I don't remember what kind of preacher my dad was while I was growing up. I went to church often, sometimes three times a week for 18 years, but I can’t remember a single sermon he preached. Subconsciously, I'm sure it's in there somewhere, and I'm sure it’s influenced who I am today, but even now, as I write this, I cannot recall anything specific.
Shortly after Heather and I were married, we moved to Halifax, and shortly after that, my parents also found themselves in the same area. It was the first and only time we've lived in the same place as adults. Once again, I had my dad as my pastor. Unlike the sermons many years before, I remember these sermons. His messages were unlike those of other ministers I’d heard. He wrote in a way that only comes with decades of honing his craft. It was the first time I realized how good of a preacher he was.
During those five years when we were all in the Halifax area together, two books often sat on my dad's desk. One was from the Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel called The Trial of God, and the other was from Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann titled Finally Comes the Poet.
I suspect both writers, in their own ways, helped instill a love of the Old Testament stories for my dad, and his sermons often reflected that. It is a love that he passed on to me. It wasn't until I read Brueggemann's Finally Comes the Poet that I understood how influential this book must have been for him. One of Brueggemann's central insights is that preaching requires the preacher to speak in an alternative mode of communication — ministers are tasked to be poets in a world of prose.
This is how Brueggemann puts it:
"To address the issue of a truth greatly reduced, requires preachers to be poets that speak against a prose world. The terms of that phrase are readily misunderstood. By prose I refer to a world that is organized in settled formulas, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos. By poetry, I do not mean rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson's fastball, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace. Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism, the only proclamation, I submit, that is worthy of the name preaching. Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal clarification. It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing, nor is it a soothing good humour.
It is, rather, the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rules of this age. The preacher has an awesome opportunity to offer an evangelical world: an existence shaped by the news of the gospel. This offer requires special care for words, because the baptized community awaits speech in order to be a faithful people."
I love this. It clearly reflects the effort my dad put into his craft. When in front of a congregation, Dad was never animated, never raised his voice or used exaggerated hand gestures. He was not blessed with a dynamic charisma. But the cadence of his speech, his relationship with the biblical text, and the words he so carefully chose demonstrated his dedication to this calling. A calling that AI programs could never replicate. There were no shortcuts! The preparation required to be a preacher was the priority, and the churches he served benefitted from that.
This is what I believe large language model chatbots such as ChatGBT and Gemini, which can produce sermons in seconds, will do to preaching:
First, they will produce mediocre to moderately decent sermons for ministers to merely read from week to week. From a structural standpoint, the sermon will likely be well-written and organized, and in this sense, it may be better than some over-stretched pastors could do on their own. The lessons within that sermon will direct the listener to the rather obvious or, in some cases, awkward application of that text to everyday life.
Second, because the research capabilities of these AI programs are already so advanced, they will alleviate the pressure for pastors to be constantly learning, constantly studying and engaging with scripture. Instead, in that weekly address, the congregation and in many cases the pastor may be exposed to something once widely known about a biblical text, but largely forgotten.
For most modern churches, this ChatGBT scenario sounds a lot like business as usual. Progressive churches will still primarily focus on inclusion and love of neighbour and Evangelicals will focus on their personal relationship with Christ and salvation. Fundamentalist churches will discuss the authority and truth of the Bible, Charismatic congregations will centre around the Holy Spirit, and Catholics will continue to speak on good works.
While this depiction is a gross overgeneralization, it will influence what AI produces. Pastors will quickly learn not to ask ChatGPT to just write a generic sermon, but to ask the program to design it for their particular stream of Christianity. The ever-improving ability of these AI programs to be more precise in giving one what is asked for will inevitably reinforce these ideological stereotypes. People will come to their particular church expecting the expected and go home unsurprised. Sermons produced by AI will deliver prose in abundance to a world that desperately needs to hear from the poet.
People need to come to a service with a sense of anticipation, of delving into the unknown. To be that poet/prophet that Brueggemann calls for is a monumental task for clergy. It's the task God has called them to do, and it’s the number one thing a church needs from its pastor.
But this critical work cannot be done if pastors are constantly exhausted from being dragged from one crisis to another. It cannot be done if they are pressured by congregations into the job of full-time social worker, accountant, and community organizer. All of these extra roles increasingly seem to be the norm in many churches. When those tasks are expected to be the priority, an uninspired AI sermon may be a better alternative to an uninspired human one, for there will be little differentiation between the two. The prophetic calling of the preacher is greatly diminished. “Reduced speech,” writes Brueggemann, “will lead to reduced lives.”
After six days of living in a world of reductive prose, the people of the church should enter the sanctuary expecting something new and life-giving. They should expect to be moved rather than entertained. They should expect to receive wisdom rather than knowledge, inspiration rather than life advice.
The sermon should be the pinnacle moment each week in the life of the church. It should be the culmination of all that has come before. After the songs have been sung and the prayers have been said, finally comes the poet, and the prophetic word of God will once again be heard.
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