This New AI Tool is Here to Help Pastors and Congregants
By Movieguide® Contributor
Pastors may have just received a huge boost in creating supplementary content through a new AI tool that turns sermons into additional resources that can be distributed throughout the church.
“We believe the loudest voice in a Christian’s life should be their local church pastor. The vision of Pulpit AI is to make the average local church pastor’s Sunday sermons the content their people feed on all week long,” Pulpit AI’s website says.
“People hear their pastor for 1 hour a week (at best), while social media has their attention for 2 (some even say 5) hours each day,” the website continues. “There is often a desire to develop custom, integrated discipleship materials, but many pastors and their teams don’t have the extra time to create them. We created Pulpit AI to help busy pastors and church teams unlock new ways to disciple, communicate with, and effectively reach your congregation and local community.”
Pastors can use the tool by feeding Pulpit AI a sermon and receiving devotionals, discussion questions, guides for small groups, newsletters, social media content and more based on the teaching found in the sermon.
“[The tool] is very helpful from a discipleship standpoint,” Pulpit AI co-founder Jake Sweetman told Fox News. “Pulpit AI just opens a huge door for content to be able to be distributed to our churches. I mean, we’re going to spend 15 hours a week writing a sermon. Obviously, we think it’s valuable, and it’s valuable enough to live on in [the congregation’s] minds just beyond the 90-minute Sunday service.”
While some may have concerns about using AI to generate church material due to its tendency to make up information, Pulpit AI was built with this in mind, ensuring that it only takes information that is present in the sermon it is given rather than generating anything new.
“The way our app is built, what you put into it is what it creates from,” explained co-founder Michael Whittle. “You’re uploading something that you have created. [Pulpit AI’s content is] based directly from the sermon and not pulling from a bunch of different sources around the internet. This isn’t something where you’re going in and having, you know, ChatGPT write you a sermon from scratch.”
“We’re not adding any commentary. We’re not adding any exegesis or anything to the app that would veer off into creating something that wasn’t the original intent of the person who wrote and uploaded the sermon to our app,” he added.
The tool has been effective during its beta testing, with pastors who used the tool receiving positive feedback from the congregation while personally appreciating the content it generates. Pulpit AI will become commercially available on July 22.
Movieguide® previously reported on the intersection of faith and technology:
As AI’s influence continues to grow, Christian leaders are exploring ways to use it in the church.
Ashley Ekmay, the lead researcher for Gloo and the Barna Group’s recent AI survey, said, “One of the questions we asked is, ‘Do you think God can work through AI?’ And we found a really large number of pastors who say, ‘God CAN work through AI.’”
According to the study, “19% of church leaders say they use AI on a daily or weekly basis,” while “27% of leaders are somewhat to very positive or excited when it comes to using AI in their church.”
The survey also found that, while many church leaders are comfortable using AI for things like graphic design or marketing, “pastors are far more cautious when using AI for theological tasks.”
“Only one in 10 pastors (12%) are comfortable using AI to write sermons,” Barna wrote. “Though two in five (43%) see its merits in sermon preparation and research.”
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