What’s in this Episode?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – You can be afraid of AI, or you can use it to further the Gospel.  That’s a major piece of the conversation we had with Alabama pastor, Bobby Gourley. AI should never diminish your time digging into the word to prepare Spirit-anointed sermons. However, it can do so much to streamline your everyday tasks in the leadership of the local church and in some cases save the church money.

 

Read the Transcript:

Dick Hardy 0:06
Hey, friend, it’s great to be with you on this Church Tips podcast. I’ve got the privilege today to hang out with a friend of mine from Florence, Alabama, Bobby Gourley, from the great church Chapel in Florence. Say hi, Bobby, to a bunch of great pastors.

Bobby Gourley 0:20
Hey, it’s Bobby Gourley, great to be here with you. It was great having breakfast with you last week. As always, when you pay, it’s always better.

Dick Hardy 0:26
Always! Guess what, they only want me because I pay for the meal. But yeah, we had a great time down there. Bobby’s a pastor in the town where my daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids live, so we’re constantly making the eight-hour trip to Florence. I always enjoy talking to Bobby about church—we’re church junkies. We’ve had great rides, serving in great ministries. It’s been a real privilege the Lord has allowed us to do so and allowed our paths to cross. One of the things we were talking about recently was the future and what AI is going to mean to the church and the pastor. This is still a relatively new topic for lots of pastors, some trying to get their head around it. So, Bobby, we’re going to drop a quarter in you and have you talk about what you see with AI and how churches and ministries can leverage it to advance the kingdom. What are your thoughts?

Bobby Gourley 1:35
Ministry changes very quickly. I was talking to a pastor friend of mine. It feels like last year, I could get ahead of what was going to happen culturally in our church and the surrounding area. Now, it seems like culture changes so quickly, you’re just playing catch-up continually. One of the things that emerged from that was AI. About a year ago, ChatGPT launched publicly. I saw it on podcasts and Twitter, or X—no one calls it X, it’s still Twitter—about ChatGPT writing sermons for people. I ran into a worship leader who gave ChatGPT a cue: “Write me a song about God’s love in a Chris Tomlin style with a big bridge,” and boom, within half a second, he had a song.

Bobby Gourley 2:25
That’s scary for pastors, knowing they could be replaced by AI at some point. People hear AI and think of Matthew 24, where Jesus talks about false teachers, rumors of war, and the like. I think AI could play a role with deep fakes and fake news, producing things that look real but aren’t. But on the other side, AI can help us spread the gospel faster if we use it correctly. There’s great stuff being done with AI. In Africa, it’s been used to determine where food needs to go in drought situations, ensuring no kids are starving. In medical science, AI helps detect cancer quicker. So, while AI can have negative sides, it can also be a great tool for ministry. We’ve started using it quite a bit, and it’s been amazing.

Bobby Gourley 3:42
I first got into ChatGPT when I needed to write a recommendation letter. A professor who helps with our Dream Center asked for a letter for her tenure board. Normally, writing a letter takes me an hour, but I asked ChatGPT to write one, gave it the details, and boom, it was done in five minutes—much better written than I would have done.

Dick Hardy 4:29
How much did you have to edit it?

Bobby Gourley 4:33
Not much. It was professional, way better than I could have done. I’m just a Nashville Southern, trailer park kid, so it was a big help. Then we started using it for social media videos. We were paying a company close to $1,000 a month to produce clips from our sermons, but now, with sermonshots.com, for $89 a month, we can upload our YouTube video, and AI generates clips, captions, and even discussion questions. It gives a full transcript, a short summary, a long summary, and even a blog version. We’re about to start releasing a full blog of the sermon. So that hour and a half on Sunday is now becoming a 24/7 message throughout the week for little cost.

Bobby Gourley 5:55
Jasper AI is another tool like ChatGPT, but for marketing. It uses your language, learning your church’s DNA to produce content. So, for example, it will generate Instagram posts with our worship service details and songs. We don’t write copy anymore.

Dick Hardy 6:19
When you say it uses your language, does it start to learn your style?

Bobby Gourley 6:25
Yes, it begins to learn Christ chapel, our language, and our DNA.

Bobby Gourley 6:34
It’s still our content, but it polishes it for social media, which is really cool. After I finish my sermon notes on Thursday, I put them into ChatGPT and ask it to write a YouTube description for the sermon. It writes the full description, which we copy and paste into YouTube, so before the sermon is even preached, everything is ready.

Dick Hardy 7:25
Another piece that jumps to mind here. I can hear a pastor out there liking what you’re talking about but wondering about the issue of plagiarism on the sermon side of things. Do we have any concerns there, or not?

Bobby Gourley 7:48
Well, it’s our content, so we’re not asking it to produce any new content. We’re taking our content, putting it in, and letting it summarize for us, for whatever we need it for. It’s my sermon notes. For example, this Sunday, Pastor Jason preached on Joshua 3. We took his sermon notes on Thursday, put them in, and it produced the YouTube description. We used that same prompt to create a social media post for it as well.

Dick Hardy 8:18
So in your case, you are not using AI to creat sermons?

Bobby Gourley 8:24
Correct, not at all.

Dick Hardy 8:25
is that a conscious decision?

Bobby Gourley 8:28
Yeah, it’s conscious for us. We want to use our own material. I have, like, asked ChatGPT to rephrase something for me. It never really worked for my style of language, but it may work for others. For example, if I’m struggling with a phrase in my sermon, I’ll put it in and ask for another way to phrase it, which is really cool. But it just didn’t work for us. So no, we’re not asking it to produce any language or content.

Dick Hardy 8:54
I’m guessing if a pastor was asking it to help with sermon content, they’re going to have to give it a critical eye to make sure there’s no plagiarism involved, right?

Bobby Gourley 9:07
yep.

Bobby Gourley 9:09
And then, even with social media, for Passion Week, we had ChatGPT write a social media schedule for us. It produced content for Monday, Thursday, and Palm Sunday. It gave us a starting point, and we customized it for our needs, but the outline it provided was really helpful. It saves you a ton of time. I had a buddy on a trip, and I asked him, “Have you read this book?” He said, “I don’t read books anymore.” I was like, “What? You’re a pastor!” He pulled out his phone and asked ChatGPT for a summary of the book Arrow Striker. It produced a summary, and he said if he wanted to dive deeper, he could ask for a chapter-by-chapter summary. It cut out a lot of his time. I don’t do that, but it’s interesting how pastors are using AI to save time.

Dick Hardy 10:05
Yeah, it’s like a new version of the old CliffsNotes. Some of the older pastors will remember those. But you’re seeing a lot of positives. If pastors harness it properly, they could really do a lot of good for the church, the kingdom, and the message of the gospel.

Bobby Gourley 10:28
Yeah, you’re going to save money. We went from spending $1,000 a month for some social media videos to $89 a month. It cuts back on our time tremendously, but it also maximizes the reach of the sermon. Now, we have video clips, a blog, and we can copy and paste a summary of the sermon in blog form. You could even potentially turn it into a book at some point. It really maximizes the impact of your Sunday morning message, getting it as far as possible. It’s wild.

Dick Hardy 11:02
Well, that’s cool. So what’s the biggest caution you would give to pastors about being careful with AI? Or maybe there’s more than one?

Bobby Gourley 11:12
Yeah, I would say the biggest caution is, don’t get lazy and let AI do the work of ministry for you. Let it be a tool in your tool belt to help you do ministry better. That’s what I would say. I would hope no one would use it to write their sermons or create worship songs. But there’s always a temptation to cheat if it’s available. I’ve got four kids—three in college, one in high school—and they use ChatGPT to cheat on everything. They write their paper with it, run it through software to remove the plagiarism, then put it into another tool to make it sound the way they want. That’s the downfall. You can see pastors losing their anointing because they’re trying to make it too easy.

Dick Hardy 11:56
Yeah, no, that’s for sure. This has been great, Bobby. Give these guys a quick recap. You know, we’ve talked about a variety of things, and if they haven’t remembered anything, what’s the one thing you want them to take away from our conversation today?

Bobby Gourley 12:12
That every week, God gives you a word that He wants you to deliver to your people, but He doesn’t want it to stop there. He wants it to go through your people to reach those outside the walls of the church who need it even more, right? You know, Charles Spurgeon used to have his sermons printed on Sunday night, and they’d be in the paper by Monday morning. Now, we can do the same thing using AI to get that message from our hearts, through the microphone, into the church, and out into the world quicker and faster than ever before.

Dick Hardy 12:41
Wow, wow. That is so good. Bobby Gourley, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to hang out with our pastors here on the Church Tips podcast. If they wanted to get a hold of you, what’s the best way? The website is wearechapel.org.

Bobby Gourley 12:57
Wearechapel.org or on Facebook and Instagram. It’s @BobbyGourley.

Dick Hardy 13:02
Very good. Thank you again, Bobby. Really appreciate it, and thanks to all of you who took the time to listen and watch this podcast. It’s been a great one, and I hope it brings great value to you. Make it a great day and be blessed.

Jonathan Hardy 13:15
Hey, Jonathan, here real quick before you go, everything in your ministry rises and falls on your leadership. So investing in your leadership is essential to staying healthy and growing the ministry, and that’s why I want to invite you to join us inside the leaders. Dot church membership, this online streaming service for pastors gives you access to more than 300 videos plus training material to level up your leadership and improve your ministry skills. If you’d like to do that, I want to invite you to go to leaders. Dot church slash boost. Again, that’s leaders dot church slash boost. Well, thanks again for joining us on the church tips podcast. We’ll look forward to seeing you next time

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