconds.
Yet few pastors sound more AI-wary than Stetler. “This AI does not enjoy what it finds,” he said. “It cannot love it.”
The wariness coexists with real financial pressure. Stetler, a married father of seven, makes $600 a week, plus a $1,500 monthly housing stipend that is less than his housing costs. His church keeps about two months of reserves. He takes construction jobs on the side, on top of a small side business creating resources, such as curriculum, for other pastors. A sermon used to take him 10 to 15 hours to prepare; a chatbot doing first-pass research and phrasing shaves off several of them.
He said the time he saves goes toward people. Earlier that day, he had sat at the hospital bedside of a congregation member. Halfway through his sermon prep, his phone rang again: another hospital visit request. Those hours, he said, are what the AI is buying back.
Half of all pastors say they use AI for brainstorming or idea generation, according to the Barna Group, a firm that studies U.S. faith trends. And roughly a quarter use AI to help write their sermons, up from 12% in 2024. The trend has drawn theological pushback all the way to the Vatican: Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV warned clergy that to give a true homily is to share faith. Artificial intelligence, the pope said, can’t do that.
Stetler, 45, has more or less made peace with the tension. He quoted a passage from Isaiah 29:13 condemning hypocrisy—This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me—as a kind of warning label for his own habits. Once, mid-prep, Stetler recalled, ChatGPT signed off a quirky reply: “Praying for you as you preach,” the chatbot wrote. Stetler laughed out loud. “No you’re not,” he thought.
Related: Pope Leo: Don’t use AI to compose homilies
