TL;DR: Carey Nieuwhof cautions pastors that relying on AI for sermon preparation can stunt spiritual growth, weaken authenticity, and erode authority, even as AI serves well for research.
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Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly the biggest technological disruption the church has faced in decades. For pastors, the allure is obvious: AI can outline a message in seconds, summarize complex commentaries, and even generate full manuscripts. But is this efficiency coming at a cost to your soul—and your sermon?
In a recent deep-dive into the ethics of AI in ministry, leadership expert Carey Nieuwhof issued a sobering reality check.
While he isn’t anti-tech, he is pro-human. In the recently published video, Nieuwhof argues that while AI makes a fantastic research assistant, it makes for a dangerous preacher.
If you are a pastor who writes and preaches sermons, here are the four specific warnings Nieuwhof gives about letting AI take the wheel in your sermon prep.
4 WARNINGS AGAINST USING AI FOR PREACHING FROM CAREY NIEUWHOF
1. It Stops You from “Wrestling” with the Text
According to Nieuwhof, the difficulty of sermon preparation isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. The “grind”—the hours spent reading, praying, staring at a blank screen, and wrestling with God over the meaning of a text—is where your spiritual formation happens.
When you outsource that struggle to an algorithm, you might get a finished product, but you bypass the process that shapes you into a man or woman of God. Nieuwhof warns that if you skip the hard work, you stunt your own growth. The sermon may be done, but the preacher is undone.
2. It Can Be Intellectually Dishonest
There is a fine line between research and theft. Nieuwhof points out that passing off insights generated by AI as if they were your own “Aha!” moments is a form of plagiarism.
When a congregation sits under your teaching, there is an unwritten social contract: they assume the words coming out of your mouth are the result of your study, your prayer life, and your heart. Standing in the pulpit and delivering a message generated by a machine—without disclosing it—violates that trust. As Nieuwhof puts it, it’s a form of theft that pastors need to take seriously.
3. Your Message Will Lose its Authentic Resonance
Have you ever heard a sermon that was technically perfect but felt hollow? Nieuwhof suggests that AI-written content often suffers from this “un-human” quality.
One of the reasons a message lands with power is because it comes from deep within the preacher. It resonates because it has been filtered through a human life, with all its pain, joy, and experience. An algorithm can mimic emotion, but it cannot feel it. Nieuwhof argues that audiences are intuitive; they can tell the difference between a word birthed from deep conviction and a script generated by predictive text. If the message didn’t move you during the week, it likely won’t move them on Sunday.
4. You Will Never Become a True Authority
This is perhaps the long-term danger that is easiest to overlook. True authority, Nieuwhof notes, comes from mastery. And mastery is the result of years of digesting ideas, reading widely, and synthesizing thoughts.
If you rely on AI to do the synthesizing for you—to tell you what the theologians say rather than reading the theologians yourself—you remain a novice. You become a curator of other entities’ intelligence rather than a cultivator of your own wisdom. Over time, this erosion of study habits prevents you from ever becoming a true authority on the Scriptures you are tasked to preach.
The Bottom Line For Carey
Carey Nieuwhof isn’t telling pastors to delete ChatGPT. He acknowledges AI is a powerful tool for research, administrative tasks, and brainstorming. But when it comes to the sacred task of dividing the Word of truth, he urges caution.
Use AI to find a quote, but don’t let it find your message.
Let the text do its work on you, so you can do your work for them.
