The Machine Is Already in the Church
64% of pastors use AI to write sermons. 73% of churches have no policy. The conversation is already happening. This publication exists to make sure the church is part of it.
Sixty-four percent of pastors use artificial intelligence to write their sermons.
Sit with that number for a moment. Not as a statistic to debate. As a reality to reckon with. More than six in ten men who stand behind pulpits in evangelical churches, men whose calling is to open the Word and feed the flock, are, to some degree, letting a machine help them do it. And in almost every case, the congregation has no idea.
Seventy-three percent of those same churches have no policy governing any of this.
The machine is already in the church. It has been for a while now. The question was never whether it would arrive. The real question, the one almost no one is asking seriously, is what we are going to do about it now that it has.
I am not here to sound the alarm. I am not a technophobe who has wandered into theology. I find artificial intelligence fascinating, and I think we are living through one of the most significant inflection points in human history. The printing press reshaped the church. The Industrial Revolution reshaped the family. AI will reshape everything. The church that treats this as someone else’s problem will find itself shaped by it anyway, just without having decided how.
What I keep seeing, in conversations with pastors and elders and seminary students, is one of two things. Either a reflexive defensiveness (we shouldn’t touch this, it’s dangerous, it’s not real ministry) or a casual adoption that never stops to ask whether there is anything at stake. Both responses fail the flock.
The pastor who refuses to think about AI because it feels like a threat is not protecting his congregation. He is just letting it happen without him. The pastor who uses it every week without asking what it means for his integrity, his calling, his relationship to the Word, is making a different kind of mistake. Neither one is shepherding.
There is a question underneath this that matters more than the technology itself.
What is a pastor for?
Not functionally. We can answer that easily enough with job descriptions and ordination vows. I mean theologically. What does it mean to be the shepherd of a particular flock, in a particular place, in a particular moment in history? What is the relationship between a man’s private wrestling with the text on Tuesday morning and the sermon he delivers on Sunday? What is at stake when the Word that is supposed to be dwelling richly in him is instead being processed by a model trained on the entire internet?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions this publication exists to answer, or at least to ask with the seriousness they deserve.
Here is what you will find here.
Posts that deal with the real intersections of AI and ministry. Not hypothetical futures, but present realities. Sermon preparation. Pastoral care and counseling. Congregational discipleship. Church policy. What it means to shepherd people who are being formed spiritually by tools you did not choose and may not understand.
Posts that are theologically serious without being academic. Written by a pastor for pastors. The working shepherd with twenty-three people in his counseling queue and a sermon to preach in four days does not need a journal article. He needs someone who has thought about this carefully to tell him, straight, what is actually at stake and what faithfulness looks like from here.
Posts that are honest about complexity. Some of this is hard. The lines are not always obvious. A pastor who uses AI to clean up his grammar and a pastor who lets AI write his sermons wholesale are doing very different things, even if the surface behavior looks similar. I will not pretend the distinctions are simple. But I will try to make them clearly.
Here is what you will not find here.
You will not find the argument that the faithful response to AI is disengagement. The machine is here. It is not going away. The question is not whether to engage. That ship has sailed, whether you know it or not. The question is how to engage faithfully.
You will not find Silicon Valley cheerleading. I am not interested in convincing you that AI is a gift from God that will supercharge your ministry. That may or may not be true depending on how you use it. Tools are not neutral, but they are also not destiny.
You will not find culture-war framing. AI is not the mark of the beast. It is also not the Second Coming of Productivity. It is a profound technology that is reshaping human life in ways we do not fully understand yet, arriving in our churches at a moment when almost no one is theologically prepared for it.
A word about what I believe.
I am a Reformed theologian, which means I take Scripture seriously as the final authority on everything it addresses. The questions we are dealing with: what it means to be human, what image-bearing means, what the relationship between language and truth is, what pastoral calling requires. These are not questions that Scripture answers in the form of an AI policy. But they are questions that Scripture addresses, and any serious account of AI in the church has to start there.
Faithfulness to the text comes before loyalty to any tradition. I will draw on the Reformed heritage where it illuminates, but I am not interested in defending confessional positions that may or may not speak to the present moment. I am interested in what the Bible actually says and what it means for the man standing behind the pulpit in 2026.
The machine is already in the church.
Your congregation is being discipled by algorithms, whether you know it or not. Your people are using AI for prayer prompts, devotionals, spiritual advice, and answers to theological questions. Some of them are sophisticated enough to know what they’re doing. Most of them are not. And the man whose calling is to shepherd their formation, to know the grief in the third row, to remember what he said to the widow six months ago, to speak the Word into the specific contours of a specific life, that man needs to think carefully about what is happening, and what faithful presence in this moment actually requires.
That is what this is for.
Glad you’re here.
Ken Duffy The Church in the Machine