Posts tagged Preaching
A.I. and the Minister

Several years ago I was sitting down with Dan Winkler. This was around 2017 or so when Dan was speaking here at Graymere. Dan has been preaching longer than I've been alive. I asked him this question, knowing for sure what I thought he would say:

"Dan, do you think it's easier to preach now than it was 30 years ago?"

His near-instant response: "No no, it was much easier 30 years ago."

I was stunned. I thought for sure that he would say that it was easier now. That we now have a repository called the internet. That there were so many more resources. There were relatively easy ways to access those resources. That you could get ideas and insights from so many more sources. But he didn't say any of that.

"Back then, we only had a few resources. That's the single biggest reason why I think it's so much more difficult to preach today than in 1975. It's so much more difficult to discern."

I think about this conversation a lot. Dan is well-respected, a good preacher, who has endured family tragedy that some of us could scarcely imagine. But almost nothing he has said has stuck with me as long as that has.


I remember using Google for the first time. It was 26 years ago, I was a junior in High School, and I think my first search was probably to Google myself. Of course, there were no results. My second search was probably something to do with Star Trek or the new Alabama Football schedule.

But I remember even thinking at the time: "This is it?"

I didn't like the way that Google presented results. I liked the way Yahoo! and others at the time even less. So I stuck with Google, and it got increasingly frustrating.

Very early on, I learned to ignore those top "sponsored" links and go straight to the ones below for the info that I wanted. I always disliked that. I also disliked that I couldn't use natural language with it - it would just pull up a person asking the same question I did.

We all trudged along for nearly 20 years after that with just using Google. They made so much money from Search that they started making an operating system and phones to compete with Apple. They rode the coattails of Search for a long time - until the next thing happened.

ChatGPT was launched in 2022, and it (literally) overnight had over 100 million users. I was one who signed up for an account. I haven't used it exclusively since then, but the A.I. landscape is something that is changing the way that we work and communicate every day. And it is changing the teaching and preaching coming out of our pulpits.


Let's get one thing straight first: I think it's very important to understand that what the media and everyone generally calls "A.I." is not artificial intelligence whatsoever. It is a learning algorithm that is more sophisticated than the search algorithms that we've been using for three decades. I sometimes refer to it as "super Google." I truly believe that it's the middle step between regular search engines and true artificial intelligence. While I believe that these tools have fundamentally changed how we work and how productive we are in just the last few years, I also believe that true artificial intelligence, once discovered, will change everything about our society as a whole. It will not merely be some form of super Google - it will be a vast, learning intelligence that we might even need to fear.

As I write this in mid-2025, there are already scientists and researchers sounding the alarm on that. It's quite unnerving.

All that being said, how are we as ministers and preachers and teachers of the Bible supposed to use these amazing tools?

I cannot speak for preachers, as I only preach once or twice a year. But what I can imagine is the temptation to use this technology the wrong way. Preachers who spend hours producing sometimes two to three sermons that are supposed to be truthful, factual and moving - every single week. Every time I preach twice on a Sunday, it makes more thankful for what my preacher does - but it also reminds me that I would never personally want that job.

As a Bible teacher that teaches three times a week or more, I can tell you that my temptation is certainly there for using these tools to manufacture a class for me, without me having to put in any work beyond prompting A.I. to do it.

Now don't read that the wrong way. I think ministers of all types should be using A.I. - in the right ways to assist in class and sermon prep.

For example, 25 years ago there was the same discussion about Google, and ministers just finding or copying their sermons from something they found on a search engine. Taking what someone else had written on a website as fact without doing the necessary checks and research yourself. The risk is the same with ChatGPT and similar tools - copying an A.I.'s "research" borders on plagiarism. Even if you're ok with that, now you have to address the slippery slope of this question - what the is true, deep theological thinking behind what you're saying in the classroom or the pulpit?

Hopefully every single one of us would scrutinize anything we find on the internet. Hopefully every one of us would test things to be true according to the Word of God, the one and only measuring stick, but that's just not happening in our culture.

I keep thinking about my conversation with Dan, and how I often ask the question now - are we better off with using these tools, or not using them at all for fear of teaching the wrong things?

The Bible says plenty about those who teach falsely. In fact, it was one of the singular focuses of John's epistles.

Any Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) client is using the internet as a search tool, aggregating it's response into something coherent, and then it authoritatively presents information to you as fact. Most of it is accurate, right?

ChatGPT-4o, the latest model, achieves around 88.7% accuracy on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Does that mean that nearly 12 out of every 100 responses are wrong?

That was just based upon one benchmark. Studies show that when you ask it complicated questions like those regarding computer programming, sometimes the accuracy rate drops below an average of 50%.

Theology can be decently complicated sometimes.

Sure, you can train these models to a certain extent. Whenever I'm doing some reading on a class, I always try to preface my prompts with, "You are a theologian. Answer this question."

But what about on more... shall we say... contentious issues?

ChatGPT at least - delivers. Especially when you preface it with the correct prompts. In nearly every "contentious" issue I asked it about, it gave concise and accurate answers while also citing sources (which you can add to any query, and you should).

So if I can train it properly and it's nearly 100% accurate (it's not) and it can write sermons for me, then why can't I let it do that?

Take this example: Notebook LM. Notebook LM is a Learning Model utility app developed by Google and runs off the backend of Gemini (their version of ChatGPT). It allows you to upload or link to sources in which you can essentially build your own GPT (or in this case, Notebook Learning Model) based upon only the sources you give it. So I can give my entire lesson series on Hebrews, (18 documents and over 54,000 words) and tell the GPT to write a sermon based upon my style on the just one aspect of the book of Hebrews, say about the Preeminence of Christ as our High Priest. Based upon only the data I have given it (not using any outside sources), it will then craft me a 2,800-word sermon.

Is that wrong? I know what I taught before is correct. I know the content of the classes that I fed into it has been well-researched personally, by me, and even taught before in a Bible class over the span of 18 weeks.

My one point of advice with using these tools would be the same advice that I would've given to someone 25 years ago using Google to write a sermon: take everything with a grain of salt, and absolutely don't plagiarize.

I've read articles that many professors in our colleges are going back to handwritten or oral exams because they cannot trust that students will not use ChatGPT in some form to take the test, write the report, or give their own thought out answer to a critical thinking question.

Make no mistake - we are not dealing with computer coding, medical diagnoses, or just putting together a term paper here. We are dealing with people's souls.

And these souls are dependent on how the Gospel is preached. How it is taught in our Bible classes, both to our young people and to our adults.

With something as old as the Bible, there is going to be a lot of nuance and careful explaining that need to be done on a lot of Biblical subjects. Which is why accurate preaching is so important. Why our Bible classes are so integral to spiritual development.

Can we use these tools? In the case of Google 25 years, it would probably be foolish for us not to use all the tools we have at our disposal to bring people to Christ. But if we bring people to Christ the wrong way, we teach the wrong doctrine, we take something that a machine wrote verbatim without checking it, then we are guilty of every repercussion that comes after that.

It is up to us, as it always has been and always will be, to "test all things, hold fast to what is good, and reject every kind of evil (1 Thess 5:21-22)."

ChatGPT wrote 0% of this article, by the way.

Markdown Cheat Sheet

If you've listened to Ministry Bits for any amount of time and you have read anything about how I like to handle text, you'll know that I love to write in Markdown. And Beegit has an excellent little cheat sheet I saw today for help in writing simpler and better.

Markdown is a simple way of styling plain text. So instead of having a .txt file, you will have a .md file that can be styled yet still be opened with any app, virtually forever. The short story is that I write in plain text/markdown because I can open the same files ten years from now. All the things I've written in MS Word in high school are completely inaccessible now, and I don't like that.

Markdwon is easy. For example, putting a single hashtag (#) before a heading makes it an H1 heading, the biggest heading. Putting two hashtags makes it an H2, a slightly smaller heading that can be used as a subheading. One asterisk indicates italics while two asterisks tells you it's bold.

Go ahead and check out Beegit's Markdown Cheat Sheet and fire up your favorite text editor (I love Brackets for Mac) and get started with Markdown today. Write simpler, write better.

Ten Years with the Mac: My Most Valuable Tool in Ministry
My first Mac - a Mac mini desktop. 2005.

My first Mac - a Mac mini desktop. 2005.

People are always asking me: "why should I use a Mac?" I get calls from youth ministers, ministers, and church workers of all types about why they should go to a Mac. There's no really simple answer to this question.

10 years ago, I decided that I wanted to purchase a Mac. My first Mac computer of my own was a Mac Mini with a half a gig of RAM, which, in hindsight, wouldn't run anything today. I was able to get it used for about $450, got my own keyboard, mouse, and monitor and set out into the great undiscovered country. And I've never looked back.

There's no simple answer to why you should move to a Mac because there are many answers.

Apple's design is unmatched. Even hardcore Windows users will agree with that. The current aluminum designs have evolved over the last ten years to produce sleek and powerful computers. Yes, Apple may be obsessed with thinness, but can't argue that they have the best designed hardware in the biz.

It doesn't run Windows. When I left Windows a decade ago, XP was going on six years old. Microsoft was clearly riding the coattails and not innovating. I know some Windows users will scoff at my supposed shot over the bow, but the Microsoft ecosystem was seriously lacking in 2005. Office was confusing, XP was old. One of the biggest advantages for the Mac was that it didn't run Windows. When you control the hardware and the software on your machines, there's a lot you can do to maximize the experience. At this point 10 years ago, Apple was iterating and innovating on OSX, and I came in at OSX 10.3 Panther. That was seven versions ago. Safari was brand new. Wow.

In my humble opinion, OSX is far superior to Windows, even the new(ish) Windows 8. Although, I must admit that Windows is coming up again, not in market share, but in public opinion. Why is OSX superior in my mind? The sleekness. The speed. The stability. The only time OSX has crashed on me was when I did something I wasn't supposed to do on the machine.

The premium price tag is an illusion. You buy $9 shoes at Target and your feet are going to hurt. You get what you pay for. Same for computers. You may buy one Apple laptop for $1200, but how long will you keep that machine in the same time frame that you would have have two Windows machines? Or three?

Macs aren't as likely to get viruses. This isn't a myth, and this isn't something touted by Apple either. At the time of this writing, Windows holds a firm 85% market share in personal computers. That means that only 13-15% of the rest of the computers on the planet are Macs. So if you were writing a virus, which platform would you write for? The one who's odds are 8 out of 10 or 2 out of 10? Simple math will tell you that's why more viruses are on Windows.

High-quality software and apps. I haven't been on the Windows side of computing since I graduated from college, so I can't speak to the quality of Windows apps. But I can for Mac and iOS apps. The Mac App Store may not get the press that the iOS App Store does, but it has had as a huge an impact on how I work just as iOS has. Apps like TextExpander and 1Password, apps that I couldn't imagine working without, aren't available on Windows. Plus, where else are you going to find a Word Processor (Pages), a phenomenal PowerPoint replacement (Keynote), and a powerful spreadsheet app (Numbers) - all for FREE? These apps, along with GarageBand (audio editing) and iMovie (video editing that borders on professional-grade) are also made available for free.

Those are my answers for why I use a Mac. I'm not an Apple elitist, I just want to use the best tools for the job that I'm doing - and ministry is the most important job there is. Other than the Word of God itself and the people in the church, my Mac is the most important tool I use in my ministry to communicate, design, and move.

Preaching from a 5.5-inch iPhone

The supposed 4.7- and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 to be announced next week. Source

If the overwhelming rumors hold true, Apple will announce not one, but two new iPhones next week at their special event in California: an newly-designed iPhone 6, one with a 4.7-inch display and one with a 5.5-inch display.

If you take a ruler to your current iPhone, it's just 4 inches diagonally. Now expand that out to 4.7 and 5.5 inches. You'll see that the 5.5-inch phone is much bigger. You get a whole lot more screen real estate with 5.5 inches.

Which brings up an interesting question - if you use an iPad mini to preach from, would you consider using a 5.5-inch iPhone to do the same thing?

I would. And I'm planning to. And here's why.

1) One device, not two. Right now I have the trifecta - the iPhone, iPad mini and my Macbook Pro. But I would love to trim that down to just two devices - my iPhone and Macbook. I use the three devices I have now for very different things. I use the phone for taking pictures, checking Twitter, taking down quick notes, and oh - texting and talking on the phone. I use the iPad mini to preach from, and I've found myself not using the iPad mini as much as I've wanted to. I surf the web and read a lot on my laptop versus my iPad. I write and watch videos on my laptop. I'm not much of a digital reader so I don't use the iPad for that (plus I do most of my reading right before bed, and they say that looking at screens before bed leads to sleep problems).

2) It won't be a 'blown-up' iPhone. Apple wouldn't do that (or at least I hope they wouldn't). They didn't just blow up iOS to fit on an iPad, they made a different interface for it. The 5.5-inch iPhone, whether it comes out 10 days after the announcement or not until 2015, will have a different kind of OS. In my opinion, it will still run on iOS of course, but it will be some kind of hybrid between iPad and iPhone views. Don't ask me to explain all of that, I just think that's what Apple will do with it.

3) The resolution will be crazy high. And that will lead to great looking text - at any size. Whether you're looking at Evernote, Simplenote, or a PDF in Goodreader, it's going to look fantastic. Text will be able to be resized to whatever you want it to be.

Are there trade-offs to a huge iPhone? Why sure. For one, you look wacky with the thing on your ear talking on the phone. Like holding small Bible to your head. Another thing would be how portable it is - will it fit in your pocket?

But to me, having one device that has everything I need and is big enough so that I can preach and teach from it will be invaluable to me.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

Maybe One Solution Isn't The One Solution

For the last year, I have been looking, searching, researching, trying out, and tweaking what I thought might have been the one solution to my workflow woes. You see, what I want isn't hard - a simple synching solution for me to be able to compose classes and sermons on my computer (or iPad mini) and have them sync to my two other devices. I had some criteria when I began this mission:

1. It must sync to my iPad mini, because I do all my teaching and preaching from it. Additionally, it must look great and I must be able to format it in a way that I can easily glance at my notes when presenting. 

2. It must be on iOS. A companion Mac app would be helpful, but not essential. iPhone app is also not optional as I do a lot of tweaking on the go. 

3. It must be simple. No crazy layouts or unnecessary button on the app - just...simple. 

So, I narrowed my list down to three applications for my workflow: Evernote, Simplenote, and Plain Text. 

 

Evernote

Evernote seems like it's been around a long time, and that's because it has. It is a service that has never been accused of standing still. Evernote continually pushes new designs, additions, and features to its suite of apps which now include Penultimate and Skitch

Pros: Evernote is very well designed. The iPad app is beautiful on a retina iPad mini screen (and on the iPad Air as well). The apps are designed to easily do what you want to do: capture anything and everything. Evernote can capture text, pictures, voice memos, and even has embedded To-Do lists. It allows rich-text editing (bold, italics and such). It syncs fast across all devices, has a Mac and Windows app, and is also cross-platform on Android and Windows Phone as well. 

The Evernote iPad app is gorgeous. 

Cons: For me, it seems a bit too much. I don't often need to capture photos and voice memos, only text. So I end up completely ignoring those features, mostly because I refuse to pay for a premium account ($5/month or $45/year). I did have a premium account for six months and didn't use the features. While it's a great app for 90% of people, a power user like myself who wants simplicity above all else isn't going to be using it very much. Still a great app though. 

 

Simplenote

Appropriately named, Simplenote is just what it says it is - simple note syncing across devices. I was just about ready to declare this platform dead when Simplenote relaunched with a new web design and app design as well as an introduction of a dedicated Mac app. I really thought this was going to be my solution. 

Pros: Extremely simple and well designed. Fonts and text look great and a retina MacBook Pro and retina iPad mini. The app is active in development and syncs well with other devices. There is no clutter to deal with in these apps - they simply allow you to compose notes, title them, tag them, export them, and pin them to the top of your list. Composing and writing in these apps (as well as the Mac app) is a joy. 

Simplenote for Mac. 

Cons: It's almost too simple. Simplenote allows no formatting of any type and does not support Markdown editing, so if you want to style your text at all, you are limited to bullet points, numbering, and capitalizations. This sounded great in theory but I've noticed if I can't bold some text or make section headings bigger in my notes then I frequently lose my place while teaching and preaching because all the text looks the same. Tagging is great, and if tagging is your thing, you're going to love this app. If it's not, stay away, because that's the only amount of organization you get from Simplenote. All you have is a long running list of your notes, in order of what was last edited first. There's the option to 'Pin to Top' which comes in very handy.

I've run into some sync issues (as late as Oct-Nov 2013), but most of those seem to have been ironed out. The apps still crash on me frequently (once to twice a week) - I don't think a day or two goes by that the Mac app hasn't quit for no apparent reason and once the iPad app crashed on me while scrolling and preaching in front of hundreds of people (ack!). The iPhone app has a bad bug where it will crash when trying to sort changes in a note. I know developers are active on this app and I love Simplenote, I just cannot afford to use something that's unreliable. If the apps were stable enough, I might have this as my go-to platform. 

 

Plain Text

And here we are, talking about the joys of plain text once again. I really don't know why I migrated away from plain text, but it seems that my search has brought me full circle, back to where I started. 

You may read this and discount the plain text preference as an uber-nerd thing, but, in fact, it's really not. It just works. 

Pros: You can use a variety of text editors on all devices and plain text formats, including regular ol' .txt, Markdown, or Multi-Markdown. Markdown allows you to style your text how you want without changing to rich-text format. It uses simple symbols like asterisks to indicate bold and italics and hashtags to indicate headlines. Comes in handy when you get it down. The app I love to use on the iPad is Editorial, and on the Mac it's Byword. You can usually sync these apps to Dropbox and keep them in nested folders, easily categorizing what you need where you need it. Apps like Editorial, Nebulous Notes, and Byword are minimalistic and usually offer inline Markdown support, so you can see your bold and italics and headlines while writing. Best of all, plain text is future proof and my files are not tied to any platform, so I can move them around as I please. 

Editorial for iPad. 

Cons: No simple "Compose it and forget it" syncing. Syncing is pretty painless, but requires a little bit of file management as well. Syncing isn't instantaneous unless you save your files in the app you're using. So unlike Simplenote and Evernote, you can't just sync and go. Plain text may not appeal to many people because it's not as simple to set up as other services. There's an extra added step when syncing to Dropbox, and you must know where your text repository folder is located. 

So looking at these three platforms, jumping back and forth between using them for the last year, I realized that there really is no "one solution" for capturing all my thoughts, pictures, and text (long or short). One solution is finding a small, precise suite of apps that fit your purposes. I'll use Editorial and Byword for all my writing (70% of the time), Simplenote for lists and occasional text capture (20% of the time), and Evernote for pics and logs (10% of the time). 

For me at least, one solution ends up being three solutions.