Notes from the First AI Sermon
ChatGPT doesn’t belong in the pulpit, and it's deeper than a mere skill issue.
Several days ago, hundreds of worshippers packed into St. Paul’s, a 19th-century neo-Gothic church in Bavaria, to witness a new kind of church. New worship band? Nope. New pastor? Not…exactly. This Protestant convention was about to witness the newest frontier in worship experiences. As the hundreds of attendees watched, an avatar of a black man with a beard appeared on the church’s video screen above the altar and began guiding congregants through worship: “It is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence.” Yep, this is happening: the sermon, and in fact, the entire service was mostly constructed by AI. Where even to start with this.
Let’s be real: some of the growth of AI is a good thing. If no one ever has to write a cover letter or pointless email again (although a response to a freaking mass shooting does not qualify as pointless, Vanderbilt), it’s a net good for the efficiency of our work. Yet, are sermons placeholder content? I’d argue that a disturbing plurality of American churches actually treat them like they are. It’s the postmodern era of worship—gimmicks rule, the future is what matters, and novelty is a viable one-for-one replacement for tradition. So, in the strangest of ways, did we ask for this? (Spoiler alert: not really.)
As churchgoers, we’ve come a long way from the Puritan days, when the church was the most intellectual part of most peoples’ weeks and they filtered into pews with their 12 kids to “have their misery explained to them.” As cities grew, so did the common man’s access to theological knowledge—I can pull up literally a thousand sermons with the click of two buttons on Google, which is a world that a medieval peasant could never have conceived of in their wildest dreams. Yet, the biggest congregations don’t meet in those churches—they meet in conference centers, which isn’t an indictment of conference centers, but it’s a point that maybe those giant Episcopal churches are having some relevance issues. So what’s keeping churches relevant? And what does any of this have to do with AI pastors?
In the American world of consumerism, where experience is marketable and personal faith is a product, the church becomes a business. As a pastor’s kid, I’ve experienced this firsthand, even though I’ve been blessed with many wonderful experiences through the church—there is a bottom line, and at some point, tangible growth has to be a priority. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this (at some level it’s just the way things have to be), but it’s worth thinking about where this mindset leads: churches that decide to bank on gimmicks are forced to continue relying on those gimmicks to keep their numbers.
This isn’t just corrosive to a church’s mission—in some cases, it can lead us to misunderstand the fundamental nature of the elements of worship. Worship music isn’t just consonant chords and aesthetically pleasing stage design—it’s a method by which we give a portion of our God-given gifts of music back to our Creator. A sermon isn’t just a rundown of a preacher’s thoughts on current events or a vaguely inspirational message or (as my tradition can more easily fall into) a mere intellectual exercise. It’s the sacred vocation of explaining and applying the word of God to His people, through which a faithful pastor is to be a mouthpiece.
And AI changes that.
Leave aside the arguments that it creates impersonal messages, creates no real connection with listeners, and gives off major notes of ‘uncanny valley’—that part’s obvious. Artificial intelligence cannot be an effective way to communicate the divine, because it’s just that: artificial. In the postmodern world, and to the congregants in Germany, it may seem like a novel thing that no one’s seriously going to use for this purpose. But using AI for this function isn’t just a wrong use of the pastoral space. It’s a misunderstanding of what a church is actually supposed to do with the Bible. Its lack of depth and flat affect (pun intended) mean that it robs those in the church of one of the few things that every church is supposed to provide: a community-informed, well-reasoned, plainly spoken, and real interpretation of the word of God to the hearer.
Theologian Charles Spurgeon, dubbed the ‘Prince of Preachers’ by historians, noted that the best preachers were those capable of “talk[ing] from experience instead of from theory.” At its core, AI is capable of nothing more than theory, no matter how finely tuned. In the modern era of worship, its novelty seems like a neat gimmick, in the sense of “we all like playing around with new things and putting them in new places to satiate curiosity.” Great. Well, it’s been tried. And it failed. And maybe this is a moment to think about exactly why that happened.
Go to a real church. Listen to real music. And now, because we have to spell it out, make sure the pastor’s real. AI can’t take us beyond the specialization of mere human intelligence. When it comes to explaining and applying the word of God, and this one should be obvious, that’s kind of a must-have.