Pastors find ChatGPT 'lacks a soul' to write sermons

Pastors have sought help from a higher power to write sermons only to find that ChatGPT ‘lacks a soul’ to create empathetic speeches used during worship services.

Several preachers put their faith in the chatbot, creating some 1,000-word scripts that they read to their congregations, and while attendees were unaware the words came from an AI, the lack of emotion was apparent.

Rachael Keefe, pastor of Living Table United Church of Christ in Minneapolis, tested the technology, noting: ‘While the facts are correct, there’s something deeper missing.’

A rabbi in New York, Joshua Franklin, recently told his congregation at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons that he would deliver a plagiarized sermon but avoided revealing it was generated by ChatGPT.  

Upon finishing, Franklin asked the worshippers to guess who wrote it, they appeared stumped, and then he said AI wrote it.

‘Now, you’re clapping — I’m deathly afraid,’ Franklin said when several congregants applauded. 

‘I thought truck drivers were going to go long before the rabbi in terms of losing our positions to artificial intelligence.’ 

ChatGPT is a large language model trained on a massive amount of text data, allowing it to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt.

It can simulate dialogue, answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.

It responds to text prompts from users and can be asked to write essays, lyrics for songs, stories, marketing pitches, scripts, complaint letters and even poetry.

Hershael York, a Kentucky pastor who is also dean of the school of theology and a professor of Christian preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told AP: ‘It lacks a soul — I don’t know how else to say it.’

Lazy pastors might be tempted to use AI for this purpose, York said, ‘but not the great shepherds, the ones who love preaching, who love their people.’  

Keefe’s feelings of the AI mirror those of the Kentucky pastor — she said an ‘AI cannot understand community and inclusivity and how important these things are in creating church.

Douglas Federhart, who attends Keefe’s church, said the sermon was not terrible, but the idea of a computer system writing words designed to bolster faith is ‘a little bit eerie.’

He continued stating that he prefers Keefe’s sermons over ChatGPT’s because it ‘comes from an actually living being.’

One issue that stems from using AI to write sermons is the technology is not alive, according to pastors and their congregations. 

It does not understand the daily trials and tribulations humans face, nor does it possess a ‘heart or f compassion.’

Todd Brewer, a New Testament scholar and managing editor of the Christian website Mockingbird, wrote in December about an experiment of his own — asking ChatGPT to write a Christmas sermon for him.

He was specific, requesting a sermon ‘based upon Luke’s birth narrative, with quotations from Karl Barth, Martin Luther, Irenaeus of Lyon, and Barack Obama.’

Brewer wrote that he was ‘not prepared’ when ChatGPT responded with a creation that met his criteria and ‘is better than several Christmas sermons I’ve heard over the years.’

‘The A.I.even seems to understand what makes the birth of Jesus genuinely good news,’ Brewer added.

Yet the ChatGPT sermon ‘lacks any human warmth,’ he wrote. ‘The preaching of Artificial Intelligence can’t convincingly sympathize with the human plight.’

In Brentwood, Tennessee, Mike Glenn, senior pastor for 32 years at Brentwood Baptist Church, wrote a blog post this month detailing his view on AI taking over sermon writing.

After being told a machine could replace him, Glenn was not sold — he said, ‘AI ‘will never be able to preach a decent sermon.’

‘When listening to a sermon, what a congregation is looking for is evidence that the pastor has been with Jesus,’ Glenn shared in the blog.