AI Sermon Enhancement

AI  Sermon Enhancement

Some years ago, I did a church crawl in the United States and heard the celebrated Baptist pastor Rick Warren speak. One thing I learned among many, was that Rick had a volunteer preaching research team. He would email this team the passage he was going to preach on and the general thrust of the message. Their job was to find possible illustrations, applications and different perspectives. They did not write the message. That was Rick’s role, but they provided a range of ideas that would help him. He would use or not use the material.

In Australia I adopted such a principle in a more modest way. One man would dig up a range of illustrations or perspectives on difficult passages. I would often run bible passages past wise women in the congregation to see how the passage impacted them. This process was particularly helpful for the evening congregation especially as I was getting older and less in touch with their world. I would email out the specific passage and topic to about a dozen young adults who would often give me fantastically useful feedback and congregational members were sometimes amazed at how up to date I had become. If only they knew!!

Now I am retired and don’t have ready access such human resources, so I have sought AI assistance. Recently I was asked to preach, and the topic was ‘preacher’s choice’. I decided to see if I had in my files an old message that would be appropriate for the congregation. I found a message on the entire book of Ecclesiastes that I felt was strong enough to be repeated. Yet at the same time I remembered the wise words of my Moore College classmate, Graeme Toovey who had warned me that, ‘old sermons are like people: they must be born again’.

So, I reworked the message with the current congregation and their lives in mind. However, I realized that while I was happy with the theology and the application, my illustrations and general tone were locked in the voice of a man in his seventies. Now some of that is fine but to be fresh and relevant I needed to somehow place myself in their world.

So, taking a friend’s advice I pasted the message into Anthropic Claude. He said Claude was good because it could take a sermon length document. I asked Claude to do three things. First, I asked it to refresh the material for a young adult audience, then a women’s audience. Finally, I realized that the congregation had a not insignificant number of people from southeast Asia and I asked Claude to refresh from that perspective.

Within moments I had three different versions of my sermon. I stress it was still my sermon but there was a wonderful range of illustrations and application points that I would never have dreamed of. The different versions did not change the message but certainly gave me a host of ideas about how I could flavour it to make it more intelligible  and relevant to different age groups and ethnicities. I often had to struggle with myself as I reluctantly omitted illustrations from yesteryear that really resonated with me, but I knew needed to be far more current.

Is this a legitimate application of AI? I would be nervous if I simply asked AI to construct the message. Then I would be very apprehensive. But I am quite comfortable at asking AI to flavour a message for a specific audience after I have done the hard work of prayer, exegesis and application. I am comfortable for now anyway!!!

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