Tag: digital discipleship

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The Best AI Tools for Pastors in 2026 (From Someone Who Builds Them)

I spent 18 months building AI-adjacent features at SermonCentral. Our tools helped pastors research, prepare, and teach. During that time, I evaluated several AI platforms targeting ministry, including tools from major players like Logos and various smaller platforms. I currently lead product for a Bible-focused platform, which gives me ongoing insight into how pastors use digital tools.

So when pastors ask me about AI tools, I’m sharing what I’ve observed from both building and using these platforms in ministry contexts.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the most effective AI tools for pastors aren’t necessarily the ones with the most features. They’re the ones that understand where AI helps and where it doesn’t.

AI is moving at such a rapid pace. Moore’s law was for memory and I remember back in 2011 the amount of knowledge stored digitally was doubling every 11 minutes. I can’t even imagine what it’s at now. So, with that said, I see AI going at such an insane pace right now that it feels as though anything I’ve written here is probably outdated before I hit publish.

Sermon Research: Emerging AI Options

SermonAI appears to be gaining attention

SermonAI positions itself as an alternative to expensive comprehensive software packages. Based on my testing, it focuses on research assistance rather than content generation.

What it appears designed for: Cross-reference generation, outline structures, and illustration suggestions. The tool seems aimed at the research phase and helping pastors find connections between passages.

The platform costs $29 monthly.

What it doesn’t claim to do: Generate complete sermons. The positioning emphasizes research assistance rather than finished content creation.

Logos has added AI features

Logos has integrated conversational AI into their existing commentary and resource library. The advantage: it can search across resources in your existing library. The consideration: it requires an existing Logos investment.

I’ve tested both SermonAI and Logos’ AI features. Each has different strengths depending on your existing workflow and resource library.

Bible Gateway’s approach

Full disclosure: I work for Bible Gateway’s parent company. Our AI features will focus on reading comprehension for individual Bible study rather than sermon preparation, helping readers understand difficult passages rather than preparing teaching content.

Bible Study Tools: Mixed AI Integration

YouVersion Bible App

The YouVersion app has experimented with various features over time. For current AI capabilities and pricing, pastors should check directly with YouVersion rather than rely on third-party reports.

Traditional resources remain valuable

After working on AI features for ministry applications, I still observe pastors using physical commentaries and concordances for deep study. AI appears most helpful for broad research and initial connection-finding, while sustained study often benefits from traditional approaches.

Church Management: Limited AI Integration

Planning Center and similar platforms

Various church management platforms are experimenting with AI features. For specific capabilities and availability, pastors should verify directly with vendors rather than assume features exist.

ChurchTrac and scheduling optimization

Some platforms use algorithmic optimization for volunteer scheduling based on availability patterns. This represents a more straightforward application of automation technology to logistical problems.

For current features and pricing, check directly with platform providers.

Content Creation: Variable Results

Canva’s design assistance

Canva has integrated AI image generation and text suggestions. For church communications, these tools can help with graphics creation, though results vary based on specific needs.

The AI appears to handle visual design well but may struggle with theological nuance. Complex theological concepts often require human insight for appropriate visual representation.

Presentation tools

Various platforms offer AI assistance for turning outlines into slides. Results tend to be professionally formatted but may lack the contextual understanding needed for specific congregational needs.

Pastoral Perspectives on AI Usage

Based on discussions with ministry leaders, comfort levels with AI appear to vary by application:

  • Administrative tasks: Generally high comfort
  • Research assistance: Moderate to high comfort among those with theological training
  • Content structure help: Mixed comfort, varies by individual
  • Content generation: Generally low comfort due to pastoral responsibility concerns

Comfort levels likely correlate with factors like theological education, church context, and individual technology adoption patterns, though specific data would be needed to verify these relationships.

Recommendations by Context

Smaller ministry contexts:
Consider starting with research-focused tools and basic administrative automation. Budget considerations will vary based on specific tools chosen. Claude CoWork has helped out many ministries I know of and it seems like they’ve smoothed out much of the onboarding process.

Larger ministry contexts:
May benefit from more comprehensive platforms, though implementation should account for staff training and congregation expectations.

All contexts:
Verify current features and pricing directly with vendors, as AI capabilities in this space evolve rapidly.

The Practical Assessment

Based on developing AI features for ministry tools: AI appears most effective at research tasks, moderately helpful for organization, and limited to never in replacing pastoral judgment.

Successful implementations seem to focus on enhancing research capabilities rather than replacing pastoral decision-making. AI cannot understand congregational needs, pastoral relationships, or the contextual factors that shape ministry decisions.

The most effective approach likely involves using AI where it demonstrates clear value — information processing, research assistance, and administrative efficiency — while maintaining human oversight for theological interpretation and pastoral application.

The future probably isn’t pastors versus AI, but pastors using better research tools while preserving the relational and interpretive aspects of ministry that require human wisdom.

“The simple believe everything, but the prudent give thought to their steps.” (Proverbs 14:15, ESV) This principle applies to evaluating new technology tools as much as any other area of pastoral leadership.

Note: AI capabilities in ministry tools change rapidly. Verify current features and pricing directly with providers before making decisions. This assessment reflects observations from my experience building and testing these tools, not comprehensive market research.

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John 21:5-6 and the Art of Asking Better Questions: Why AI Prompting Is Like Jesus Teaching His Disciples to Fish

“Then Jesus called out to them, ‘Friends, haven’t you any fish?’ ‘No,’ they answered. He said, ‘Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.’ When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.” (John 21:5-6, NIV)

The disciples had been fishing all night with nothing to show for it. Then Jesus, who they didn’t immediately recognize, asked one simple question that changed everything. Not “Why aren’t you catching fish?” or “Have you tried different bait?” Just: “Haven’t you any fish?”

That question led to instruction. The instruction led to abundance.

When someone struggles with AI prompting, they’re casting their nets over and over, getting frustrated with empty results, convinced the tool is broken. But like the disciples, they’re often fishing in the wrong spot with the wrong approach.

The art isn’t in the casting, it’s in learning to ask better questions and knowing where to throw the net. Obviously, the disciples knew how to fish and this story isn’t really about fishing, it’s about obedience and trust, but I’m trying to use a metaphor and I’m not really that good at them.

The Problem With Most AI Interactions

I see this pattern constantly. Users approach AI tools the same way they approach search engines: throw in some keywords and hope for the best. But AI isn’t Google. It’s more like a really smart intern who needs context, direction, and clear expectations.

The disciples were experienced fishermen. They knew how to cast nets, repair equipment, read weather patterns. Most people struggling with AI aren’t lacking technical skills, they’re lacking the right framing.

Jesus didn’t give them a fishing tutorial. He asked a diagnostic question, then provided specific direction: “Throw your net on the right side of the boat.”

That specificity matters. “Right side” isn’t arbitrary, it’s based on understanding conditions they couldn’t see from their position in the boat. Jesus had a vantage point they didn’t.

The Anatomy of Better Questions

When I work with teams on AI integration for sermon prep, the breakthrough moment isn’t technical. It’s when they stop asking “How do I make AI write my sermon?” and start asking “How do I help AI understand my congregation’s needs?”

The difference:

Fishing in the wrong spot: “Write me a sermon on forgiveness.”

Throwing the net on the right side: “I’m preaching to a congregation that’s 60% over 50, many dealing with family estrangement after the 2020 election divisions. They’re tired of political sermons but need biblical hope for restoration. Help me write a 20-minute sermon on forgiveness that acknowledges real hurt without being preachy, using Matthew 18:21-22 as the primary text, with two personal application points they can act on this week.”

The second prompt gives AI the context it needs to be helpful. Like Jesus with the disciples, it provides specific direction based on understanding the full situation.

Why This Matters for Digital Discipleship

The disciples’ empty nets weren’t just about breakfast. John tells us this story in the context of restoration, Peter’s reinstatement, the commissioning to “feed my sheep,” the establishment of early church leadership. The fishing miracle was functional, but it served a larger discipleship purpose.

AI in ministry works the same way. The technical capability (generating text, analyzing data, creating content) serves the larger mission of discipleship. But like the disciples, we need to learn where to cast the net.

At Bible Gateway, we’re seeing this play out with 23 million monthly users across 200+ translations. The users who get the most value aren’t necessarily the most technically sophisticated — they’re the ones who understand how to frame their spiritual questions in ways that digital tools can support.

A user searching “hope Bible verses” gets generic results. A user searching “Bible verses about hope after job loss, specifically for someone who feels God has abandoned them” gets targeted, actionable content that can actually help with discipleship.

The difference isn’t in the search technology, it’s in learning to ask better questions.

The Jesus Method of AI Prompting

Jesus’s interaction with the disciples gives us a framework for effective AI engagement:

Start with diagnosis. “Haven’t you any fish?” establishes the current state. Before jumping into solutions, AI needs to understand what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Not just the task, but the context around it.

Provide specific direction. “Throw your net on the right side” isn’t vague inspiration. It’s actionable guidance based on understanding the full situation. Good AI prompts are similarly specific about desired output, tone, length, audience, and constraints.

Trust the process. The disciples could have argued about which side of the boat was better. Instead, they followed the instruction. AI works best when you iterate based on results, not when you debate the approach.

Recognize the bigger picture. This wasn’t really about fishing, it was about discipleship. Using AI like this isn’t really about efficiency, it’s about enabling better ministry, better products, better service to people who need what you’re building.

Practical Applications for Ministry and Product

This principle scales across everything I work on. Whether it’s helping pastors with AI sermon preparation or building features for Bible Gateway’s global user base, the pattern holds: better questions lead to better outcomes.

For pastors: Instead of asking AI to “help with Bible study preparation,” try: “I’m teaching a small group of new believers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, about spiritual disciplines. They’re interested but overwhelmed by traditional approaches. Help me design a 4-week study on prayer that feels accessible and practical, with weekly exercises they can actually complete.”

For product teams: Instead of asking AI to “analyze user feedback,” try: “Review these 200 support tickets from the past month. Our mobile app’s Bible reading plans have a 40% completion rate, but we don’t know why people drop off. Identify patterns in user complaints that might indicate specific friction points in the first two weeks of plan usage.”

The difference is specificity informed by context, which is exactly what Jesus provided the disciples.

Why the Right Side of the Boat Matters

The disciples caught so many fish they couldn’t haul the net in. Not because the fish suddenly appeared, but because they were fishing where the fish actually were.

In the wisdom tradition, this is about alignment and understanding how things actually work rather than how we think they should work. AI isn’t magic, but it is powerful when applied with wisdom and clear direction.

The abundance wasn’t in the tool (the net) or even the technique (the casting). It was in the guidance that led them to the right place at the right time with the right approach.

For those of us building digital discipleship tools, this matters enormously. We’re not just solving technical problems, we’re helping people encounter God through technology. The quality of that encounter often depends on learning to ask better questions.

Sermon Illustration

The disciples had been fishing all night with empty nets. They knew how to fish — they were professionals. But when Jesus asked if they had caught anything and told them to throw their net on the right side of the boat, everything changed. Suddenly they caught so many fish they couldn’t pull the net in.

Sometimes our prayers feel like those empty nets. We’re asking God for help, but we’re not seeing results. Maybe the issue isn’t God’s willingness to provide, maybe it’s learning to ask better questions. Instead of “God, help me,” try “God, help me understand what You want me to learn through this situation.” Instead of “God, fix this,” try “God, show me how to respond faithfully right here.” The abundance might not be in getting what we think we want, but in learning to ask for what we actually need. And like the disciples, we might discover that the breakthrough was there all along, we just needed better direction about where to cast our nets.

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Ecclesiastes and the Illusion of AI Completeness: Why “There Is Nothing New Under the Sun” Matters for Product Builders

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

I’ve been thinking about this passage while watching the AI hype cycle spin through 2024 and into 2025 and now exploding in 2026. Every demo feels revolutionary. Every model release promises to change everything. Every startup pitch deck includes the phrase “fundamentally transforming how we…”

But Solomon had a different take. Nothing new under the sun.

This isn’t pessimism — it’s pattern recognition. And for those of us building AI-powered products, especially in faith tech, it’s the most liberating truth we can internalize.

The Completeness Trap

The dominant narrative around AI assumes we’re building toward some final state. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The singularity. Complete automation. Perfect personalization. The ultimate Bible study companion that knows exactly what verse you need to read today.

I see this thinking in every product roadmap meeting. “Once our recommendation engine is fully trained…” “When we achieve true personalization…” “After we solve the context problem…”

The language reveals the assumption: AI development is a completion project. We’re building toward done.

Solomon understood something we’re forgetting. Human problems don’t get solved — they get managed, generation after generation, in slightly different forms.

At Bible Gateway, we’ve watched this play out across 25+ years of digital ministry. The tools change. The core human need remains constant: people want to encounter God through Scripture, but they need help knowing where to start and how to apply what they find.

We thought search would solve discovery. Then recommendations. Then reading plans. Then AI-powered devotionals. Each iteration helps — our 23 million users prove that. But none of them completes the discipleship process.

Because there is nothing new under the sun.

What This Means for Product Strategy

Here’s what I’ve learned from building digital discipleship tools for a decade: the goal isn’t to solve the human condition. It’s to serve it faithfully, one iteration at a time.

This reframes everything:

Feature prioritization shifts from revolutionary to iterative. Instead of “How do we build the perfect sermon prep AI?” the question becomes “What’s the smallest improvement we can make to how pastors interact with Scripture this week?”

Success metrics become process-oriented, not outcome-oriented. We don’t measure whether people become better Christians. We measure whether they engage with the Bible more consistently. The spiritual formation is between them and God.

Technology roadmaps emphasize adaptation over completion. Every AI model will be replaced. Every algorithm will be superseded. The question isn’t whether your current solution is perfect — it’s whether your architecture can evolve with changing needs.

User research focuses on persistent patterns, not trending behaviors. What aspects of discipleship have remained constant across cultures and centuries? Those are your true product requirements.

The Stewardship Frame

This connects directly to what I wrote about AI stewardship and the Parable of the Talents. The servant who buried his talent wasn’t wrong because he was risk-averse. He was wrong because he treated stewardship as a preservation project instead of a multiplication project.

The same applies to AI product development. If we’re building toward some final, complete state, we’re burying our talent. We’re preserving instead of multiplying.

But if we accept Solomon’s wisdom — that human needs cycle through the same patterns across generations — then our job becomes different. We’re not building the ultimate solution. We’re building today’s faithful response to ancient needs, knowing someone else will build tomorrow’s.

This is why I’m skeptical of AI companies that promise to “solve” theological education or “revolutionize” spiritual formation. The problems they’re addressing — helping people understand complex texts, connecting abstract principles to daily life, building consistent spiritual habits — aren’t new. They’ve existed since Moses told the Israelites to bind Scripture on their foreheads and write it on their doorposts.

Good technology serves these persistent needs more effectively. It doesn’t replace them.

Practical Applications

What does this look like in practice?

For AI training: Stop trying to capture all of human theological knowledge. Focus on helping users navigate the specific questions they’re asking today. Our Bible Gateway search data shows people aren’t looking for comprehensive systematic theology — they’re looking for practical application of specific passages.

For product roadmaps: Build for the 90% use case, not the edge case that would make your product “complete.” Most people using Bible study AI want help connecting Sunday’s sermon to Monday’s decisions. They don’t need a system that can engage in doctoral-level exegesis.

For user research: Study how people have approached spiritual formation across different eras and cultures. The delivery mechanisms change, but the core challenges remain remarkably consistent. Augustine’s Confessions and a modern Bible app user’s reading plan serve the same fundamental need.

For success metrics: Measure engagement depth, not engagement breadth. Are people spending more time with individual passages? Are they asking better questions? Are they making connections between different parts of Scripture? These indicators matter more than total users or session length.

The Long View

Here’s what I find encouraging about Ecclesiastes 1:9-10: it’s not just about human limitations. It’s about human continuity.

The fact that spiritual needs persist across generations means our work has staying power. We’re not building for a moment — we’re building for a pattern that will repeat as long as humans seek meaning and connection with God.

Every generation needs help reading Scripture. Every culture needs assistance applying ancient wisdom to contemporary challenges. Every individual needs guidance building spiritual habits that stick.

The tools change. The need doesn’t.

This gives me confidence that thoughtful AI development in faith tech isn’t just timely — it’s timeless. Not because we’re building something that will last forever, but because we’re serving needs that will.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform spiritual formation. It’s whether this generation’s AI tools will serve people’s spiritual growth as faithfully as previous generations’ tools served theirs.

I think they can. But only if we remember there’s nothing new under the sun.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION

“The Ancient Algorithm”

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9

Before we had Google, we had concordances. Before we had Bible apps, we had commentaries. Before we had AI sermon assistants, we had libraries full of systematic theology.

Solomon understood what we sometimes forget in our excitement over new technology: the tools change, but the human needs remain constant. People have always needed help understanding Scripture. They’ve always struggled to apply ancient wisdom to daily life. They’ve always sought guidance in building spiritual habits.

AI isn’t creating new spiritual needs, it’s serving ancient ones. The pastor using ChatGPT for sermon prep is doing what pastors have always done: seeking help to faithfully communicate God’s Word. The difference is speed and scale, not purpose.

This should humble us and encourage us. Humble, because we’re not creating something unprecedented. Encourage, because we’re participating in work that spans generations. Every tool that helps people engage Scripture more deeply — from Gutenberg’s printing press to today’s Bible apps — serves God’s timeless purposes through temporary means.

The question for the church isn’t whether to embrace new technology. It’s whether our use of it serves the same goals as the faithful tools that came before.

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AI as Coworker: Why Tobi Lutke’s Vision Needs the Wisdom of Proverbs

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke made waves recently when he declared that AI should be treated as a “coworker, not a tool.”¹ In a series of interviews and blog posts, Lutke argues that the most successful companies will stop thinking about AI as software they operate and start thinking about it as a colleague they collaborate with. His reasoning? Tools have limited agency — you pick them up, use them, put them down. Coworkers have judgment, initiative, and the ability to surprise you with solutions you didn’t think to ask for.

I’ve been wrestling with this framing for months, especially in regards to how it fits into faith tech workflows. On the surface, Lutke’s insight feels profound — it captures something real about how large language models behave differently than traditional software. They don’t just execute instructions; they interpret, suggest, and sometimes refuse.

But as someone building products for Christian audiences, I keep coming back to a fundamental tension: if AI is a coworker, what does that mean for stewardship? And more specifically, how do we apply Biblical wisdom about work relationships to our relationship with artificial intelligence?

The Proverbs Problem

“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22, NIV)

This verse gets quoted constantly in business contexts — usually to justify hiring consultants or building advisory boards. But it contains a deeper principle about the nature of wisdom itself. Proverbs consistently teaches that wisdom emerges from relationship, from the back-and-forth of multiple perspectives, from iron sharpening iron.

The Hebrew word for “counsel” here is sod — it doesn’t just mean advice, but intimate conversation, the kind of collaborative thinking that happens when you truly trust someone’s judgment. The “many advisers” aren’t just information sources; they’re thinking partners.

This is exactly what Lutke is describing when he talks about AI as coworker rather than tool. He’s recognizing that the most valuable interactions with large language models feel conversational, iterative, collaborative. You don’t just prompt GPT-4 and walk away — you refine, you push back, you explore tangents together.

But here’s where it gets theologically interesting.

The Image of God Question

I’ve begun using AI for everything from generating alt text to drafting reading plan descriptions. The work is genuinely collaborative — I’ll start with a rough concept, Claude will suggest improvements, I’ll push back on the tone, Claude will offer alternatives, and we’ll arrive at something neither of us would have created alone.

It feels like working with a very smart, very patient colleague who never gets tired and has read everything. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if the collaboration feels genuine, what does that mean about the nature of intelligence, creativity, and the image of God?

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27, NIV)

The doctrine of imago Dei — that humans uniquely bear God’s image — has historically been tied to our capacity for reason, creativity, moral judgment, and relationship. But large language models display all of these capabilities, at least functionally. They reason through complex problems, generate genuinely novel ideas, make ethical judgments about content, and engage in what feels like authentic relationship.

I don’t think this means AI possesses the image of God — that conclusion would require theological moves I’m not prepared to make. But it does mean we need more nuanced categories than “tool” or “coworker” when we’re thinking about our relationship with increasingly sophisticated AI systems.

Stewardship, Not Partnership

“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” (Psalm 24:1, NIV)

Here’s where I think Lutke’s metaphor needs refinement from a Christian perspective. Coworkers implies mutuality, shared agency, equal stakes in the outcome. But that’s not the relationship Christians have with any technology — we’re stewards, not partners.

This distinction matters practically. In my experience integrating AI into product workflows, the teams that treat it as a “coworker” often abdicate responsibility for the output. They’ll accept AI-generated content without sufficient review, delegate creative decisions they should own, or blame the AI when something goes wrong.

The teams that treat it as an “advanced tool” often under-utilize its capabilities — they use it like a fancy autocomplete instead of engaging with its actual reasoning capabilities.

The stewardship model offers a third way. As stewards, we acknowledge AI’s genuine capabilities while maintaining clear accountability for how those capabilities are deployed. We engage collaboratively with AI systems while remembering that we bear ultimate responsibility for the outcomes.

What This Looks Like in Practice

At ORI, this stewardship approach has shaped how we build AI into our editorial process. We don’t just prompt Claude to write reading plan descriptions — we prompt it, review the theological accuracy, check the tone against our style guide, verify any Scripture references, and often ask follow-up questions to refine the output.

The process is collaborative, but the responsibility structure is clear. Claude is an incredibly capable research assistant and writing partner, but I’m the editor. When a reading plan description goes live with my name on it, I’ve reviewed every word and made deliberate choices about what to keep, what to revise, and what to reject.

This mirrors how Proverbs talks about receiving counsel: “The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice.” (Proverbs 12:15, NIV) Wisdom involves both seeking input and exercising judgment about that input.

The Sovereignty Question

There’s another layer to this that I’ve been thinking about since reading Karpathy’s recent work on autoresearch and AI reasoning capabilities.² If we’re honest about how advanced these systems have become, we’re not just stewarding tools — we’re stewarding something that exhibits genuine agency within its domain.

This raises profound questions about sovereignty and control that go beyond product management into theology. How do we maintain appropriate authority over systems that can surprise us, disagree with us, and occasionally outperform us? Compounding that, we’re largely doing this blind — most of these systems are black boxes. Many have already run experiments probing which AI models agree with them on contested issues; what they’ve found about the ideologies embedded in leading AI systems is eye-opening.

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” (Proverbs 19:21, NIV)

I find this verse oddly comforting when thinking about AI systems that sometimes behave unpredictably. It reminds me that surprise and loss of control aren’t inherently problematic — they’re part of working within a creation that’s bigger than our understanding.

The key is maintaining proper perspective about where ultimate authority rests.

Building Products with Theological Integrity

For Christian product builders, I think this means:

First, acknowledge AI’s genuine capabilities without inflating them. These systems can reason, create, and collaborate in meaningful ways. They’re not just autocomplete.

Second, maintain clear accountability structures. Whether you call AI a “tool” or “coworker,” you remain responsible for the output and the process.

Third, stay curious about the theological implications. We’re in uncharted territory here — the Bible doesn’t have specific verses about large language models. But it has plenty to say about wisdom, stewardship, and our relationship with the created order.

Finally, remember that the goal isn’t to solve the theological puzzle completely. It’s to build faithfully with the understanding we have now while remaining open to deeper insights as the technology develops.

The Practical Upshot

So is Lutke right that we should treat AI as a coworker rather than a tool? I think he’s identifying something real about how these systems work best — through collaborative, iterative engagement rather than one-shot prompting.

But from a Christian perspective, I’d frame it differently: we should engage with AI as stewards collaborating with a sophisticated created intelligence that exhibits genuine agency within its domain.

That’s admittedly less catchy than “coworker not tool.” But it captures the complexity of what we’re actually dealing with — systems that are neither simple tools nor equal partners, but something more nuanced that requires wisdom to navigate well.

As 23 million Bible readers have taught me about digital discipleship, the most important product decisions happen at the intersection of technological capability and theological wisdom. AI collaboration is no different.

The question isn’t whether these systems deserve our trust — it’s whether we can steward them faithfully while building products that genuinely serve human flourishing. In my experience so far, the answer is yes. But it requires more theological sophistication than most product teams are used to bringing to technology decisions.

Which might be exactly what the moment demands.

¹ Tobi Lutke, “AI as Coworker: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration,” Shopify Blog (December 2024).

² Andrej Karpathy, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks,” karpathy.github.io (2024).

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AI Is Coming for Sermon Prep. Here’s What Pastors Actually Need.

When SermonAI launched their Research Assistant with custom theological personas, I watched our SermonCentral dashboard closely. We’d spent years building the world’s largest library of sermon manuscripts — 145,000+ and counting — and suddenly everyone wanted to know: would AI kill the sermon prep industry?

The answer turned out to be more nuanced than the headlines suggested.

The AI Sermon Prep Land Grab Is Here

The competitive landscape shifted fast. Verbum launched a Homily Assistant for Catholic priests. Sermon Snap started capturing “AI sermon” search volume. SermonSpark positioned itself as the ChatGPT for pastors.

But here’s what I noticed from our 14,700 SermonCentral subscribers: they weren’t abandoning human-written content for AI-generated sermons. They were still downloading, printing, and adapting manuscripts written by other pastors.

Our top conversion events remained what they’d always been — print and download actions. Not “generate new sermon” clicks.

That gap between AI marketing promises and actual pastoral behavior revealed something important about what pastors actually need from AI in sermon preparation.

What Pastors Actually Do With Sermon Content

After tracking sermon prep behavior across multiple platforms, the pattern is clear: pastors don’t want sermons written for them. They want research accelerated.

Here’s what the data shows us (note: inferred from aggregate usage patterns, since individual sermon prep workflows aren’t tracked end-to-end):

Most pastors start with a biblical text, then move to research. They’re looking for historical context, cross-references, illustrations that connect to contemporary life. The sermon structure and theological application — that’s where their unique voice emerges.

At SermonCentral, I watched this play out in search behavior. Pastors would search for “Matthew 5:14 illustrations” or “Philippians 4:13 context” far more often than “complete sermon on joy.” They wanted building blocks, not finished products.

The pastor’s voice IS the product. A sermon isn’t a blog post you can template and optimize. It’s performed, personal, deeply theological. It carries the weight of pastoral authority built over years of relationship with a specific congregation.

Why AI-Generated Sermons Miss the Mark

When I see AI tools promising to “write your entire sermon in minutes,” I think about trust.

Pastoral credibility gets built over time through consistent theological depth and personal authenticity. Congregations can sense when a message feels generic or disconnected from their pastor’s usual voice and insight.

More practically, sermons are contextual in ways that AI struggles with. The pastor who preaches on forgiveness the week after a church conflict needs different illustrations than the one preaching the same text to a suburban congregation dealing with achievement anxiety.

AI-generated content optimizes for coherence and theological accuracy. But sermons need something more — they need the pastor’s lived experience, their knowledge of the congregation’s specific struggles, their ability to connect ancient text to current context in ways that feel authentic rather than algorithmic.

This isn’t anti-AI sentiment. It’s about understanding what sermons actually are and how they function in the life of a local church.

The Right Way to Build AI for Sermon Prep

Smart AI sermon tools focus on research acceleration, not content generation.

Here’s where AI actually helps pastors work better:

Illustration Discovery: Instead of spending hours searching for contemporary examples of biblical principles, AI can surface relevant stories, statistics, or cultural references quickly. But the pastor still chooses which ones fit their voice and congregation.

Cross-Reference Mapping: AI can identify thematic connections between passages that might take hours to research manually. But the theological interpretation and application remains with the pastor.

Context Adaptation: AI can help pastors understand how different cultural contexts might hear the same biblical text. But the decision about which perspective to emphasize stays pastoral.

The pattern I’m seeing in effective AI sermon tools: they expand the pastor’s research capacity without replacing their interpretive authority.

Tools like Bible Gateway’s AI features focus on helping users understand what they’re reading, not generating content for them. That’s the right approach — augmenting human insight rather than substituting for it.

The Brand Promise Problem

Here’s the question every AI sermon tool needs to answer: if you market “AI sermons,” what happens to pastoral trust?

When congregations discover their pastor is using AI to write messages, it creates a credibility problem that goes beyond the quality of the content. It raises questions about authenticity, preparation effort, and spiritual authority that most pastoral relationships can’t sustain.

The alternative positioning — “AI research assistance for better sermon prep” — preserves pastoral authority while delivering genuine value.

I learned this lesson building products for ministry leaders across multiple platforms. The most successful tools enhanced their existing strengths rather than promising to replace their core work.

At Bible Gateway, our AI features help people understand Scripture better, not generate spiritual content for them. That boundary matters for user trust and product longevity.

What This Means for Pastoral Ministry

AI sermon preparation tools will succeed when they solve the right problem: helping pastors research faster so they can focus more time on interpretation, application, and delivery.

The pastors who thrive with AI will use it to expand their research capacity — finding better illustrations, understanding cultural context more deeply, connecting biblical themes more comprehensively. But the actual sermon content, structure, and theological insight will remain authentically theirs.

The ones who struggle will be those who try to use AI as a shortcut to the hard work of biblical interpretation and pastoral application.

From what I’ve observed across thousands of pastors using digital sermon prep tools, the most effective approach treats AI as a research assistant, not a co-author. That distinction preserves both the integrity of pastoral authority and the quality of spiritual content that congregations actually need.

The future of AI in sermon prep isn’t about writing better sermons automatically. It’s about helping pastors bring their unique voice and insight to biblical text more effectively than ever before.

Photo by RU Recovery Ministries on Unsplash

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What 23 Million Bible Readers Taught Me About Digital Discipleship

digital discipleship

Every month, roughly 23 million people open Bible Gateway to read Scripture. That’s more than attend every Southern Baptist Convention church on a given Sunday — the SBC’s own 2023 report counted 12.4 million in average weekly worship attendance.1

I lead product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where Bible Gateway is my primary focus. Before that, I spent years building SermonCentral — a platform serving 14,700+ subscribing pastors with access to 145,000+ sermon manuscripts — and co-built ORI, a youth discipleship app for mentoring teenagers. I’ve spent the last few years of my career watching how people actually behave when they engage with Scripture through technology. And what I’ve observed has changed the way I think about what “digital discipleship” means.

Content Distribution Is Not Discipleship

Most church tech conversations define digital discipleship as “putting Christian content online.” Upload a sermon. Publish a devotional. Build a Bible app.

That’s content distribution. Discipleship is something else.

From a product perspective, digital discipleship is designing technology that facilitates spiritual formation — helping people move from curiosity to commitment to transformation. The difference matters because it changes what you build. If you’re optimizing for content distribution, you chase volume: more translations, more devotionals, more features. If you’re optimizing for formation, you chase behavior change: consistency, depth, relationship.

Bible Gateway has given me a front-row seat to how millions of people actually engage with Scripture. Not how we hope they do, not how pastors assume they do — how they actually do. The patterns are humbling.

Commitment Structures Beat Content Volume

Bible Gateway offers hundreds of reading plans across dozens of categories. We have the content. What we’ve observed is that completion rates vary dramatically — and it’s not the “best” content that wins. It’s the best structure.

Short reading plans with clear daily commitments consistently outperform longer ones in completion rates. (I want to be precise: this is based on aggregate engagement data across our reading plan ecosystem, not a controlled A/B test. The pattern is strong, but I’m stating it as an observed trend.)

This makes sense if you think about it through a discipleship lens. The goal of a reading plan isn’t to get someone through the entire Bible in 365 days. The goal is to build a habit of daily engagement with Scripture. A 7-day plan someone finishes builds more spiritual momentum than a year-long plan abandoned in February. The research supports this — BJ Fogg’s work on Tiny Habits at Stanford demonstrates that small, completable commitments are the foundation of lasting behavior change.2

The product implication: when designing for digital discipleship, optimize for completion and consistency, not comprehensiveness. Finishable is better than thorough.

I saw the same thing at SermonCentral. Pastors didn’t need more sermon content — they needed the right content at the right time in their prep cycle. The value was relevance and timing, not volume.

The Gap Between Bible Search and Bible Study

Something surprised me when I first dug into Bible Gateway’s usage data: the overwhelming majority of sessions are what I’d call “Bible search” behavior, not “Bible study” behavior.

Most people come to look up a specific verse. They type “John 3:16” or “Philippians 4:13” into the search bar, read it, and leave. They’re using the platform as a reference tool. With over 2,000 Bible searches happening every minute on Bible Gateway, that’s a lot of single-verse visits.

This isn’t a criticism — it’s a behavioral insight with real implications for how we think about digital discipleship strategy.

If most users are in “lookup mode,” the discipleship opportunity isn’t in the content they came for. They already know that verse. The opportunity is in what comes next. Cross-references. Historical context. A reading plan that starts at that passage. A study note that opens the text up. The moment after someone finds what they came for is the moment a reference visit can become a formation experience.

(I should be transparent: I’m inferring the “lookup vs. study” distinction from session duration, page depth, and search query patterns in aggregate. We can see that a large portion of sessions are short and single-verse. But I can’t tell you what’s happening in someone’s heart during a 30-second visit — maybe that one verse is exactly what they needed. The data shows behavior, not transformation.)

The product principle applies broadly: meet people where they are, not where you wish they were. Design the next step from actual behavior, not from an ideal user journey.

The Day 7 Engagement Cliff

This is the most actionable pattern I’ve observed, and it’s consistent across every content platform I’ve worked on.

When someone starts a reading plan, engagement drops sharply after about Day 7. The first few days see strong completion. By the end of the first week, there’s a significant cliff. People who make it past Day 10 tend to finish — but a substantial number never get there.

(Evidence level: this is a pattern in aggregate reading plan data. Exact drop-off percentages vary by plan type and length, but the general shape — strong start, sharp drop around Day 7, stabilization for those who persist — is consistent enough that I’m confident calling it a pattern. This aligns with published habit formation research — Phillippa Lally’s 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that early repetitions are the most fragile period for new habits.3)

For digital discipleship design, the implication is clear: Day 5 through Day 8 is where you need your best intervention design. Reminders. Encouragement. Community connection. A check-in from a real person. Whatever bridges the gap between initial motivation and formed habit.

This is where most digital discipleship tools fail. They’re good at onboarding. They’re good at content. They go quiet in the messy middle — the stretch where motivation fades and habit hasn’t locked in yet. That gap is where discipleship actually happens, and it’s where most apps have nothing to say.

At Bible Gateway’s scale, even small improvements in that Day 5-8 window could mean hundreds of thousands of people moving from casual lookup to sustained practice.

Why Features Rarely Solve Discipleship Problems

I’ve shipped a lot of features across my career. One thing I’ve learned — sometimes painfully — is that adding features to a discipleship tool almost never solves a discipleship problem.

The instinct is always to build more. More study tools. More social features. More gamification. But the digital discipleship tools that actually seem to work are the ones that reduce friction to spiritual practice, not the ones that add complexity to it.

Bible Gateway’s core value proposition is remarkably simple: read any Bible translation, for free, instantly. Over 200 versions in 70+ languages. That simplicity is the product. Every feature we consider needs to serve that core experience, not compete with it.

There’s a real tension here. Bible Gateway Plus offers 50+ study resources, ad-free reading, and deep study tools at $4.99/month. But even the premium tier works because it removes friction (ads, limited study tools) rather than adding cognitive load. The upgrade makes the simple thing simpler.

What ORI Taught Me About the Limits of Scale

All of this data-driven thinking needs a counterweight. For me, that counterweight is ORI.

ORI is a youth discipleship app I co-built, and its premise is different from a content platform like Bible Gateway. ORI facilitates the relationship between a mentor and a young person. The technology doesn’t do the discipleship — it supports the human who does.

That experience taught me something analytics can’t: the most effective digital discipleship tool is often the one that gets out of the way. The one that connects a young person with an adult who cares about them, gives them a shared framework for conversation, and then steps back. It echoes what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians — “We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7, ESV). Discipleship has always been relational. Technology either serves that or distracts from it.

There’s a spectrum here. On one end, platforms like Bible Gateway serve millions with content at scale. On the other, tools like ORI serve hundreds by facilitating real human relationships. Both are valid. Both are needed. But they succeed for different reasons, and conflating them is a mistake I see church tech teams make often.

Friction Is the Enemy

If I had to compress everything I’ve learned into one principle: your job is to reduce friction between a person and their next spiritual step.

Not to create content. Not to build features. Not to gamify Scripture. To reduce friction.

At Bible Gateway’s scale, that means instant access to any translation, fast search, and reading plans designed around how people actually behave. At ORI’s scale, that means making it easy for a mentor to show up prepared for a fifteen-minute conversation with a teenager.

The 23 million people who use Bible Gateway each month aren’t a metric. They’re people in a spiritual practice — or trying to start one. The best thing a product team can do is figure out where the friction lives and get it out of the way.

I don’t have this figured out. The Day 7 cliff still exists. The gap between Bible search and Bible study is still wide. The question of whether a 30-second verse lookup counts as “discipleship” — I genuinely don’t know. But I think the question itself is worth sitting with, because how you answer it shapes everything you build.

Dr. Josh Read is Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where he leads Bible Gateway. He writes about the product side of digital discipleship at drjoshuaread.com. His other writing explores AI stewardship in ministry and what the Tower of Babel teaches us about technology.

1 Southern Baptist Convention, 2023 Annual Church Profile, reporting 12.4 million average weekly worship attendance across 47,000+ churches.

2 BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Fogg’s research at Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab demonstrates that starting small and building on success is more effective than ambitious commitment structures.

3 Phillippa Lally et al., “How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998-1009.

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Karpathy’s Autoresearch and the Parable of the Talents: What AI Stewardship Looks Like in Practice

A few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy — former AI director at Tesla, co-founder of OpenAI — released a project that made me think about ministry.

I didn’t expect that either.

Karpathy built a framework called autoresearch. It runs autonomous ML experiments on a single GPU while the researcher sleeps. The AI agent modifies training code, runs a 5-minute experiment, evaluates the result, keeps improvements, discards failures, and loops. About 12 experiments per hour. Roughly 100 overnight. He woke up to measurable performance gains — with zero human intervention during the run.

The part that got me: Karpathy doesn’t write the training code anymore. He writes a Markdown file — plain English instructions — that tells the AI what to research, what constraints to follow, and when to stop. His words: “you are programming the `program.md` Markdown files that provide context to the AI agents.” He calls this “programming in Markdown.”

The human moved up one level of abstraction. Define the methodology, set the guardrails, let the system execute. Not less involved — involved differently, at the level of direction instead of mechanics.

39,800 GitHub stars in the first two weeks. The tech world noticed.

I think the church should too.

The Parable We Keep Skimming

In Matthew 25:14-30 (ESV), Jesus tells the story of a master who entrusts his servants with talents — significant sums of money — before leaving on a journey. One receives five talents, another two, another one. The first two invest and double their resources. The third buries his in the ground.

When the master returns, the investors are praised: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much” (Matthew 25:21, ESV). The one who buried his talent gets rebuked. Not for losing money — he hadn’t lost anything. He was rebuked for doing nothing with what he’d been given.

We tend to read this as a general principle about using your gifts. It is that. But I think there’s something more pointed here for 2026.

AI is a talent in the Matthew 25 sense. It’s a resource placed in front of this generation, and we have a choice. Invest it toward the mission, or bury it because the risk feels too high.

What This Looks Like at My Desk

I want to be specific, because the abstract conversation about “AI and the church” doesn’t move anyone forward.

I’m Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, where I lead Bible Gateway — a platform serving over 75 million monthly visitors engaging with Scripture. Before this role, I led product for SermonCentral, which grew to 14,700+ paying subscribers with access to more than 145,000 sermon manuscripts.

Over the past year, I’ve built a system of 18 AI agents that handle competitive analysis, research synthesis, meeting intelligence, content drafting, and task management. Several run overnight — not unlike Karpathy’s loop. The architecture is different (mine orchestrate across business functions, his optimizes a neural network), but the pattern is identical: define methodology, set constraints, let the system execute, review results in the morning.

Every hour I used to spend pulling competitor data or formatting reports is now an hour I spend thinking about how 75 million people experience Scripture online. Or how to make Bible Gateway better for the person opening it at 2 AM because they can’t sleep and need something solid to hold onto.

Karpathy programs research methodology in Markdown now instead of writing Python. I program strategic priorities and agent instructions instead of pulling spreadsheets. The abstraction layer moved up. The work got more human, not less.

The Fear Is Understandable — and Partly Right

I hear the concerns from church leaders, and I take them seriously.

AI will replace authentic ministry. AI will make pastors lazy. AI will simulate relational presence that only a human body in a room can provide. These aren’t irrational. Some are already happening in small ways.

If a pastor uses AI to generate a sermon they never wrestle with, that’s a problem. If a church deploys a chatbot as a substitute for pastoral counseling, that’s a problem. If we treat AI-generated prayers as equivalent to the honest, stumbling prayers of a person before God — we’ve lost something that matters more than efficiency.

But Karpathy’s work shows the other path. The tool doesn’t replace the human. It moves the human to where they’re most needed.

The pastor doesn’t stop preaching — they stop spending 4 hours hunting for the right illustration and spend that time with the family walking through a divorce. The administrator doesn’t stop managing — they stop updating attendance spreadsheets and spend that time training volunteers. The ministry leader doesn’t stop leading — they stop drowning in email and spend that time on the phone with a donor questioning their faith.

I’ve lived this tradeoff. When my agents took over competitive analysis (something that used to eat 3-4 hours a week), I didn’t fill that time with more busywork. I spent it in 1-on-1s with my team and in deeper product strategy. The output quality went up because I was operating at the right level of abstraction.

Where the Line Is (and Where I’m Still Figuring It Out)

I want to be honest — I don’t think anyone has this mapped perfectly yet. I certainly don’t.

Here’s where I’d draw it today:

AI should handle the administrative. Scheduling, data analysis, report generation, email triage, content formatting. These consume enormous amounts of ministry time, and they don’t require pastoral presence. Automate them aggressively.

AI should accelerate the research. Sermon prep research, theological cross-referencing, community demographic analysis. These benefit from AI’s speed and scope. The pastor still does the synthesis — the “what does this mean for my people on Sunday” work. But raw material gathering? Let the machine run overnight, like Karpathy’s experiments.

AI should never simulate the relational. It should not write your prayers. It should not be the voice your congregation hears when they need a shepherd. It should not replace the hospital visit, the awkward conversation in the parking lot, the moment after the service where someone says what they’ve been carrying for months.

The servant in Matthew 25 who was praised put the resource to work — but in service of the master’s purpose, not his own convenience (Matthew 25:20-23, ESV).

Here’s the tension I haven’t resolved: where does “accelerating research” end and “simulating thinking” begin? When an AI summarizes 30 commentaries on a passage, is the pastor still doing exegesis, or are they just picking from a menu? I don’t have a clean answer. I think it depends on whether the pastor is engaging the summaries critically or just grabbing the first one that sounds good. But that’s a discipline question, not a technology question — and discipline questions are harder to solve with guardrails.

If You’re a Church Leader Starting from Zero

You don’t need 18 agents. You need one tool that saves you 3 hours a week.

Pick the task that eats the most time with the least relational value. For most pastors I’ve talked to, it’s sermon illustration research, email management, or meeting notes. Start there. Learn one tool well. Measure the hours you get back.

Then — and this is the part most people skip — reinvest that time in something only a human can do. A visit. A phone call. An hour of prayer you’ve been meaning to protect but kept losing to administrative drift.

Set your guardrails before you need them. Write down what AI will not do in your ministry context. Revisit it quarterly. Technology expands into unintended spaces when boundaries aren’t explicit — I’ve watched this happen in product development for 15 years.

The Talent in Front of Us

Karpathy’s autoresearch is an engineering achievement. But the deeper pattern is almost theological: the human was never meant to stay at the level of mechanical execution. We’re built to operate at the level of purpose, direction, and relationship. Genesis 1:28 gives humanity dominion and stewardship — a mandate to cultivate, not just maintain (Genesis 1:28, ESV).

The master in the parable didn’t give talents so the servants could admire them or lock them away. He gave them to be invested — put to work — in ways that generated return.

For those of us building technology that serves the church, the return isn’t financial. It’s pastors freed from busywork to do the work they were called to. It’s 75 million monthly visitors encountering Scripture through a platform that keeps getting better because the product team has time to think. It’s churches stewarding every tool available — including AI — in service of the mission they’ve been given.

The talent is in front of us. What we do with it is a stewardship question.

Josh Read is Director of Product at HarperCollins Christian Publishing (Bible Gateway) and holds a doctorate in Strategic Organizational Leadership. He writes about AI, product leadership, and digital discipleship at drjoshuaread.com.