AI in the Pulpit: 5 Trends Pastors Can’t Afford to Sleep On

Foreign. It's Justin. Welcome to Tech with that tech pastor and I'm so glad you guys are tuned with in with us. Don't forget to hit that like button and hit that subscribe button no matter where you are. If you're listening to us on Spotify or itunes, be sure you guys are following our story. Today we're going to look at a couple of different things as we continue our journey in terms of applied AI. We're going to talk today about AI in the pulpit. And I want to talk about not necessarily just how to use it, but I want to talk about five trends that pastors can ignore. Now here's the thing. We know the gospel is not about chasing trends. We know the only trending viral topic is Jesus. What I want us to understand this is about stewardship that God is calling us to be great stewards of every season, no matter what season we're in. So in this case, I want to talk through five trends that I believe we cannot ignore. Five things we have to be aware of and then how to use it. And what are some practical things you can do to apply this to you? So as we jump into our time today, let's have some fun thinking through five, five trends that you as a pastor cannot ignore when it comes to AI. All right, so here we go. Five trends. Number one. Trend number one is multimodal Bible study tools. So you need, you used to need to have an entire library. Like I remember growing up and having pastors going into their offices and their libraries were just full of books, right? They have bookshelves with the bookshelves and bookshelves. And now you're seeing more and more. Like if you come to my office, I have a whole lot of books. I love reading. But then also my Kindle library, my audible library are just as full. I think the same thing from having a strong concordance to Matthew Hammond's commentary where you're carrying around like little children, like a little kid, everywhere you went that has many books you had. Now you can have all of that in your iPad. You can have all of that on your, on your Audible books. And then also you can have all of that well in your AI tools as well. Building the right multimodal Bible study tool helps you do a couple of things. Where now you can have a small group guide that goes to adults, a small group discussion that goes with modern analogies. You have Gamma slides or PowerPoint slides to help you teach. You have TikTok that are created because now Bible study is not Just about you getting up one time. It's not multimodal tools. Now this matters to me because I believe it removes the bottleneck format that we have when it comes to a lot of our, of our stuff where we prepare one thing and then it's one space at one time. Now AI allows you to make sure that you can get to young Adult studies, Gen Z studies, senior studies, Women's studies, senior studies, whatever that is for you, every audience. And then not only is it just the audience in the room, but it now gives you a chance to multimodal. Right? You can now get to different mediums. So now you're talking getting on TikTok, getting on Instagram, getting into classrooms, and even getting into long form videos as well. Because the same truth that gets in the sanctuary, the same truth that can get on someone's when they're scrolling, the same truth that hits in the sanctuary is the same truth that can hit somebody when they're playing bingo at the senior center. The same truth that hits in the sanctuary can hit everywhere else. So the first trend I think we have to be aware of is the multimodal nature of our formatting and multimodal nature of our teaching when it comes to studying for people beyond Sunday morning. Number two, I think the second trend we have to be aware of is hyper personalized outreach. So it used to be that visitor follow up or guest follow up or new member follow up was the person inside the office who wrote a letter and maybe a phone call that came from the pastor throughout the week. And if the pastor is really great, you send a letter to them throughout, maybe the next week. Right now. Automation. Automation. Automation. We're glad that you visited. And now AI can help you create a follow up system that's automated to make sure that you follow up with those individuals. Make it personalized and not generic. So instead of saying, hey, we're glad that you came to church, it's hey Michael, we're so glad that you and your daughter visited us at 9 o'. Clock. We heard that she enjoyed the kids ministry. We'll be praying for you the first week of school. Think about it. It goes from hey, we're glad you came to church, that everybody gets to hey Michael, we heard about your kid. We're excited for their next big step and we're really glad at the time of service you came. See, personalization doesn't just make people feel seen, it makes them know they're remembered. Right? AI doesn't replace compassion, but it multiplies your capacity to serve. I want us to think through this. What are the ways that you can serve better and smarter? Because it doesn't just increase our capacity to make people know that we saw them, but we now let them know they're important to us. Right? That's trend number two. Trend number three is this AI enhanced sermon archives. All right, so if you've been preaching for more than two years, you have gold sitting there. Think about it. You've been preaching, you wrote 52 research papers current to a particular context. Revelation from heaven. That has been going for 52 weeks for two years. That's 104 things on average. You have 10 to 12 pages of research done. You've been speaking for 30 minutes a week for 104 weeks. You have so much data out there that can be used to create more stuff. So when you think about all of this, most of the sermons that we preach are never heard again. Unless you're going in your evangelist and you're repeating these at other churches or you're evangelist or you're taking this someplace else. Or maybe it's a speech you wrote. Whatever that is, you're not really re preaching the same sermon over again. So now AI can turn your entire sermon library into a searchable discipleship library. Imagine someone in your city typing in give me a sermon about forgiveness or what do I believe about X or where's a sports analogy on this? Where? Now you as a public speaker, you can now repurpose your 30 minute speeches for 104 weeks. Cause think about it. A Ted Talk speaker has mastered three or four speeches. Most of the public speakers out there have mastered three or four. You have a new one every week. So don't just let that die. But it's not content recycling. It's evangelism on demand. Trend number four, ethical hardware management. So here's the thing. I always get asked all the time about ethics and AI. Here's where I come with ethics and AI. As churches adopt AI, we've got to ask the justice question. Who made this and at what cost? Right. Ethical hardware means your church's laptops, your church's tablets, your church's servers are built without exploiting workers and built without damaging the environment. This raises a whole lot of questions because remember, justice is not just in the pulpit. Justice now is also in your purchase orders. That's trend number four. Lastly, trend number five, AI for spiritual formation. So AI cannot be your therapist, cannot pray for you. I'm a huge proponent of not letting this become something. Because remember, how algorithms are built. Algorithms are built as a. Reflect. Reflect reflective response to you. Reflexive, sorry, response to you. It tells you what you want. It tells you what based upon predictive analytics. What you like and what you want. And it gives you what you want. It AI learns from you to give you what you want to do its job well. So can it pray for you? Absolutely not. Can it be your therapist? Absolutely not. So it can't do those things. But it can remind you to pray. It can remind you to go to therapy. It can remind you of the conversation you had with your therapist. Imagine a young adult. Imagine a person in your church getting daily devotional prompts tailored to them. Imagine someone, a believer, who has been guiding through journaling sessions that keeps them grounded in the psalms, not only because you're preaching them, but because that's what they're personally studying. This means AI now can now be used to disciple people between Sundays. Right? So those are my five trends. I want you guys to understand. I want you to see number one, multimodal Bible study. I want you to see hyper personalized outreach. I want you to see AI enhanced sermon archives. I want you to see ethical hardware management. I want you to see AI for spiritual formation. Those are the trends. So how do you do this? What are the things you can use? Well, as usual, we give you our tool, our prompt, and our challenge for the week. So here's our tool for the week. I built it. Of course, I'm going to remind you guys of Pastor GPT. You guys have heard of pass through GPT? Passagpt is my recommendation of a tool because, well, I made it. And here's what you can do in password. GPT. You can give it your text, you can give it your audience, you can give it your preaching style. And based upon that, it'll give you historical evidence. It'll help you do your research, it'll help you follow up with all the work and then help you not necessarily write the sermon, but give you an outline. My goal is not to just give you a sermon. When you put it into Pastor GPT is to make you think, is to make you be critical, is to make sure that it's historically accurate. Make sure it's historically sound. I've gotten hit up a lot of times about Pastor Justin. Now listen, I've used Pastor GPT. I just want Pastor GPT to give me a sermon. No, Pastor GPT will not just give you a sermon. Pastor GPT will give you an outline to make sure that you still are thinking and praying through your sermons. But here's what it will do. It'll help you write a devotional, It'll help you write a small group guide. It'll even help you give follow up emails whenever you use it. For example, a couple weeks ago I fed it one of my sermons in the book of James and gave it to our young adults. I said listen, I need my young adults to have this, this, this study guide. And my young adults were able to give this for their small group. I need my younger daughters. We will do XYZ in light of what's going on in the world. And Pastor GBT was able to take my sermon from that Sunday on James. It was enabled to take it to current it to break it down for my young adult group, give them questions, follow up everything of that nature based upon the small format we have built in the chat to Pastor GPT and then it gave them interactive questions. It gave them reels they could use. They gave them things they can record. It gave them things to go look at. Also give them podcast suggestions because Pastor GBT is built for pastors by one. So you're still the preacher, you're still the leader. You got a co laborer who doesn't get tired and doesn't need health care. That's why I built Pastor GPT. So my tool for you this week, try out Pastor GPT. It's at passagpt co. Have some fun playing with it. So what's a prompt you can use as my tool? Here's a prompt. Here's a prompt that I would challenge you to use. So I want you to go on Pastor GPT, upload an old sermon of yours or Bible study of yours and say do this, create a four week Bible study on this book in this chapter. So let's say I don't know Philippians chapter two and include scripture readings, discussion questions and one interactive activity every single week for this age group. Right? Let me say it again. Create a four week Bible study plan including on this book and chapter, let's say Philippians 2, including scripture readings, discussion questions, an interactive activity per week written for this particular age group. You can swap out the audience, swap out the book and chapter for you, but that's my prompt for you to try. Now it's more particular. Remember, good data in, good data out, bad data in, bad data out. And in this case we're putting good data in with saying how long we want it to be, what book and chapter we want it to come to. We're being very descriptive of what we wanted to give back to us and though we were very descriptive in terms of the age group for young adults as well. So go ahead, reuse it all year and reuse it for your sermons or reuse it for your congregation. That's the prompt. So what's my challenge? I want to challenge you to personalize your guest follow up this week. I want you to think about how static, like if you were to do this, here's the first step. Go into your guest follow up system, put your number in as a tester and you randomly begin to get the numbers, the messages and emails from your guest follow up. Is it static? Is it stoic? Does it read like it's not personal? Then I want you to go back into it and hyper personalize your welcome messages. Hyper personalize your text and emails. If there's a way you can put in there, if it's a parent, meaning if they add something in the automation, if they add to the kids line, then we got to make sure we add their name in. I want you to think about how we can hyper personalize your messages. For every first time guests mention something specific from their visit, feel free to include scripture into it. Maybe something you preached on or you anticipate preaching on. Right now, for example my church, we're in the Gospel of John and so whenever we message some of our guests we quote something from the Gospel of John and it changes monthly. We don't change it weekly, it changes monthly. And then make sure you get those messages out within 24 hours to those new guests. I prefer to tell you to get that message out within two hours of the ending of your first service. Ending of your service. And then by the time they get home, they make sure they have the message in their phone. Then you get something back into their phone again by Tuesday or Wednesday. Whether it's email or a phone call or call drop or a text message, be sure you are doing so. I say this all the time. If Nike and Telfar can make sure that they get all these messages to my phone, if Nike can text me over and over, push notification over and over for some shoes that are left in my cart. If someone is visiting your church for the first time, be intentional about making sure you follow up with them. If a Nike can do it for Sue's, you can surely do it because you're going to take care of their souls. That's my tool. Pastor GPT my prompt. Make sure you correct a four week Bible study. And my challenge personalize your guest follow up well that's tech. With that tech pastor this week, I pray you guys are blessed by this. I pray there was something that challenged you to hold on to something. Those are five trends coming down the line as well. Those five trends are vital. Now, I've said this before and I'll say it again. I remember having this conversation in 2016 about live streams and it seemed crazy. Why are we talking about live streaming in church? And now if your church does not have a live stream, you're killing yourself slowly. What I'm trying to tell you now, multimodal AI is here. Personalizing your messages is here. Repurpose. Your sermons are here. Don't waste all that work if you spend. My pastor put it like this. He said that the average sermon is if you want to see how long the research is, it's one hour per one minute. So don't waste that 25 to 30 hours a week you're spending to write a research paper every single week to get up and execute it well on Sundays and just let it sit in your iPad or sit in the back of the room. Repurpose that immediately. Repurpose that. And I would love to help you do that. If you want to learn about that or talk to me about how we can do that together to get a custom GPT for your church, go to thattechpastor.com Anyway, that's tech with thattechpastor. I'm so glad you guys tuned in. We'll see you next week on Here with tech with that tech Pastor. Peace.