by Rev. Michael Jannett
The last time my family visited a restaurant, my youngest daughter didn’t think she would like anything on the menu. She loves a good Caesar salad, but quite often, she takes a bite of something from someone else’s plate and finds that she actually enjoys what’s on that other plate.
We don’t know what we don’t know, until we try it out. And we either confirm our dislike or change our minds. We face uncertainties when something new comes to us and, with it, the challenges that come with changing our minds/perspectives/opinions. At the forefront of technological change today is the introduction of and accessibility to artificial intelligence (AI) for the everyday person—the likes of you and me.
The world constantly goes through changes in technology. As Lutheran Christians, in particular, we are very much aware of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440 and how Martin Luther used that new technology to create many publications with the desire to reform the church. That particular technology greatly enhanced his reach and allowed him to share his message of God’s grace to the masses much more efficiently than the technology that existed before the printing press. (According to the Project Gutenberg Wikipedia page, the press could “produce up to 3,600 pages per workday, compared to forty by hand-printing and a few by hand-copying.”)
Many of us (ahem, myself included) have also witnessed major technological advances: the birth of the internet, smartphones and more . . . each with its own joys and struggles.
So how can AI—one of the latest technologies to come along—help us out today in our modern ministry context?
To apply AI tools to a ministry context, we want to look at “generative AI,” a subset of artificial intelligence. This type of AI aims to teach machines to create content, whether it be text, images, audio or other types of data, that resembles human-generated content. (That last part is key: It aims to generate what looks like “human-generated content.”)
In other words, generative AI is like having a good student intern help you with your work. Giving a generative AI tool a task is like giving a student intern a task to complete. You take that response and do what you need to do to it—critique it, alter it or use it—giving credit where credit is due, of course.
One such “generative” tool in the AI arena is something you may have heard of before: ChatGPT. ChatGPT refers to models that are finetuned for generating conversational responses. The “chat” in ChatGPT signifies its ability to understand and generate human-like text in a conversational manner. (Note: The G in ChatGPT is for “generative.”)
Users can interact with ChatGPT by providing prompts or input, and the model generates responses based on its understanding of the context and the patterns it learned during training.
Now . . . onto the application!
I know you’ve used Google before. It’s the world’s most popular and powerful search engine. When you use Google, you enter a search and get responses. Then, you must sift through the responses to find what you seek. With AI, you can take that search to the next level. You enter a query into ChatGPT, and it takes the responses and formulates them into a format of your choosing. ChatGPT generates something like a human response.
Here is a scenario you might engage in: You teach a Sunday school class or lead a retreat. You want to drive home some ideas about grace and forgiveness. So, you ask ChatGPT: “What are three movie references that show grace and forgiveness? Keep the list to just movies that are rated PG or younger audiences.” You could ask for more (or less); if you don’t like those responses provided, you can ask it to search again to give you more responses.
Now, to get into a more specific context. Say you want to apply the movie clip concept to a sermon or devotion you’ve already written. You want ChatGPT to look at your sermon or devotion and ask it to give you movie clips to reinforce the point of your devotion or sermon. (Again, this is like giving an intern an assignment to work on while you get other work done.) To accomplish this, you simply copy your sermon or devotion, paste it into the ChatGPT prompt and discern the responses.
To take it even further, consider this: Based on your sermon you want to have some good discussion questions for your Sunday school class based on this sermon or devotion. You can post these questions in an email to your congregation to prep them for the sermon or post them on social media for some online engagement. You’ve already entered your original material into ChatGPT. Now, you ask it: “Give me 10 discussion questions based on this content.” Then, sit back and watch for the responses.
As I stated earlier, you can do the work, give it ChatGPT for some processing, and then get some results. You can critique, ignore, alter or use the results.
These generative responses are the brilliance of AI. You wrote a sermon or devotion and now you want folks to discuss further. You are a little pressed for time or need more creative energy for the next step. Enter ChatGPT. ChatGPT unlocks the brilliance of generative AI.
A recent open letter from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan expresses my thoughts about artificial intelligence: “AI should empower human creativity, not replace it. And everyone should have access to AI tools that will push the boundaries of creative expression.”
In the Spirit of Mohan’s quote (and with a hat tip to friends Ryan Panzer and Dr. Michael Chan), let’s use AI to help us look not just for answers but to help us be more curious. Let’s use tools like ChatGPT to engage our curiosity. Let’s instruct ChatGPT to ask US questions and to help us be more curious.
ChatGPT 3.5 is free. Download it to your smartphone or access it via a web browser. ChatGPT 4 is more advanced and can do graphics (currently costs $20/month).
Happy “chatting”!
P.S. To see how this all works, check out my YouTube channel with examples of ChatGPT usage. Click the link or scan the QR code. Peace!
https://bit.ly/LutheranTechTalk
Here are more prompts for ChatGPT to help you in ministry:
- What questions should I be prepared to answer if someone asks me about my faith?
- What questions should I be prepared to answer if a 10-year-old asks me about my faith?
- What questions should I ask my fellowship committee to help them better include church members in their efforts to serve our congregation?
- Write a TikTok script based on the sermon I just pasted into ChatGPT.
- I want to engage my social media followers. Lay out a 10-week plan to post content two times per week, using Martin Luther’s Small Catechism as the basis for the content. Give suggestions for a graphic, a quote from the catechism and an open-ended question for each social media post. (This one is particularly cool.)
The Rev. Michael Jannett (he/him) is a husband, father, and pastor, and currently serves the Southeastern Synod of the ELCA as the Assistant to the Bishop for Formation and Communication. He is a graduate of Lutheran Theological Soutern Seminary (M. Div. 2007) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S. in Computer Science, 2001).
Connect Journal 
Thank you Michael for these great ideas!
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