No — a pastor should never let AI draft the sermon, because preaching is covenant proclamation by a man God has dealt with, and that act cannot be delegated to a machine. But the same pastor may, with a clear conscience, use AI for the work around the sermon: background research, administrative drafting, scheduling, and study scaffolding. The line is not between using AI and refusing it; the line runs between leverage for the work and substitution for the witness — and a working pastor can hold that line precisely.
Key Takeaways
- Lifeway Research’s September 2025 survey of 1,003 Protestant pastors found 10% are regular AI users, 32% are experimenting, and nearly two in five are avoiding or ignoring it (1).
- Churchgoers are split almost evenly on AI in sermon preparation — 44% see nothing wrong with it, 43% are opposed (24% strongly) — and 61% are concerned about AI’s influence on Christianity (1)(2).
- John Piper called AI-drafted sermons “wicked,” arguing AI can process truth but can never delight in God — and “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him” (3)(4).
- Pastors themselves draw a sharp internal line: 88% are comfortable using AI for graphic design, but only 12% for sermon writing (5).
- The defensible third way: AI for research, admin, and scaffolding around the sermon; never for the act of proclamation born of prayer and study — because the congregation’s trust assumes the voice in the pulpit is the man’s own.
- The best AI models misquote Scripture at least 15% of the time, which means even research-level AI use requires verification before quotation (6).
What Do the Lifeway Numbers Actually Show?
The most reliable data we have on pastors and AI comes from Lifeway Research’s phone survey of 1,003 U.S. Protestant pastors, conducted September 2–24, 2025, paired with an online survey of 1,200 Protestant churchgoers (1). Three findings frame the whole debate.
First, the pulpit is cautiously adopting. One in ten pastors describes himself as a regular AI user; another 32 percent are experimenting. But nearly two in five are avoiding the technology or ignoring it altogether (1). The pastorate is split into three camps — adopters, experimenters, and abstainers — with no camp holding a majority.
Second, the pew is split down the middle. Forty-four percent of churchgoers see nothing wrong with pastors using AI to prepare sermons; 43 percent are opposed, including 24 percent who object strongly (1)(2). A pastor who uses AI carelessly — or secretly — is gambling with the confidence of roughly half his congregation. And the unease is wider than the pulpit question: 61 percent of churchgoers say they are concerned about AI’s influence on Christianity itself (2).
Third — and this is the finding I find most theologically revealing — pastors’ own consciences have already drawn a line that no denomination handed them. Asked about specific uses, 88 percent of pastors were comfortable using AI for graphic design. For sermon writing, the number collapses to 12 percent (5). Pastors who never read a word of the ethics literature have located the boundary by instinct: the closer a task sits to the act of proclamation, the less delegable it feels. The instinct is correct. The rest of this article is an argument for why — and a practical system for obeying it without surrendering the leverage.
Why Did John Piper Call AI Sermons “Wicked”?
When an anonymous pastor asked John Piper whether he might use tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to help draft sermons, Piper’s answer was a single word delivered with full deliberation: “Wicked — I’m using a strong word because I feel strongly about this. This goes to the heart of God and the meaning of Christianity and the integrity of the church and her ministers” (3)(4).
It is worth slowing down on his reasoning, because it is not a grumpy reflex against new technology. Piper’s argument is doxological. The ultimate purpose of the universe, he argued, is that God be glorified — and God is glorified “not merely by being rightly thought about, logically comprehended, but by rightly being enjoyed, admired, appreciated, valued.” AI can compute true propositions about God. It cannot enjoy him. “The very phrase ‘artificial emotion’ is an oxymoron,” Piper said; no machine will ever “rejoice or delight or be glad or stand in awe” (4). And since preaching, in Piper’s famous definition, is expository exultation — truth proclaimed by a man who is himself exulting in it — a sermon drafted by a machine is a contradiction in its very form: exultation outsourced to something incapable of exultation.
There is a second strand in his verdict that deserves equal weight: integrity. A congregation listening to its pastor assumes — reasonably, covenantally — that the words are his, born of his prayer, his study, his wrestling. To stand and deliver machine-drafted proclamation as one’s own is a quiet deception of the flock, regardless of the content’s orthodoxy. Trevin Wax pressed the same point from a different angle: AI can supply logos, the logical content, but never pathos or ethos — and in Christian preaching, the emotional weight and the character of the witness are not garnish; they are constitutive (7).
Where I part company with a blanket reading of “wicked” is at the boundary of the word sermon. Piper’s argument lands with full force on the act of proclamation. It does not land on the concordance, the commentary, the church bulletin, or the sermon-prep calendar — and a position that cannot distinguish these will not survive contact with the actual week of an actual pastor. Which brings us to the third way.
Is There a Faithful Third Way Between “Wicked” and Wholesale Adoption?
The discerning middle is already forming. The Gospel Coalition’s treatment urges pastors to ask hard questions about formation before adopting AI — noting that the slow struggle with the text, through commentaries and prayer, is pastoral formation, not friction to be optimized away (5). TGC Canada lands similarly: tools for ideas, outlines, and research may be permissible; the burden and voice of the message are not transferable (8). Desiring God’s own published counsel on authentic preaching in the age of AI presses the same distinction (9).
Here is my version of that middle, stated as a covenant principle rather than a tech policy. I write as an executive pastor who preaches regularly and uses AI daily in the rest of my work, so this is a line I walk weekly, not a theory.
Preaching is covenant proclamation. When a man stands before God’s assembled people to declare “thus says the Lord” from a text, he is not performing content delivery. He is executing an office: a herald (2 Timothy 4:2), an ambassador through whom God makes his appeal (2 Corinthians 5:20), a workman who has himself labored in the text (2 Timothy 2:15). Paul’s charge to Timothy is bodily and personal: “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching… Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:13–15). So that all may see your progress — the congregation is meant to watch the Word work on the man. That is not sentiment; it is the mechanism. The flock learns that Scripture transforms by watching it transform their shepherd, sermon by sermon, year by year. Outsource the wrestling and you do not merely cut a corner; you remove the very thing the assembly came to witness. The sermon is, in this exact sense, a covenant obligation of the preacher’s own voice to the flock he will answer for (Hebrews 13:17).
But the office has always used scaffolding. The same Paul who charged Timothy to immerse himself asked for “the books, and above all the parchments” (2 Timothy 4:13). The Reformed tradition has never confused the use of concordances, commentaries, lexicons, and research assistants with the delegation of preaching. Spurgeon employed researchers; Calvin leaned on a millennium of fathers. AI, rightly bounded, belongs in that lineage — a tireless, fast, occasionally unreliable research assistant. The bivocational pastor running a business Monday through Friday — the East African norm, and increasingly the global one — needs that assistant more than anyone, and has the least time to philosophize about it. For him this framework is not a luxury; it is how the pastorate and the enterprise both stay afloat.
So the third way is not a compromise between Piper and the enthusiasts. It is a line — and I give it a name so it can be taught: the Proclamation Line.
The Proclamation Line: A Do/Don’t Table for the Working Pastor
Everything around the sermon is leverage. The sermon itself is witness. AI may serve the first and must never touch the second.
| AI MAY do this (around the sermon) | AI must NEVER do this (the sermon itself) |
|---|---|
| Compile historical and cultural background on a passage | Write the sermon, in whole or in part |
| Summarize commentaries you then read and judge | Generate the outline you preach from |
| Suggest cross-references — which you verify in the open text (6) | Choose the text’s application for your specific flock |
| Draft announcements, bulletins, and admin emails | Draft your pastoral exhortation or call to repentance |
| Transcribe and archive your past sermons for retrieval | Produce “your” illustrations from a life it never lived |
| Translate your finished sermon for multilingual congregations, with human review | Pray, or simulate the prayer out of which preaching is born |
| Build small-group questions from your finished manuscript | Stand in for your own meditation on the text (Psalm 1:2) |
| Track sermon-series planning and preaching calendars | Be the reason the congregation never sees your progress (1 Tim 4:15) |
Two operating rules complete the system. Verify before you quote: the best models misquote Scripture at least 15 percent of the time, so any AI-supplied reference, quotation, or statistic gets checked against the source before it enters your notes — a discipline I have argued for at length as a theology of truth-telling (6). Disclose your scaffolding: be the kind of pastor who can say from the pulpit, without embarrassment, “AI helped me gather background this week; the sermon is mine.” Half your congregation is wary (1); secrecy converts a clean conscience into a scandal-in-waiting, while candor turns your practice into the very formation your members are asking for.
What Does This Mean for the Bivocational Pastor in East Africa?
Now the bold claim, and the hopeful one: rightly drawn, the Proclamation Line is not a restriction on the East African pastor. It is his competitive advantage.
Consider the actual arithmetic of his week. Across Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, the typical pastor shepherds a congregation in the hundreds with no paid staff, while running the shop, the farm, or the school that feeds his family. The hours that Western pastors spend in staffed offices, he spends finding the money to stay in ministry at all. For this man, every administrative hour AI absorbs — the announcements, the records, the letters, the logistics — is an hour returned to the only two things that constitute his office: the Word and the sheep.
This is why I stake the claim plainly: the African bivocational pastor who uses AI for everything around the sermon will out-shepherd the one who uses it for the sermon. The first man multiplies his hours and arrives at Sunday with his own fire; the second mass-produces fluent emptiness and arrives with someone else’s ashes. The congregation can tell. Congregations can always tell — pulpit committees and village mothers alike have a finely tuned ear for a man preaching beyond his own walk with God. And in a region where the church is among the most trusted institutions in public life, that trust is the asset everything else is built on; a pulpit caught laundering machine text would spend down in one season what took a generation to build.
There is a generational dividend too. East Africa’s churches are young, mobile-first, and growing — Bible-app engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa grew 27 percent last year, the fastest in the world (10). The pastors who model governed AI use now are writing the playbook their sons and daughters in ministry will inherit, and — as I argue elsewhere — the global church may well learn its AI discipline from Africa rather than teach it.
So, should a pastor let AI draft the sermon? No — Piper’s instinct holds, because the machine cannot delight in the God it describes, and the flock covenanted for a shepherd, not a stylist. Should a pastor let AI carry the hundred burdens that crowd out prayer and study? Gladly, gratefully, this week. Guard the pulpit; deploy the scaffolding. The Word deserves your own voice, and your people deserve a pastor whose progress they can see.
FAQ
Is it wrong for a pastor to use AI at all?
No. The Lifeway data shows 42% of pastors already use or experiment with AI, and pastors themselves are comfortable with uses like design and administration. The moral line falls at proclamation: research and admin are legitimate scaffolding; the sermon itself must be the preacher’s own work (1)(5).
Why did John Piper call AI sermons “wicked”?
Piper argued that God is glorified not merely by being rightly described but by being enjoyed — and AI can process truth about God while remaining incapable of delighting in him. An AI-drafted sermon is therefore exultation outsourced to something that cannot exult, undermining the integrity of the ministry (3)(4).
Do churchgoers accept AI in sermon preparation?
They are split almost exactly in half: 44% see nothing wrong with AI in sermon prep, 43% are opposed, with 24% strongly opposed. Sixty-one percent are concerned about AI’s influence on Christianity generally — which makes disclosure and clear boundaries pastorally essential (1)(2).
Can AI be trusted for Bible research?
Only with verification. YouVersion’s CEO reports the best AI models misquote Scripture at least 15% of the time, and some up to 60%. AI can usefully gather background and suggest references, but every quotation must be checked against the open text before it enters a sermon (6).
What AI uses are appropriate for a busy bivocational pastor?
Administrative drafting, scheduling, transcription, translation review, background research, and small-group materials built from his finished sermons. These recover hours for prayer, study, and people — the non-delegable core. The sermon’s outline, words, applications, and illustrations remain his own (5)(8).
Related Reading
- A Third of Christians Trust AI as Much as Their Pastor
- AI Misquotes the Bible 15–60% of the Time: A Theology of Truth-Telling
- AI Can Triage; Only a Shepherd Can Shepherd
- The Bivocational Pastor-Entrepreneur
Sources and Evidence
- Lifeway Research — “Pastors, Churchgoers See AI as Concerning and Confusing” — Probability phone survey of 1,003 Protestant pastors (Sept 2–24, 2025) and online survey of 1,200 churchgoers; the most rigorous current dataset on pastoral AI adoption.
- Lifeway Research — “Pastors’ Views on Artificial Intelligence” (full PDF report) — Primary instrument and full crosstabs, including churchgoer concern figures; see also the churchgoer report.
- ChurchLeaders — “John Piper Is ‘Appalled’ by the Thought of Using AI To Draft a Sermon” — Direct coverage of the Ask Pastor John episode, with extended quotations.
- Christian Post — “John Piper warns AI can think but never ‘delight in God'” — Reporting of Piper’s doxological argument, including the “artificial emotion is an oxymoron” line.
- The Gospel Coalition — “4 Questions Pastors Should Ask Before Using AI” — Source of the 88% (graphic design) versus 12% (sermon writing) comfort split and the formation argument; TGC is a leading confessional evangelical publisher.
- Christian Post — “AI’s Bible misquotes range from 15% to 60%: YouVersion CEO” — Bobby Gruenewald’s Scripture-accuracy figures for frontier models.
- The Gospel Coalition (Trevin Wax) — “The Missing Heart in AI-Generated Sermons” — The logos/pathos/ethos analysis of why machine drafting fails preaching as a form.
- TGC Canada — “Should Pastors Use AI in Sermon Preparation?” — Representative statement of the discerning-middle position: research aid yes, voice and burden no.
- Desiring God — “Authentic Preaching in the Age of AI” — Piper’s ministry’s own constructive treatment of preaching authenticity under AI conditions.
- Christian Daily International — “Isaiah 41:10 named YouVersion’s most popular Bible verse as app logs record engagement in 2025” — Source for Sub-Saharan Africa’s world-leading 27% growth in daily Bible-app engagement.