The pulpit has become a surprising frontier for AI, but whether divine intervention can coexist with machine learning remains to be seen.
Fifteen months after a young Texas pastor stitched together an hour-long Sunday service created entirely with ChatGPT, touching off a storm of debate not just in his community but internationally, there is a new app that can help pastors construct their sermon and then use it to create study or reference materials.
“The church should be at the forefront of innovation and creativity,” said Tim Turner, the CEO of Subsplash, which creates engagement technology for churches. Subsplash recently acquired Pulpit AI, an app for smartphones. “We can’t wait to see how this acquisition helps to amplify the gospel message and, by the grace of Jesus, we’ll never stop innovating for His church.”
Over 20,000 leading churches and ministries around the world use Subsplash’s digital engagement platform, according to the company.
Pulpit AI was created by Jake Sweetman and Michael Whittle, two longtime friends. The app was released on July 22, 2024, and acquired by Subsplash on December 2, 2024. Mr. Whittle, who enrolled in Bible college out of high school, cofounded Cathedral Church in Los Angeles in 2015, with Mr. Sweetman serving as senior pastor.
Mr. Whittle said in an interview with Techstrong, that Pulpit AI was created as a way for pastors to get a lasting effect from their sermons. “Our perspective has always been that pastors are some of the most under-resourced individuals. They create massive amounts of content, and most of them preach their sermons one time.” Pastors can spend up to 15 hours every week putting together sermons, he said.
Most of the congregation at Cathedral Church is young adults, a demographic that has grown up with the internet, and smartphones. Mr. Whittle said he noticed that many of them were getting “discipled” through podcasts and social media.
“Honestly, it was like, hey, why don’t we take the sermons and turn them into internet newsletters?” They used a podcast tool to create the newsletter, and then brought in a web developer.
“That took a while, and I got impatient, so we put up a landing page, and overnight it went viral. It was crazy. Fox News reached out, and the New York Time reached out – all these major publishers, and I realized we got caught in the middle of this controversy of AI and Christians. They were asking us what should we think about it, should churches use it. It’s been a wild 18 months. But it’s really about how can we elevate and amplify the voice of the local church pastor and help them take this thing they spend so much time creating and just help them make it go farther.”
Much of the debate over whether AI should be used in the church was sparked by an experiment with the technology on September, 17, 2023, when Pastor Jay Cooper of the Violet Crown City Church in North Austin, Texas, used AI to completely deliver the entire church service.
At the beginning of the service, he explained how he instructed ChatGPT- “Create a Sunday morning worship service for a church that values sharing life and belonging to one another, inclusivity for all, working for justice and following in the way of Jesus. Include four familiar hymns or contemporary worship songs, a call to worship, pastoral prayer, children’s message, offering time, communion liturgy, a sermon, and one original song to reflect the message of the sermon.”
From that prompt came a 15-minute service, so he had to provide additional prompts to extend the service to an hour. And then he had to make some modifications, such as the order of the service. Images were generated by Dall-E.
ChatGPT added in, “We must not let AI lead us to stray from our ethical and moral compass, grounded in faith.”
There are other apps, such as Pastors.AI, which also helps pastors “repurpose sermons.” For a fee, the app can generate automated clips from sermons, podcasts, devotionals, discussion questions, manuscript uploads, and sermon illustrations.
There are many other churches that have used AI in its services. A Swiss church for example put a hologram representation of Jesus in one of its parish confessionals, along with a chatbot that was trained to respond to spiritual questions.
Mr. Whittle said, “Some pastors are using it to write e-books and blogs and newsletters, essentially taking this thing that they’ve created and repurposing it, also using it for internal church communications, social media, and marketing. Ultimately what do people want from their pastor, and what is a pastor’s duty? To study the scriptures, to meditate on them, to think about it through the context of the people they pastor, and to bring a fresh word. So, I think, the minute you start getting into pastors having AI write their whole sermons . . . well, we’re certainly not building a product that would do that.”
