5 Ways I Use AI in Ministry
We’re in the middle of the AI revolution. Some say it’s bigger than the printing press. It seems just about everyone is scrambling to figure out how to use it. I am a relatively late adopter. I’ve never used ChatGPT, mainly because I’m being obstinate. But when I got an invite to the early version of Gemini, I decided to jump in.
There are a lot of great things you can do with AI, but the worst thing you can do is offload your entire thinking process to a machine, especially when we’re talking about the things of God. It makes mistakes. If you’re not careful, there are major privacy issues. Most of the time people can spot its writing from a mile away.
As I walk through how I use AI every week, please don’t just copy/paste whatever your LLM spits out. I taught for a year and my students did that. Many of them bragged about it. You’re not helping your kids or the people you lead. They need your voice and your interpretation, not what some machine decided would be the best answer based on the prompt you gave it. And please chill with the ChatGPT fliers. They were cool the first 5 times. Now I’ve seen hundreds. I’d almost take a Word doc full of clip art over that… almost.
Since I write a sermon just about every week, the cognitive load is higher than when I was in day-to-day kidmin. It would be incredibly easy for me to outline the main idea, pick a Bible story, list some verses, and then ask AI to put something together for me. And it would probably be ok.
However, I question if the Spirit is in that writing. It’s not in my voice. It’s not what I would have done. I didn’t wrestle with the text. I didn’t cover it in prayer. So even though it would be easier for me to ask Claude or Gemini to write for me, I do all my own writing. Even the writing for this post.
So, here are five ways that I do use AI in my ministry.
1. Copy Edit
I know I’m not perfect. I can miss a comma. I can miss a (link) tag in my posts. Sometimes my sentences are so convoluted, I don’t even know what I mean. I could hire a copy editor, but I’m a one-man show. I don’t have a couple hundred dollars lying around every month to pay someone to make sure everything I write is correct. Microsoft Word’s editor does ok, but it’s far from perfect. I’m looking at 10 blue underlines as I write this, and I’ll probably only change 2 of them before this post is done.
So, after I write my sermon, blog post, Facebook event, announcement on Planning Center, anything that’s going to the public, I ask AI to copy edit it for me. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than Word. It catches my comma splices, my double words, the times I change my thought halfway through a sentence and end up with a wayward “the.” Word doesn’t do any of that.
Even better, I can save my document and upload it to Claude. Then it will go through my document and mark all the changes using track changes in Word. Then all I have to do is accept or reject them. I wrote a letter to my church today, and it saved me hours of work.
If you’re creating something to go out to people, AI can help you clean it up and look professional.
2. Punch up Announcements
I’ve been writing church announcements since 2008. In an effort to build excitement, I have a bad habit of saying things like “Don’t miss it!” “It’s going to be awesome!” “You’re going to love it!”
All of that may be true, but for most things, it isn’t. Your Fall Festival or Egg Hunt probably won’t be the best ever, and to be totally honest there are better, more creative ways to motivate people to show up.
So, just like my sermons and blog posts, after I write my event copy, I paste it into AI. I have a conversation saved in Gemini called “Punch Up Copy.” It’s full of every announcement, email, text, or landing page I’ve written over the last 8 months. It knows how I write and what I expect. So, I use the prompt “Punch up this copy…” and then paste in what I want to say.
Within a few seconds it spits out basically what I meant to say but in a cleaner, more logical, exciting way. There are times when I need to push back and tell it to cut emojis and em dashes. It loves those, and I hate them. Nothing says, “hey, AI wrote this” more than a bunch of stacked sentences full of em dashes. So don’t be afraid to edit what it gives you and make it sound more like you.
Because I’ve used AI to punch up just about everything, it’s learned my voice and it sounds like one person wrote it instead of a robot. I’m hoping I can pass this task off to someone, and they can pick up this same conversation and keep it in the same voice. That will take way less time than training someone to write like me.
3. Align with best web practices
This is kind of niche to web development and blog writing, but it’s how I use AI. I don’t know what a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) description needs to be. And alt text is a chore. So instead of writing those, I ask AI to write them for me. It already has my post, so it knows what I’m talking about. But it also knows what search engines and social media algorithms are looking for to push something to the top of the stack. So instead of me staying on top of the latest trends, I ask AI to describe what I wrote.
You may not write a blog post, but you probably create web pages for your big events. You want people searching Google to be able to find your event without going three pages deep. (Who does that anyway?) Great SEO helps get your event in front of the people searching for it on any search engine.
As much as I say don’t just copy/paste what it writes, I’ll be honest here, most of the time that’s exactly what I do for these. I still read it just to make sure it’s not way off base, but for the most part, I don’t change a thing and keep going. SEO descriptions are only read by machines. Alt text is the exception, since screen readers speak it aloud to people who can’t see the image, but I don’t worry about it.
4. Help me find things I missed
There are blog posts and sermons where I finish and can tell something’s missing. So, I’ll take the draft and upload it to Claude and Gemini and ask what I’m missing. They can follow my logic like a good editor and point out ideas that can make my arguments stronger or clearer. Sometimes they point out problems or ask for clarification. Claude did that for this post once I finished the first draft, and the result was decidedly better. I also did it for that letter to the church I mentioned earlier. You can do this with just about anything you’re writing.
I like to upload to two different chatbots because they have different opinions and can point different things out. Sometimes they will advocate for opposite ideas, and when I told one what the other said, they both flip-flopped. With that in mind, you still need to decide which one you want to go with. AI can be good at giving advice, but it can’t decide for you. For now, that’s a purely human skill. I, personally, don’t want to offload that to a machine.
5. Brainstorm Ideas
There are times, especially when there’s a lot going on, that I just don’t have any fresh ideas. Whether it’s coming up with ideas for this blog, the perfect illustration for a lesson, or a verse for a sermon, AI can give me options. Sometimes, I’ll even be specific and tell it to give me 5 ideas.
I’ve seen posts in Facebook Groups asking people for ideas for a ministry area or event they’re doing. AI can do this for you extremely well and way faster than any social media post.
So that Claude can better understand me and where I’m coming from, I’ve uploaded a lot of my writing to it. The better it knows me, how I write, and what I’m looking for, the better ideas it can give.
Any of these LLMs can use your data however they want, including training data. That’s the privacy issue I mentioned earlier. You’ll need to check the privacy settings on whatever platform you’re using to keep your info with you. Either way, I still wouldn’t upload sensitive information to the platforms. It can easily get out and then you’re in a world of hurt. You don’t want to accidentally slip your congregation’s contact information out into the wild.
I’ve been using the paid version of Claude for three months as I finalize my next book, Next Level VBS, coming out on January 12. (Look for more info soon!) And I can say there is a marked difference in the output between the free and paid version. When I used the free version of Claude to review my sermons, my conversations were limited to one question a day and the output was surface-level. Upgrading to the paid version allowed me to get much better feedback and a lot more of it. I don’t have to wait 18 to 24 hours before asking another question.
So, if you’re going to upload a lot of information and ask for ideas, use the paid version. It’s worth the money and there are discounts for nonprofits from places like TechSoup.
I’m still learning how to use AI and trying new things every week. It gets better with every model and every update. So even if you used it 3 years ago and wrote it off, I encourage you to try again. It can do way more than replace Google.
If you want more information on how to use AI responsibly, I strongly encourage you to pick up Carey Nieuwhof’s new book AI and the Future Church. He talks all about the ethical issues, how to use AI responsibly, and what the church needs to look out for as AI becomes more a part of our lives.
How are you using AI?
We’re in the middle of the AI revolution. Some say it’s bigger than the printing press. It seems just about everyone is scrambling to figure out how to use it. I am a relatively late adopter. I’ve never used ChatGPT, mainly because I’m being obstinate. But when I got an invite to the early version of Gemini, I decided to jump in.