How I Use AI in My Work
What Artificial Intelligence Can—and Cannot—Do for the Work of God
We are living in an amazing time. The tech world and its impact on Christians are changing right before our eyes. The technological advances we are witnessing in 2026 alone are mind-blowing. And, like the coming of the internet 30 years ago, there are good things, amazing things to be excited about, as well as things that are concerning to come along with it all.
In 2023, someone told me about ChatGPT. One morning in the office, I decided to log in and play around with it. I asked it some basic questions about easy-to-verify things. Then I threw out some basic religious questions, asking it about baptism, the Holy Spirit, and grace. My first reaction? I was a little creeped out, but also amazed and intrigued. After I logged out, I went back to the rest of my day and forgot about it.
But news about it kept showing up. People I know started talking about how they were using it. And slowly, I started exploring it more, searching for how I could use it effectively in what I do. As you know, I wear two primary hats. I am a pulpit minister producing new sermon material forty-five weeks out of the year. I write 90% of the adult bible class curriculum for Cornerstone. Plus, I have all the other responsibilities that come along as a preacher serving a congregation of 200+. The other hat I wear is that I’m a book publisher, with 67 writers under contract, with over 600 products in print/online. Believe me, if something comes along to streamline some of the processes I’m involved in, I’m all for it.
A new tool in a long line of tools
Preachers have always used tools. My shelves are full of them. Concordances. Study Bibles. Commentaries written by men who spent their lives in the text. Lexicons that unlock a Greek or Hebrew word I’d never understand without. These days, my main library lives on a screen, in my Logos Bible software, where I do the heavy digging in the text. When the word processor replaced the typewriter, no one stood up and called it unspiritual. It was just a better tool for getting words on the page.
Artificial intelligence is the newest tool on that shelf. It helps me think out loud and organize what’s already in my head. On a good week, it saves me hours — and those are hours I pour back into study, into people, and into prayer.
But here’s the thing about every tool. A sharp saw in a careless hand still cuts crooked. The saw doesn’t make the carpenter; it only serves him. A microphone can carry a voice to the back row, but the microphone has nothing of its own to say. The tool amplifies. It does not believe. It does not love. It cannot stand before God on the last day.
The everyday help
Here’s what I’m using it for. In my writing, it helps me build summaries and more effectively draw out the big idea of what I’m trying to get across. It drafts discussion questions for a class. I’m using it to build charts and timelines that make a hard passage clear. This year, it has advanced to the point where I can give it instructions, and it will literally build the PowerPoint file I use for my Bible classes. Earlier this year, I used it to enhance a 130-year-old image of Barton W. Stone for a sermon illustration.
In my weekly sermon prep, I’m doing all the deep digging —first in the text, then in Logos—doing word studies, pulling cross-references, and looking through commentaries. From this, I build notes from all of this in my Logos software. That work is mine. Over the last year or so, I’ve started using AI to synthesize my studies, pulling the threads of my research together and helping me see how the points connect. I then write out the sermon manuscript word for word. (I handwrote this for years until my writing got bad.) After that is finished, I go back through the outline again and shorten it into outline form. Once that’s done, I run the full outline through AI for the plain mechanical things, the grammar, and the spelling I’m too close to catch. (Grammarly is a great tool for this, by the way.)
Now, what’s really neat is that AI speeds up the process of content generation. From a sermon I wrote last week or years ago, I can take that outline and turn it into a blog post. From the class material I’ve archived, I load up a lesson and instruct it to produce a podcast transcript. Then, it can help produce social media content, generate images/artwork, and archive it all in a vault for future use.
Now hear what it cannot do.
It Doesn’t Know the Truth
Remember those questions I asked back in 2023, about baptism, the Holy Spirit, and grace? I told you I walked away a little creeped out. Here’s the part I left out. The answers it gave me were smooth, confident, and wrong.
Ask one of these tools about baptism, and more often than not, it’ll tell you it’s a symbol — a nice outward sign of a decision already made, but not necessary. Ask it about grace, and you’ll get something a Reformed minister could’ve written, with hardly a word about obedience. Ask it about the Spirit, and the answer drifts wherever the loudest voices online have drifted. The words come out polished and sure of themselves. And a good bit of the time, they don’t square with the book.
Here’s what we need to remember. These tools don’t read the Bible and reason from it. They were trained on a mountain of what people have already written — and most of what’s online about the Bible is often just the majority opinion of the religious world, dressed up to sound like an authority. It can repeat back what it heard, beautifully. It has no idea whether any of it is true.
So, the machine doesn’t need to get anywhere near my doctrine. I bring my convictions to it. Never the other way around. I use it to organize and sharpen what I already believe from Scripture. I never use it to tell me what to believe. So I stay awake. The tool serves the study; it doesn’t get a vote on what’s true.
Where I Keep Watch on Myself
Now, I understand the unease some of you feel. I had it too, sitting in my office that first morning. Some of it is exactly right. So let me show you the places where I keep a close watch on myself.
The first is the pull to let it think for me instead of with me. The wrestling with a text — those hours when it won’t open up and you can’t find the door — that’s not wasted time. That’s where God does His work on the preacher before the preacher ever does his work on the people. If I hand that wrestling to a machine, I’ll walk into the pulpit with full notes and an empty heart. So the digging stays mine. The tool joins me after I’ve sweated, not in place of it.
The second is muscle wasting. You know what happens to a man who lets the calculator do all the work — before long, he can’t add in his head anymore. A muscle you stop using gets weak. If I quit doing the hard study because the tool can do it faster, the part of me that knows how to dig will wither.
The third is the matter of my own voice. A sermon ought to smell like the study. It ought to carry the marks of a man who bled over the text — your stories, your scars, your own way of saying a thing. The danger of these tools is that they can make you sound like everybody else: clean, correct, and hollow. The people in the pew don’t need a flawless essay. They need a man who’s been with God and has something of his own to say.
None of this is fancy. It’s just the old discipline of a workman keeping his own hands on his own work. The tool is welcome at my desk. It doesn’t get my chair.
A word from the workman’s text
Paul wrote to a young preacher, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, an unashamed worker who correctly teaches the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).
The word translated be diligent means to make every effort, to be eager, to give yourself fully to the task. It is the language of sweat. You cannot fake it. You cannot outsource it. A tool can speed the hand, but it cannot supply the earnest heart God is looking for.
That is the line I will not cross. A machine can move the pen. It cannot do the diligence. The eagerness to handle God’s word rightly, the fear of mishandling it, the love for the people who will read it — those are mine to carry, and I carry them gladly.
Ministry Brain
There’s one more part of this I want to show you, and it may be the part I’m most thankful for and excited about.
For more than thirty years of ministry, I’ve preached sermons, written articles, recorded podcasts, and taught classes — and like most preachers, I watched a lot of that work disappear into folders and filing cabinets I’d never open again. A few months ago, I started building something to fix that. I call it my Ministry Brain. The simplest way to describe it is an AI-powered digital memory for my ministry: a place where everything I create gets gathered, connected, and made findable again.
For example, when I add a new sermon or article, the system doesn’t just tuck it away. It reads what I wrote and links it to everything related — every scripture I leaned on, every theme I touched, every illustration I used. So a passage I preached on this Sunday connects itself to a class I taught three years ago and a blog post I wrote last spring. Instead of digging through old files trying to remember where I said something, I can follow the threads and see how a single idea has run through my teaching across decades.
Because everything is connected, I can actually watch how my preaching/teaching has developed over time. A tool I built to keep from losing my work has turned into a way of studying it, and it’s become the foundation for the next things I’m writing.
Where the real power lives
You know, no tool I own has ever changed a heart. Not the concordance, not the commentary, not the computer, and not this one. The power was never in the tools. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). The word of God is living and effective (Hebrews 4:12). When a sentence I wrote ever does any good in your life, it is because the truth of God was in it, and a heart was ready to listen.
I’ll keep using good tools. So should you, in whatever work God has given you. But let’s never confuse the help with the source. The help is just help. The Lord is the one who builds His people.
The Tools I Currently Use
I have explored most AI platforms that have come on board over the last few years. This is what works for me.
Claude.ai - my primary AI - for deep thinking, organization, crafting, and honing of ideas, brainstorming, etc. Claude now has plugins that work directly in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. I have found that to be extremely helpful.
Grammarly - for grammar, spelling, and proofreading content.
ChatGPT - for image creation, editing, etc.
To a lesser extent, I use Grok and Gemini, although I hear very good things about them. I haven’t really got into Perplexity yet. And, I have found Microsoft’s Co-Pilot to be useless for my work.
