AI Can't Preach

By Mike Glenn

AI Can’t Preach

Photo by Reet Talreja on Unsplash

These days, a doctor probably didn’t read your X-ray. AI did. That credit card application you submitted? Scanned by AI and then, approved or denied according to a sophisticated algorithm. Again, no human being was involved. AI did it. AI is driving cars, writing emails and predicting the ups and downs of the stock market. According to futurist prophets in countless articles and panel discussions, AI will soon be doing everything. 

Including preaching sermons. 

With adequate access to all my previous sermons, teaching plans and other writings, I simply need to give AI a topic, and AI will scan all the relevant material to produce a coherent sermon. The communications team of the church where I was pastor did this for me – as a joke – from time to time. AI was a new toy for everyone and once they knew the subject for the coming Sunday, they would tell AI to scan my content and write a sermon. Then, they would proudly walk into my office, hand me the AI produced material and say, “Here’s your sermon for Sunday.” I would read it and honestly, it wouldn’t be a bad sermon. The words belonged to me. I remembered some of the paragraphs from previous sermons on related topics and while the words were all in the right place, it’s still not a good sermon. 

Why not? Because I’m not the same person who wrote those words. I’ve changed since then. I don’t think the same way about certain things like I used to. I no longer use some of the phrases AI picked up from earlier sermons. I’ve learned some things about how people listen to a sermon, how they consider truth claims and respond to calls for action. In short, I’m a different preacher than I was a few years ago. While AI did pick up a lot of related material on the topic of the coming sermon, AI left out one of the most important parts of the sermon. 

The preacher. 

Phillip Brooks famously said preaching is truth through personality. According to Brooks, a sermon occurs when the Scriptures are pressed through the preacher’s life and into the context of their congregation. The church counts on their pastor to take the Scripture before the Lord on their behalf and wrestle with all the nuances of the passage and then show up on Sunday morning and say, “This is what this passage means for us right here, right now.” 

AI has no experience. AI has no soul and that means AI can’t preach. A sermon happens when the preacher encounters the Word of God and then tells someone else about that encounter. Leave out any part of that process – word, encounter, or preacher – and you don’t have a sermon. You might have an article. You might have a blog post. You might have a lot of fodder for social media. You might have any number of things, but you won’t have a sermon. 

On any given Sunday morning, the church looks at their pastor and they want to know one thing: has our pastor been in the presence of Jesus this week? Has our pastor talked to Jesus? And if they did talk, what did Jesus say? In particular, what did Jesus say to us? What did Jesus say about us? AI can tell us what the preacher said earlier about any number of topics. What AI can’t do is tell us how the Spirit of God is dealing with the preacher right now. AI can’t tell us how God is dealing with the congregation at this moment. The best AI can do is go into the refrigerator of memory and pull out leftovers to be warmed up again. The congregation deserves more than that. The congregation deserves a fresh cooked meal. 

The pastor encounters the Word and then, in their sermon, tries to bring the church to that same encounter. This is the moment when the Spirit of God breathes new life into people and churches. This is the sermon. This is what needs to be said now. 

For some mysterious reason, God has chosen to reveal His truth through the human experience. Ultimately and supremely, God became human in the person of Jesus Christ. Every time the good news is proclaimed, the miracle and mystery of the incarnation happens again. In some small way, a human life is filled with the life-giving Spirit of Christ and that Spirit is shared whenever the story of Jesus is told. 

AI may have found all the right words, but AI will never have the Spirit of Christ. AI will never know for itself that Jesus is alive. That’s why AI will never write a sermon. AI doesn’t know. Just because you can play all the right notes on a piano, that doesn’t make you a musician. There’s more to music than right notes. Just because you have all the right words, that doesn’t make you a preacher. 

There’s more to preaching than just words. 

AI doesn’t have that…and it never will.