Why Pastors Should Question AI for the Sake of Their Souls

Imagine a robber breaking into your house in the middle of the night. To distract your only line of defense—your dog—the robber throws a package of bologna on the ground. While your guard dog gnaws away at that tasty treat, the robber quietly goes about ransacking your home and stealing the things you hold most dear.

Neil Postman uses this metaphor in Technopoly (1992) to underscore the damaging effects technology had on humanity in the late twentieth century. In his illustration, the robber is modern technology. The bologna is the set of questions we tend to ask about technology. And we are the dogs—happily chewing on processed meat while technology robs us of what is essential to human life.

As a pastor, I’ve often overheard other pastors and influential Christian thinkers discussing the potential benefits and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. These conversations are usually prompted by questions like:

1. How can generative AI reduce my sermon prep time?
2. Will my sermons be more memorable if AI helps craft sharper points?
3. Can AI eliminate mundane tasks—answering emails, drafting responses to congregants—and free me up for more “important” ministry work?

In keeping with Postman’s illustration, these questions are like the house dog munching on a fresh package of Oscar Mayer. They are the very questions the robber wants us to ask. Meanwhile, the pastor’s soul is being quietly plundered by the technology we’re so eagerly evaluating.

Why These Questions Are a Diversion

To understand why these common questions are diversions from what we should be asking, we need to examine them one by one.

Take the question, “How can generative AI decrease the amount of time I spend on sermon prep?” Embedded in the question is a thick web of assumptions—most notably, that sermon prep currently requires referencing too many sources. That there are more important matters pastors need to work on in order to be effective. That sermon prep is bogged down by tedious, cumbersome tasks like reading books, consulting commentaries, wrestling with difficult concepts, and plumbing lexicons for meaningful word studies. In other words, the assumption is that sermon preparation should be made more efficient.

Or consider the second question: “Will my sermon points be more memorable if I use something like Claude to sharpen them?” Again, the assumption is revealing. It assumes that people would benefit more from sermon points that are more precise—and that AI can make them so. It assumes precision is always spiritually beneficial. And because AI can tailor communication to demographics using large-scale data harvesting, the underlying assumption is that sermons can be more effective if they are hyper-targeted.

Look also at the third question pastors often ask: “Can AI eliminate mundane tasks that bog down ministry hours—like answering routine emails or fielding basic theological questions?” This assumes that mundane questions from the congregation are an impediment to “real” ministry. That ministry would be better if it were freed from the messy, slow, human affairs of broken people. That is, pastoral work ought to be expedient.

The Baseline Assumptions Revealed

These three baseline assumptions—efficiency, precision, and expediency—reveal what we have come to prize as human beings—and especially as pastors and church leaders. At a core level, many of us value: efficiency over cumbersome study; precision over humanly crafted pastoral communication; and expediency over the slow, messy, personal work of ministering to real people.

This is what Neil Postman said was the defining feature of a Technopoly—a culture that had lost the ability to think outside of the values and assumptions embedded within technology.

In other words, these questions are simply asking whether this new technology is a more efficient, more precise, and more expedient tool. We are asking whether generative artificial intelligence is more powerful than the tools that came before it.

And the answer, of course, is yes. AI will make pastoral duties more efficient, more precise, and more expedient.

That is why these are diversionary questions. They keep us occupied and impressed while the technology itself quietly robs us of what is essential for cultivating the kind of godly soul required of any minister of the gospel. As Postman warned, “Through it all, the question of what is being undone [has] low priority—if it [is] asked at all.”

Focused on diversionary questions, we never stop to ask whether anything is spiritually detrimental about the time-saving technology itself.

My Experience With AI—and the Cost I Didn’t Expect

I am personally familiar with the benefits of generative AI. I first discovered ChatGPT’s ability to edit my sermon manuscripts. After years of preaching, I know my final sermon manuscripts need to be exactly thirteen pages to fit within our 30–35-minute window. My first drafts, however, usually run sixteen to twenty pages.

Before using ChatGPT, editing those drafts—cutting, shaping, tightening—took at least ninety minutes, often two hours. Saving that time seemed like an obvious gift.

So, I began pasting my manuscripts into ChatGPT, asking it to help me remove 800–1,000 words. Within seconds—seven seconds—it produced line-by-line suggestions showing where to tighten, which illustrations were unnecessary, where cultural notes were too long, and which applications wouldn’t land on my upper-middle-class, predominantly white, conservative-leaning congregation. Overnight, my editing time dropped from two hours to twenty minutes.

But as I continued using ChatGPT, I noticed something happening inside me.

Before AI, when editing felt difficult and I couldn’t decide what to cut, I would take short walks in the Colorado afternoon and pray—asking God for wisdom, clarity, and discernment about what our church needed to hear. Those weekly walks increased my intimacy with God, strengthened my dependence on him, and reminded me that preaching is a spiritual calling, not a mechanical task.

Once ChatGPT entered the process, that part of my weekly rhythm disappeared.

Martin Luther’s hymn echoed in my mind: “The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him who with us sideth.”

God had equipped me—by his Spirit—to think, write, edit, and deliver sermons. And here I was outsourcing that Spirit-enabled work to a machine.

I also discovered another expedient function of ChatGPT. As a pastor, you often get critical emails from people who disagree with leadership decisions or take exception to points made in a teaching. I quickly discovered that with a quick copy and paste into ChatGPT and a prompt to respond in a pastorally warm, casual, but thoughtful way, I could circumvent a difficult conversation altogether.

I realized, however, that I was breaking a cardinal rule I had learned from my mentor years before: all conflict should be handled face-to-face, as human beings, over a cup of coffee or tea. Not only was this approach a signal of respect, but it had many practical benefits, like allowing time to think through thoughtful responses, time to pray for softening of hearts, time to find common ground, and space for congregants to re-examine their assumptions. It reinforced that pastoral ministry is an embodied profession. Fortunately, I was already questioning the benefit of generative AI before fully utilizing ChatGPT to respond to emails, but in the past, I would have immediately called the person and scheduled a time to meet.

What troubles me most is not that generative AI “works,” but that it only works until the moment pastoral ministry must be exercised in real time, face-to-face, without prompts or buffers (i.e. how pastoral ministry has been conducted for two millennia). A tool that smooths written communication can quietly weaken the very relational and spiritual muscles required when a pastor must speak, listen, and discern in the presence of another human being.

The Spiritual Detriment of Artificial Intelligence

I noticed other changes too. The classic Christian virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—were being slowly chipped away in my soul and replaced by the virtues of machine technology. Efficiency, precision, and expediency were beginning to unravel the cardinal virtues God had formed in me.

When I asked ChatGPT for advice on responding to a critical congregant email, I was no longer seeking godly wisdom from friends, elders, or fellow pastors. I was outsourcing prudence.

Likewise, instead of treating individual members of my congregation as persons—people who deserve patience, fairness, and genuine pastoral care—I began treating them as obstacles to be removed. In doing so, I found myself sacrificing the virtue of justice.

My fortitude probably took the greatest hit. Fortitude is the courage and strength to face difficulties head-on. But why press into a hard conversation or engage conflict patiently when I could summarize the situation to ChatGPT and receive a smooth, articulate, conflict-neutralizing reply in fifteen seconds or less? The very muscles of courage that ministry requires were slowly atrophying.

Lastly, temperance—moderation and balance in desires and pleasures—was unraveling as well. A wiser, healthier approach to AI would have required temperance: principled decisions, careful boundaries, and firm lines around when AI should and should not be used. Such boundaries would protect the desires that should remain central to pastoral life: prayer, study, Scripture meditation, and personal and embodied shepherding.

This is what I find so troubling about the kinds of questions we ask as pastors when we think about generative AI. The questions we typically ask show that we have nearly lost the ability to ask critical questions of technology. We assume outright that, “Of course, we should be more efficient!” We take for granted that, “Of course, our work should be expedient and eliminate wasteful time.” We forget that, “Of course, ministry should be challenging and time-consuming!” Meanwhile, the pastor’s soul is being quietly plundered by the technology we’re so eagerly evaluating.

The Myth of Technological Neutrality

Many people I deeply respect disagree with my assessment of AI. “AI is just another tool. A computer can be dangerous only if the person using it is dangerous. The technology itself is neutral; how it is used by humans makes it good or bad.”

This sentiment, however, is specious. Again, Postman reminds us:

Technological change…is ecological… One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment… The same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none…This is how the ecology of [technology] works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.

Think about a household adding a television for the first time. The household ecology is completely changed. How the household spends time is changed. How parents communicate is altered. How dinners are prepared and enjoyed is modified. How members of the family think changes.

The same holds true for pastoral ministry and AI. The more I relied on ChatGPT, the more the balance tipped toward efficiency, expediency, and precision—and away from slow formation, patient prayer, and relational ministry. I spent less time studying Scripture, asking colleagues for help in crafting illustrations, seeking wisdom from older pastors on navigating hard conversations, and more time completing tasks, plowing through emails, and refining lessons.

What is more, I think it is important to ask whether AI is even a tool, classically understood.

Ask yourself: have you ever heard of a person falling madly in love with a tool—say a broom or a calculator? Yet, there are dozens of accounts of young men who have fallen in love with their chatbots. This concept even inspired the 2013 movie Her. It is also worth asking whether you know of anyone who has been advised by their miter saw or scissors to take their own life and hide suicidal ideations from parents and counselors. Yet, there are lawsuits in process right now against OpenAI for its liability in the suicide of sixteen-year-old Adam Raine.

The Real Questions We Should Be Asking

So, what kind of questions should we be asking of artificial intelligence?

First and foremost, we must ask whether this technology is shaping us into Christlikeness or merely reshaping us into the image of technology itself. Simply put, does Generative AI make us more holy, courageous, prayerful, contemplative, patient, kind, joyful, respectful, peaceful, moral, loving, compassionate, and honest in our work?

Personally, I think this question is rhetorical. We know the answer. But I suspect many of us who have used generative AI are afraid of the answer and the yoke of inconvenience it will place back on our shoulders. And because we have been so shaped by this technology, and seen its benefits, we are unwilling to plumb the depths of the questions we should be asking.

But consider Christ. Jesus could have efficiently saved humanity by circumventing humanity altogether. Instead, he chose to work through inefficient human beings. He traveled, walked, preached, and reasoned with real people in real places. He used the craft of preaching and the slow work of discipleship to bring salvation to the nations.

Jesus also could have broadcast the message of salvation with perfect expediency—inscribing it across the sky for all to read. Instead, he chose messengers who struggled to balance their time, who faltered, who doubted, who misunderstood him repeatedly, and who often failed in their endeavors to carry out what they promised to do.

He could have spoken with crystal-clear, divine precision from heaven itself. Instead, he entrusted the gospel to finite, broken, sinful human beings whose sermons would not always be perfect, whose arguments would not always follow flawlessly, whose illustrations would sometimes fall flat. Christ intentionally built his church through human beings—through their sins, pitfalls, foibles, and finitude.

To be clear, I am not arguing that Scripture forbids the use of generative AI, nor do I wish to bind consciences unnecessarily around issues which are adiaphora. My concern is not prohibition but formation—namely, whether, in exercising our freedom, we are doing so with proper discernment about what kind of pastors this technology is shaping us to become.

Do We Want to Be Human Beings?

The most outspoken proponents of AI are clear about their goals and intentions. Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt contends that by building AI systems “we are making God.” Rothblatt’s opinions are echoed by transhumanist Elise Bohan and Google’s Ray Kurzweil.

This recognition, among others, motivated AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum to scrap his primitive AI program ELIZA. Convinced he was not merely conversing with a machine, he concluded that the effects AI has on the way people perceive the world were too uncertain to continue his research.

Human beings are not like technology in many ways. We are emotional, spiritual, embodied, experiential, finite creatures. And our current technological ecology hampers these vital components of human nature.

Pastoral ministry is one of the few remaining vocations that deeply values the multi-faceted complexity of human beings as embodied, emotional creatures. Most pastors—though the number is declining—still understand that embodied presence in worship is essential to spiritual maturity. Pastors still understand that our spirituality is more than gaining intelligence by means of information. They still grasp that maturity in the faith requires time, process, discipline, failure, and repentance.

Pastoral ministry is one of the few remaining vocations that values humanity qua humanity. As AI enthusiasts are clear about their intentions to build God in a box, will we as Christians take them at their word and turn away from the ever-present temptation to be gods ourselves?

Image Credit: "Andreas Reading," by Edvard Munch. Oil on board. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped by Modern Reformation.