It’s hard to think of a faith leader more bullish on artificial intelligence than the Rev. Christopher Benek. “I look at it as a partner in ministry,” he recently told The Dispatch. “The internet, I think, is going to feel like a very little subject compared to what AI is and the influence it has.”
He’s writing a book called The Church Leader’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence in which he outlines his beliefs about an AI-filled future.
There is no question that AI is already speeding up his productivity when it comes to sermon writing. “I have been able to write all my sermons for the next year in one week,” he said.
With ChatGPT now reportedly at 800 million users and generative AI seeping into new corners of modern life, religious leaders like Benek are deciding whether it belongs in one of the oldest. The emergence of AI-generated sermons, BibleGPT, and “robotic saints” has prompted questions as to the degree to which the emerging technology and religion will go together. To understand more about this issue, The Dispatch spoke to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders about what role they thought AI should have in one of religion’s cornerstone crafts—sermon writing.
For Benek, a Presbyterian pastor in southern Florida, this ancient tradition has found new life in the digital age. He uses AI to help aggregate research, refine transitions, and produce sermons. These tasks previously took him hours. “What it’s done is it’s created a time-saving piece for me … something like 87.5 percent,” he said. “And that’s time that I can actually spend engaging my congregants, engaging my ministry teams, and growing the church.” Instead of replacing him, he says AI allows him more “play,” giving him the freedom to incorporate spontaneous stories or insights in response to “what God’s doing in the moment and the space that I’m in.”
Benek emphasized the particular importance of using good prompts when using AI, describing in his blog how “AI-generated sermons are only as good as the prompts given to them. Just as a skilled craftsman carefully selects his tools, a pastor must be deliberate and precise when asking AI for assistance.” Additionally, he will always edit the output, stressing that otherwise it “wouldn’t translate” well to his congregation. “There’s an interpersonal element that has to be there with everything,” he said.
Benek is clearly passionate about technology, describing himself as a “techno-theologian” and “Christian Transhumanist.” (Transhumanism is the belief that the human race can, and should, use science and technology to overcome current biological constraints such as aging and involuntary death.) He reportedly was the first pastor to speak at the International Conference for Social Robotics. His church is notably diverse, with over 50 nationalities and a number of congregants who work in technology companies.
Yet when it comes to using AI for tasks like sermon-writing, Benek is not alone. Exponential is a network dedicated to helping churches grow and multiply. Alongside several partners, this year it surveyed more than 650 church leaders and found that 64 percent used AI to help prepare or write sermons, an increase from the 43 percent of leaders who used it last year.
Kenny Jahng, an ordained evangelical pastor from New Jersey and a technology entrepreneur who runs an “AI for Church Leaders” Facebook group, is a big proponent of AI in religious contexts. “From the printing press to the radio, from television to livestreams, every innovation once raised fears,” he told The Dispatch. “AI is simply the next chapter in that story. The question is not ‘Should we use it?’ but ‘How do we use it faithfully?’”
Yet he believes AI will raise enormous questions for religious leaders. “It can pass the bar exam right now, it can pass the MCAT exam for applications before you become a doctor, it is going to make scientific discoveries soon,” he said. “What happens when AI sermon manuscripts outperform the current pastor’s efficacy in teaching, audience retention of ideas, engagement, and decisions for Christ or baptism?” In the future, Jahng believes there will be a shift toward an increasing focus on small group or one-to-one relationships between pastors and congregants, as AI reduces the burden of sermon-writing. He says this could be a positive, through offering more time and space for “relational, incarnational experiences” between leaders and congregants.
But he emphasized that AI must be harnessed carefully as a tool to enhance leaders’ work when used for sermon-writing. “AI isn’t a giant vending machine in the sky where you press a single button and out pops a complete sermon in a shiny wrapper,” he said. “You cannot just outsource all your thinking and your thought leadership, and your discernments and the wisdom that you are called to in your position.”
AI can do the “grunt work,” namely the “menial stuff, the analysis, the research,” Jahng said. “Let AI take care of all the superficial work tasks in your vocation. What you need to do is keep the human in the loop so the spiritual is controlled, retained, and directed by you.”
Yet not everyone agrees. While Jahng and Benek see AI as an instrument for faithful innovation, others see its absence as essential to preserving the sanctity of the pulpit.
“I personally feel like there is an opportunity here to go out of your way to not use AI for sermon-writing,” David Zvi Kalman, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center in New York, told The Dispatch. “And it’s not because AI wouldn’t do a good job.”
Kalman referenced a recent Pew Research study, which found that 73 percent of people do not want AI to play a role in advising them about their faith. “There’s an opportunity here actually to kind of harness public opinion on the matter and say like, okay, you know, we’re creating these spaces in which you can be assured this is a kind of human-to-human interaction … you’re not reading words written by a robot,” Kalman said.
Religious institutions’ resistance to new technologies often seems awkward at first, but, Kalman argues, those acts of restraint can grow in meaning over time. He points to the Jewish Torah as an example. By continuing to use scrolls instead of the more efficient codex, Judaism has preserved a physical and spiritual distance between sacred text and everyday reading. That very distance, Kalman says, has only enhanced the Torah’s significance. Through preserving the unique method of producing and reading the Torah across generations, the sanctity and sacredness of the text is elevated in its uniqueness and distinctiveness from other texts. The same, he suggests, could one day be true of sermon-writing, in its retention of a skill that may otherwise degrade through reliance on AI. “Going out of your way to preserve human writing in this specific context is one of those things that can gain meaning over time,” said Kalman.
Across all faiths, scholars and leaders are weighing in on these same questions.
Ali-Reza Bhojani teaches Islamic ethics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and has written about the intersection of Islamic ethics and AI. He’s a strong advocate for advancing AI literacy across society and believes AI can help structure arguments, smooth language, and identify topics or gaps when preparing sermons. But risks such as AI hallucinations mean that religious leaders should not rely on AI models too much. “If they’re using large language models as research partners, I think they need to be very, very careful,” he told The Dispatch.
Some are already choosing caution. In California’s San Francisco Bay Area, the world’s biggest AI companies sit within driving distance of the East Bay Muslim Community Center, where Imam Sarim Mundres gives the Friday sermon. Mundres says he deliberately avoids the technology when preparing. “For me personally, I try my utmost best to stay away [from AI],” he told The Dispatch. He suggested that anyone can use AI to retrieve a verse from a text, but true knowledge requires context and understanding. “We have a preserved method which we hold to,” he said.
Questions over interpretive authority and knowledge echo across religious traditions. Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence served for nearly 30 years as an Orthodox rabbi in both Australia and the United Kingdom. While he has used AI as a “friendly mentor” to help edit or focus his work, he says he would never use it to find source materials or to write. He noted concerns when it comes to AI’s reliability in the context of religious scholarship, offering a personal anecdote where he caught AI giving him factually incorrect information about what could be consumed on Passover. “It is able to be manifestly wrong, or it is able to highlight a minority opinion, and give it much greater weight than it ought to,” he said.
