Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere these days. No, it’s not because Skynet has taken over the world and we’re not slaves to robot overlords. Rather, it’s because publically available tools like ChatGPT and Bard have made powerful AI more accessible and visible than ever before.
AI is not new. It’s been around in various forms for decades. Everything from your Alexa smart speaker to auto-corrected text messages use AI. However, these new tools take machine learning to the next level because of their ability to generate content and understand complex tasks. There are serious implications for this, but also a host of new opportunities.
So how can church leaders leverage these new tools for growth within their church? We’ve compiled a list of a few of the best uses for leaders like you to try out immediately.
Before you ask—no, this blog post wasn’t written entirely by ChatGPT. However, it’s clear to everyone that AI tools are becoming increasingly prominent and nearly unavoidable. So I will admit that this post is somewhat AI-assisted, but the basic ideas are still 100% human-originated.
1. Research
Church leaders are thought leaders. People in your congregation and community consider you an expert on faith (or at least they should). You share this expertise in several ways—probably the most common being the Sunday morning sermon.
But writing a unique and helpful sermon every week can be and should be exhausting. The research process alone is time-consuming and energy intensive. Even if you know what you would like to say, how do you find new ways to say it or new stories to back it up?
Artificial intelligence tools can be a big help in jumpstarting the research process. Maybe you have the perfect sermon illustration, but you can’t think of the speaker or book your example came from. AI is especially adept in helping you locate those elusive details.
2. Brainstorming
Related to research is your chance to use AI tools for brainstorming. These are two different approaches because research often looks for a specific thing, but brainstorming is usually more open-ended and blue sky.
There are any number of ways church leaders can use AI for brainstorming:
- Blog or online articles to write
- Podcasts to listen to
- Books to read
- Trending topics
- Ways to approach a challenging conversation
AI is like a good resource that you can bounce ideas off of all day long. Except this resource has read the entire internet and has a photographic memory. You still need to come up with the right prompts to spark the conversation, but AI is ready with an endless string of ideas. Then, it’s up to you to review these ideas and see what’s worth using.
3. Editing
When you’re creating content to share with others, you often need another perspective to give you feedback. Sometimes, that feedback might come from a machine. Artificial intelligence tools allow you to drop in your content for assessment—whether that’s grammatical or even just summarizing a particularly difficult sentence.
We’ve actually been using AI for editing for years now. Those squiggly red lines under misspelled words in Microsoft Word were a basic form of artificial intelligence that detected grammatical errors in your writing. Now, tools like Grammarly and more use machine learning to review and help you improve your content, or even suggest ways that it could be clearer or stronger.
AI-generated online content means that it’s easier than ever to fill the internet with more content at speed and scale. Unfortunately, that means some of this content is going to be done sloppily. I’d encourage you not to completely rely on AI for content creation. Instead, content collaboration is a much better avenue.
4. Automating
Good leaders focus on doing things that they’re best at. As a church leader, this hopefully includes building relationships with people and sharing God’s word through weekly messages. Unfortunately, running a church includes a bunch of more tedious administrative tasks. AI offers a solution for streamlining some of these tasks and saving you (and your entire team) time.
These are just a few things you can potentially us AI to automate at your church:
- Transcribing your text from a sermon video
- Generating a summary from sermon notes
- Turning a podcast episode into a video
- Creating headlines for videos based on context
- Adding new content to your website
- Analyzing data from digital channels
Some of these tasks were things that took you hours to do manually before. Some of these things weren’t even possible before because of the investment of time it would take. Now, these mindless tasks can be handled within minutes by an AI tool and you can get back to doing what you do best (and things that only a human is capable of).
5. Learning
There’s no reliable way to predict the future. God knows what’s coming—and the rest of us are just left guessing. However, it’s still fun to try and predict what the future holds with AI technology. There’s no doubt that it will impact our lives and culture somehow, but the question is how.
In the meantime, the best we can do is to stay open to learning. AI could likely disrupt the search engine industry. In a few years, we may turn to a Bard chat instead of a Google search to answer our deepest questions. That’s true for church leaders and churchgoers alike.
Therefore, it’s best for all of us to at least become more familiar with how this technology works. We have the opportunity not only to learn from AI’s vast encyclopedic knowledge but also to learn from the experience of using AI.
Remain Both Excited and Skeptical
When having conversations with leaders about AI, I invariably see them express two emotions simultaneously: curiosity and fear. We’re excited and interested in the power of artificial intelligence. However, we’re also anxious about what it means for us, mainly because represents an unknown.
This is a good thing. We should be eager to learn more about AI, but we should also foster a healthy skepticism of all the promises it offers. AI is not a magic bullet or a panacea for our problems. It’s capable of doing great things and terrible things without knowing the difference between the two. It’s all about our human intentions.
So as you explore the applications of various AI tools, remain both excited and skeptical. Be brave enough to dip your toe into the proverbial water, but take your time diving into the deep end.
Read more about AI and Church Leadership
- The Holy Grail of Outreach: How AI Can Transform Your Church’s Digital Presence
- 4 Ways Technology Enables the Mission of the Church
- 3 AI Prompts Church Leaders And Pastors Can Use With ChatGPT Or JasperAI To Produce Ministry-Related Content
- 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Help Church Leaders
- Pastors: Lead Not Your Church into Fear of AI | Christianity Today
- The Ultimate Guide to A.I., Pastors, and the Church – CareyNieuwhof.com
About the Author
Robert Carnes is former church communication and nonprofit marketing professional. He leads marketing strategy for GreenMellen, a digital marketing agency in Atlanta. He’s also the author of a few books about storytelling, including The Original Storyteller and The Story Cycle. For help with digital marketing or storytelling, reach out to him on social media @jamrobcar.