Should Pastors Use AI to Write Sermons?

What the data shows

Whatever a pastor decides personally, AI is already in the study. According to Barna Group / Gloo, 2026 (fielded late 2025), 87% of Protestant pastors now use AI in ministry in some form — only 13% say they never touch it. And sermon writing is one of the fastest-growing uses of all.

24% of pastors now use AI to write or edit sermons — double the 12% who did in early 2024.

That is not an outlier figure. A separate national survey of church leaders (AiForChurchLeaders.com with Exponential) found that 64% of preaching pastors use AI somewhere in sermon preparation, that 91% of church leaders support AI use to some degree, and that 61% now use it weekly or daily — up from 43% the year before. Barna's breakdown of what pastors actually do with it is telling: brainstorming leads at 50%, followed by graphic design (37%), biblical and theological research (36%), writing small-group questions (34%), and administrative work (34%). In other words, most of the adoption is happening upstream of the pulpit, in research and preparation, not in the moment of proclamation.

The people in the pews, however, are divided. Barna/Gloo found that 34% of practicing Christians — and 30% of U.S. adults — already say AI's spiritual guidance is "just as trustworthy" as a pastor's, and roughly half would trust AI with their own spiritual growth. At the same time, 83% of practicing Christians worry AI could misinterpret Scripture, and 73% fear that leaning on it could lead people away from the faith. So a preacher stands before a congregation where some members would happily hear an AI-assisted message and others would feel quietly betrayed to learn a machine had a hand in it. That split is exactly why the how matters as much as the whether.

The case for using AI in sermon prep

The strongest argument for AI in the study is stewardship of time. A faithful pastor's week is crowded with hospital visits, counseling, funerals, meetings, and the thousand small crises of shepherding real people. Anything that compresses the mechanical parts of preparation — pulling every cross-reference on a theme, surfacing the historical background of a city like Corinth, drafting three possible outline structures to react to — hands those hours back to the work only a pastor can do. As Barna's Daniel Copeland observed, pastors "are using it to prepare for ministry, not to replace what happens when they're actually with people."

Used this way, AI is a research accelerant and a thinking partner, not a ghostwriter. It can:

Speed up research and cross-referencing. Instead of paging through concordances for an hour, a pastor can gather every passage on grace, mercy, or the fear of the Lord in seconds, then do the discerning himself. This is why "biblical and theological research" sits near the top of pastors' actual uses.

Break a blank page. Brainstorming is the single most common pastoral use for a reason. An outline you disagree with is often more useful than a blank screen — it gives you something to push against and refine into your own structure.

Organize and tighten. AI is genuinely helpful for turning a sprawling set of notes into a clean outline, suggesting transitions, and trimming a message that has run long — the editorial grunt work, not the message itself.

Many respected voices frame this as ordinary faithfulness. The Gospel Coalition's essay "Christians Can Give Two Cheers for AI" treats it as a morally-neutral tool under the stewardship mandate, and church-tech leader Kenny Jahng argues, "Rather than fearing AI, churches must see it as an ally in amplifying gospel reach." The printing press, the study Bible, and Logos software were each met with suspicion in their day; used wisely, each ended up serving the Word rather than diluting it.

The case against — and the real risks

The case against is not fear of technology. It is a set of specific dangers that grow the closer AI gets to actually composing the sermon.

Authenticity and calling. Preaching is not the transmission of information; it is a called man declaring what God has pressed on his own heart to a particular people he knows and loves. A message assembled by a machine — however articulate — can be true and still be hollow, because it did not pass through a life. Paul insisted his preaching came "not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." Outsource the wrestling, and you can lose the very thing that makes preaching preaching.

The Spirit's leading and spiritual formation. The Gospel Coalition's Jonathan Sams names the subtler risk: "Even if the counsel AI gives is biblically sound, it's still spiritually detrimental if it trains people to rely on AI for what God intends to mediate through his Word, his Spirit, and his people." A pastor who stops doing his own study to hear from God does not just risk a weaker sermon — he risks his own formation.

Accuracy — the risk few pastors see coming. General-purpose AI is startlingly unreliable with the exact words of Scripture. YouVersion founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald has put a number on it:

"The best model… misquotes Scripture at least 15% of the time. Some of them as much as 60% of the time." — Bobby Gruenewald, YouVersion CEO

To be fair and precise: this is not a knowledge problem. Top models score above 90% on Bible trivia. The failure is narrower and more dangerous for a preacher — verbatim quotation, correct chapter-and-verse citation, and doctrinal reasoning. A general chatbot will blend several translations into wording that matches none of them, attach a confident reference to a verse that says something else, and occasionally invent a passage outright. Put that on a slide or in a manuscript and you have preached an error in God's name.

Secular drift. Gloo's research found that without explicit Christian framing, mainstream models default to secular vocabulary — "higher power" for God, "mindfulness" for prayer, "values" for virtue — and stumble on grace, sin, and forgiveness. Its Christian benchmark scored leading models worst of all on the "Faith" dimension. A sermon quietly shaped by that default can carry the spirit of the age into the pulpit while sounding perfectly reasonable. It is no surprise that 94% of pastors worry AI could misinterpret Scripture, 79% believe it is biased, and 72% call it a "threat." These are not Luddites; they are shepherds naming a real hazard.

The guardrails

The way through is not a ban and not a free pass — it is discipline. Only 12% of pastors feel prepared to give guidance on AI, and very few churches have any written policy, so the guardrails usually have to be self-imposed. Four hold up well:

Held together, these keep the tool in its place: a servant of preparation, accountable to the text it claims to quote. "Study to shew thyself approved unto God" still describes the pastor's work — the machine can carry the concordance, but it cannot do the studying for you.

A better tool for the study

Most of the risks above come from one root cause: a general-purpose chatbot reproduces Scripture from memory and reads the Bible through the average of its training data. The answer is not to avoid AI — it is to use a Scripture-first tool built for the study rather than a mainstream assistant borrowed into it.

Because the verses come from a fixed, verifiable library instead of the model's memory, a pastor can check the app's work against the exact translation he trusts — which turns the biggest accuracy risk into a built-in safeguard. The study tools let you go deeper without leaving the text: exegete a passage, pull cross-references, and build an outline you then make your own. See exactly how preachers put this to work in AI sermon prep with FlickerFaith, or read why general-purpose AI gets Bible verses wrong so often.

For the wider conversation, this page is part of our guide to AI and Christianity. If you're weighing the bigger questions, see will AI replace pastors? and the full pastors and AI statistics. The pattern across all of it is the same: the tool serves the calling; it never carries it.

Frequently asked questions