Every week, church leaders get told there's a new tool or trend they "have to" adopt — and most of us don't have the time or staff to chase it all. This newsletter is here to help.

Each week, we take one trend making the rounds in church comms and give you a straight answer: what it is, whether it's worth your time, and one simple step to take if it is. No fluff — just help spending your limited time on what actually matters.

Let’s get started.

AI use in sermon preparation has gone mainstream. Recent surveys put the number of preaching pastors using AI somewhere between one-quarter and two-thirds, depending on how you define "using AI" — and among those who use AI regularly, most say it's now a normal part of their weekly rhythm.

Here's the thing the headlines skip: there's a big difference between "I used AI" and "AI wrote my sermon." The research shows pastors are overwhelmingly using AI as a research assistant — digging up commentary, cross-references, historical context, and outline ideas — not as a ghostwriter. One large survey found AI users saving several hours a week, which adds up to nearly three extra work weeks a year. Most of that time gets reinvested in prayer, people, and delivery — not cut from the process altogether.

But there's a real failure mode too. Pastors who lean on AI-generated outlines without heavy editing report their preaching starting to feel generic — more polished, less personal. And the ethical line almost everyone agrees on: never read AI output cold from the pulpit, and if AI meaningfully shaped your message, your congregation deserves to know.

Using AI for research, cross-referencing, and outline brainstorming is a reasonable, time-saving move. Using it to write your sermon for you, unedited, is where it stops being a tool and starts being a shortcut around the actual work of pastoring.

This week, try AI for exactly one task — pulling background/historical context on your passage, or generating 3 outline options to react against — and keep everything else in your own process. See if it buys you back time without changing your voice.

Until next week,

Josh
The Church Comms Guy

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