Preacher's Block

This preaching tip was shared by Preacher’s Block co-founder, Hunter Bethea. If you’re interested in joining the most focused preachers in the world and getting these tips sent to your inbox every week, sign up here.

When it comes to preaching, I’m of the mindset that artificial intelligence is a tool we can use to help us as we preach the Word of God. Much like a commentary or YouTube or Google, it doesn’t replace the human preacher that God speaks through to a specific people in a specific place so we need to know its limits before we abdicate some of our spiritual authority and God-given creativity to a non-human person being thing.

I’ve found AI to be a tool that is especially helpful for feedback on a sermon I’ve already written. If you write a manuscript for your sermon, you may find the following helpful:

One way that I recently used AI for feedback was to find out what age groups would find my sermon too difficult to understand. Let me show you how I did this.

1. Fill in the blank in your head: I want my sermon to be easy for anyone __ and older to understand.
2. Copy your sermon in its entirety.
3. Choose your favorite generative artificial intelligence chatbot (I used ChatGPT) and type the following (or something similar): I’m preaching a sermon. Below is the sermon. For what ages is this sermon understandable?
4. Before clicking enter, paste your sermon.
5. Click enter and see what it says!

I had hoped that my sermon was easily understandable by people aged 12 and up. I was close… ChatGPT told me that it was written at a 9th-10th grade level, or age 14 and up. It then broke down my sermon into different sections and told me what ages would understand each section. There was a section that it said only 16 year olds and older would understand! That tells me that that’s a section that I should probably edit, explain more, and slow down when I’m preaching.

It also gave me words that I could change or explain more to help the sermon be more understandable. I’ll be doing this for all of my sermons going forward in the editing process. I hope it helps you too!