When the Shepherd Didn't Write the Sermon

There's a difference between using a tool and outsourcing your calling. Most pastors know which one they're doing.

Last Sunday, somewhere in America, a pastor stood behind his pulpit and delivered a sermon he didn't write. Not all of it, anyway. Maybe not most of it. His congregation doesn't know. His elders don't know. He might not even be sure himself where his thinking ended and the machine's began.

He's not a fraud. He's not lazy. He's a man with 30 hours of work crammed into 20 available hours, a hospital visit on Saturday afternoon, and a sermon that needed to land by Sunday morning. So he opened ChatGPT, fed it his passage, and asked for help.

If you're a pastor reading this, I need you to hear something before we go any further: I'm not here to condemn that man. There's a decent chance that man is you. I've stood behind a pulpit. I know the weight of Sunday morning bearing down on a week that gave you nothing. According to the 2025 State of AI in the Church survey, 64% of pastors who preach now use AI in sermon preparation. That's up from 43% just one year earlier. Sixty-one percent of pastors report using AI weekly or daily. This is not an emerging trend. It has already emerged. The only question left is whether we'll be honest about it.

The Tool Question

Let's get the easy part out of the way first, because I think a lot of the anxiety around this topic comes from a failure to think clearly about categories.

AI is a tool. Full stop.

I know that sounds reductive, and I know there are important conversations to have about what kind of tool it is and what it's becoming. We'll have those conversations in this publication. But for the purpose of sermon preparation, we need to start with the obvious: pastors have always used tools.

You use commentaries. You use lexicons. You use sermon software that cross-references Scripture and pulls up word studies with a click. You use books written by dead theologians who did the hard exegetical work centuries before you were born. If you've ever borrowed an illustration from Spurgeon, you used another man's words to make a point to your congregation. Nobody called it a crisis of pastoral integrity.

The question has never been whether pastors use tools. The question is what role the tool plays and what role the shepherd plays.

When you open Matthew Henry's commentary, you're engaging with another mind that wrestled with the text. You read his conclusions, weigh them against the passage, argue with him in the margins, and then form your own position that you bring to your people on Sunday. The tool served the shepherd. The shepherd still did the shepherding.

AI can function in exactly the same way. I've used it to surface cross-references I hadn't considered. I've asked it to summarize scholarly positions on a difficult passage so I could evaluate them faster. I've had it identify structural patterns in Hebrew poetry that would have taken me an hour to trace manually. In each case, the tool served my engagement with the text. It didn't replace it.

But here's where we have to be honest with each other.

The Line Nobody Wants to Draw

There is a difference between using AI as a research tool and using AI as a ghostwriter. And that difference matters. Not because the tool is inherently sinful, but because the act of preaching is inherently personal.

When Paul wrote to Timothy, "devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching" (1 Tim. 4:13), he was not describing the delivery of content. He was describing the overflow of a life devoted to the Word. Two verses later he says, "Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress" (v. 15). The congregation is supposed to see the pastor's own progress. His own growth. His own wrestling.

This is not a minor point. The Reformed tradition has always understood preaching as more than information transfer. It is the means by which God speaks to His people through the called, gifted, and prepared minister of the Word. The Westminster Directory for Public Worship charges the minister to preach from his own study of Scripture, drawing on his knowledge of his people and their condition. There's a reason for that. The sermon is not just an essay delivered aloud. It is a pastoral act.

So when a pastor prompts ChatGPT to "write a 25-minute sermon on Romans 8:28 for a congregation dealing with grief" and then delivers that output with minor edits from the pulpit, something has broken. Not because the theology is necessarily wrong. AI can produce surprisingly competent Reformed theology on a good day. Something has broken because the congregation is receiving a product where they were owed a process. They came to hear their shepherd's voice, and they got a machine's approximation of it.

The line is not complicated, even though we want it to be. If you're using AI to help you study, think, research, and prepare, you're using a tool. If you're using AI to produce the thing your congregation thinks you produced, you're not using a tool. You're outsourcing your calling.

The Commentary Objection

I can hear the pushback already: "How is this different from using a commentary?" It's a fair question, and it has a clear answer.

When you use a commentary, you know you're engaging with another theologian's work. You cite it or you don't, but everyone in the room understands that pastors read books and those books shape their preaching. The commentary is a known category. It's part of the ecosystem of sermon preparation that congregations have always understood and accepted.

AI is different because it is invisible. When a pastor uses AI to generate sermon content, the congregation has no framework for understanding what just happened. They assume the words came from their pastor's study of the text. They assume the illustrations were drawn from his experience or reading. They assume the application was shaped by his knowledge of their lives. None of those assumptions may be true, and the pastor knows it.

The issue is not the tool. The issue is the assumption gap between what the congregation believes happened and what actually happened. And that gap is an integrity problem, not a technology problem.

What This Actually Requires

I'm not calling for pastors to swear off AI. That ship has sailed, and frankly, I don't think it needed to stay in port. AI is a powerful tool that can serve faithful ministry in real ways. What I'm calling for is something harder than abstinence. I'm calling for honesty.

First, be honest with yourself. You know the difference between studying with a tool and letting a tool do your work. Your conscience is not confused about this, even if you've been telling it to be quiet. If you cannot point to the place in your sermon where your own wrestling with the text shaped the message, you have a problem that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with your calling.

Second, be honest with your elders. If your church doesn't have a leadership conversation about AI in sermon preparation, it needs one. Not because you need permission to use a research tool, but because secrecy about tools and methods is corrosive to trust. Your elders should know how you prepare. They should know what role AI plays. And they should be able to hold you accountable for the integrity of your pulpit ministry.

Third, and this is the harder conversation: be honest with your congregation. I'm not suggesting you need a disclaimer before every sermon. But your people deserve to know, at a general level, how their pastor prepares to preach to them. If AI is part of that process, they should know it. Not because it's shameful, but because transparency is the foundation of pastoral trust.

Barna's research found that 49% of pastors are concerned about the loss of authenticity in preaching. Nearly a third of practicing Christians say they trust spiritual advice from AI as much as from their pastor. Those two statistics should keep every shepherd up at night. Not because AI is a threat, but because the church is losing the ability to distinguish between the authentic and the generated. And the pulpit is the last place that distinction should be allowed to collapse.

The Real Danger

The deepest danger of AI in sermon preparation is not that pastors will use a tool. It is that pastors will stop doing the work that the tool was supposed to assist.

Sermon preparation is formative. The hours spent in the text, the frustration of a passage that won't yield its meaning easily, the moment when the Spirit illuminates something you've read fifteen times before: that process shapes the preacher. It forms him. It is part of how God sanctifies the man who stands before His people. When you skip that process, you don't just get a worse sermon. You get a less formed shepherd.

Every preacher who has ever labored over a passage on Friday and felt it break open on Saturday knows exactly what I'm talking about. I have. That breakthrough was not just for your congregation. It was for you. It was God doing something in you so He could do something through you. No machine can replicate that process, and no machine should be asked to replace it.

Where We Go from Here

AI is not going away. Its capabilities are accelerating. By next year, every major Bible software platform will have AI integration that makes today's tools look primitive. The question for pastors is not whether they will encounter AI in their workflow. The question is whether they will be shepherds who use tools wisely or consumers who let tools use them.

Use AI to research. Use it to check your exegesis. Use it to find the quote you half-remember from a theologian whose name you've forgotten. Use it to identify patterns in the original languages. Use it to draft your bulletin and your email newsletter and your small group discussion questions. These are good and legitimate uses of a powerful tool.

But when you stand behind the pulpit and open your mouth to preach the Word of God to the people God has entrusted to your care, make sure it's you. Make sure you did the work. Make sure you wrestled with the text, sat in the difficulty, and came out the other side with something God gave you for your people. Not something a machine generated for a generic audience.

Your people can tell the difference. They might not be able to articulate it, but they can feel when their shepherd is speaking from the overflow of his own encounter with God. And they can feel when he isn't.

The machine is already in the church. The question is whether the shepherd is still in the sermon.