How to Use Generative AI as a Church
Image generated by Jared Belcher with DALL-E
Everyone is talking about “AI” these days. It’s the hot topic. But there’s good reason for it - these tools can quickly do complex tasks that might take a person hours. Maybe you’ve heard about tools like ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, WALL-E, or Sora and wondered how you could even get started.
Today, we’re going to talk about “Generative AI” and how your church can begin to use these new tools to speed up non-critical tasks. We’re going to discuss AI’s strengths, weaknesses, and a few ways you can begin to use them (with wisdom) within ministry context. And at the end, I’ll share how we built our church its own custom AI bot through ChatGPT.
What is “Generative AI?”
In the simplest terms, Generative AI is a computer creating something on its own based on what it has seen humans create in the past. There are all kinds of generative AI's these days and usually each one is specialized in just one kind of creative work - writing, images, video, and audio.
To understand what these tools really are, focus on the first word: GENERATIVE.
The AI has no idea what it’s saying to you. It is not intelligent, it’s a machine.
Generative AI is like a dream-machine, not a truth-machine. It’s generating content. It’s easy to get this wrong because when you interact with an AI, it seems so intelligent and the answers it gives are so confident. But the machine has no clue what it’s saying. If you ask it question about reality- history or science, for example- it’s likely to get the answer wrong (with great confidence). That’s because, even in name, generative AI’s are not designed to help with facts, they are designed to generate content. It’s trained on patterns, not knowledge and certainly not wisdom. The machine has no concept of the meaning of the content it generates and therefore no ability to discern how truthful that content is or not. It’s not a search engine; it’s an imagination engine.
In other words, use generative AI in the way it is designed to be used.
Here are a few guiding principles for using generative AI:
Don’t trust the external information an AI gives you. You’ll need to fact-check every statement an AI makes, especially about theology. I find that the external information tends to be 80% right, but you’ll want to hunt out the 20% that isn’t.
AI image or video generation is based on what patterns are most common in the training data the scientists used for that specific AI. If you ask it to show you a picture of Jesus, it’s most likely going to look like those Sunday School illustrations of a European Jesus with silky smooth brown hair and potentially a halo around his head. That’s because there are thousands of photos of Jesus in that style. It’s difficult to even get a different result. Every AI will be trained on a different set of images/video, and there will be specific quarks like this.
How well you feed information or instructions into the AI will determine the quality of its work. The best source the AI has for truth is you. If you want to have better results, you need to feed it better information.
Our Church’s Policy on Generative AI
In light of this technology, knowing that our own staff would want to try it or work it into creative workflows, we wrote a Generative AI policy for our staff to follow. There aren’t a lot of laws or even norms around this stuff yet, so we thought it important to give clarity to our staff. The goal was to give freedom to our staff to experiment and even use content they create with AI tools, but in an ethical, legal, and transparent way. There are a few rules about any AI content that we publish, such as :
All images and video made with AI must be disclosed in the description of the publication
We never publish an AI image that appears to recreate a real moment at our church, such as baptisms or worship
AI mustn’t be used to directly generate teaching content (such as sermons, blog posts, or manuscripts)
Anything produced with an AI must be checked for accuracy by both the creator and the distributor.
In other words, don’t trick people. Be real. And use the AI as a tool and not a replacement for human creators.
This is all new and our first policy is really just a starting point, but any of our staff who want to use AI for their church work must sign it. You can download our policy using the button below.
How to use Generative Images in the Church
Incredibly, this is not a real image. I generated this photo from a prompt I wrote using DALL-E. You can feel the energy of the moment and it really nailed the wide-angle camera look I was going for, even if there are a few oddities in the photo, such as the water. Per our church’s policy, we would never publish this photo.
Using generative images is where things can get really wild and really cool. By describing what kind of image you want, in just a few seconds, you can get a custom image for your church that took almost no work for you to produce at all.
But here’s the thing: You don’t know what you’re going to get. Generating images can be tedious and frustrating because often, it’s not quite right, and even if you know what you want changed, the AI doesn’t always get it. But if you’re flexible and patient, it can be really cool. Let me show you. In this slideshow below, these are all biblical images that I had DALL-E generate using prompts and feedback that I provided.
Pretty cool, right?
But before you start thinking this could make anything you want, let me remind you that in 2024, this process is frustrating. You have to get good at knowing how to write image prompts and even then, it’s a mixed bag. So here are some practices I’ve learned for generating good AI images:
I had DALL-E generate this image of a cat who was super into UT football. In the image on the left, I didn’t specify the style and it looks like bad CGI. In the image on the right, I asked for a 3D animated kids movie.
“The Holy Bble,” so close. Try not to have any text in your generated images.
Specify what style you want: Typically, if you don’t specify the style, the AI will make something surreal, which looks like weird CGI. Instead, tell the AI what you’re going for. Is it photo journalism? Is it a stock photo? An oil painting? A frame from a cinematic movie? A pencil sketch? A 3D animated kids movie? Landscape image? A blank coloring page for kids? You can specify the style.
Explain the “vibe,” the emotion of the shot: This dramatically affects your result. Is the scene energetic? Is it happy? Is it dramatic? How do the people in the shot feel? For example, in the shot in the slideshow above of the creation of light, I told the AI that “the light shoots into the black void in a joyful celebration.” But in the image of the dragon being lowered into the lake of fire, I wrote, “It’s dark and dramatic; the wrath of God is on display in its full power and there is no escape for the dragon.” This is where you can be artsy and it’ll pay off!
Define the Color Palette: If you have specific colors in mind, include them in your prompt. This could be as broad as "warm autumn colors" or as specific as "midnight blue and gold." Specifying the color palette helps align the AI's output with your project's tone and emotional impact. Going back to the image of the baptism at the top, I specified what colors the shirts were of the two men.
Specify the camera angle and the aspect ratio: By default, most AI’s will generate square images. But often, what I want is a wide screen image, so I always ask for that at the end of my prompt. Similarly, specifying the desired perspective or camera angle in your prompt can greatly influence the composition and impact of the generated image. Whether you want a bird's-eye view, a close-up, or a wide-angle, including this information helps guide the AI to better match your vision.
Explain lighting: It’s incredible how much lighting changes the quality of the image. When you describe the emotion of a scene, this will usually provide the correct lighting instructions, but it never hurts to give lighting direction, too. For example, in the baptism photo above, I said “the sun is above the men and illuminating the splashing water droplets.”
Avoid showing text in the image: If there is any text or any logos in your generated image, it’ll look so weird. This might improve with time, but right now the AI’s just can’t get text right. I do everything I can to keep the AI from trying to create text in my design.
Specify how many people/objects are in the image. For example, in the image above of the man being baptized, I told the AI that there were two men: a pastor and a man being baptized. If you just say, “There are some people watching,” it will absolutely fill the scene with thousands of people. I don’t know why, but it does. So always specify how many people (or things) are in the image.
So that being said, here are a few ideas of how you can use generative AI in your church:
Custom Stock photos
This is admittedly the hardest thing to generate convincingly because it has to pass for real photography, but if you can get it to look right, this is a great way to get exactly the stock image shot you want. You can see in some examples I generated here, it can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you get a totally usable shot, and sometimes you have identical octuplets meeting in a coffee shop. Of course, do this with wisdom. In our church, our policy says that we will never publish AI images that try to pass for real photos within the life of our church, such as baptism, worship, or church lobby interactions. But we could totally use generic stock images made by AI.
Sermon Series Images
If you have a vision for a special sermon-series image, especially a seasonal one like for Christmas or Easter, AI images can be a great way to get exactly the kind of shot without much effort. If you want a nativity scene made entirely out of snow, you got it. Want an image of modern man holding a hammer and nails from the crucification? Done. What about a photo of a family meal, but there’s zero gravity and food is flying everywhere? Not a problem. Essentially, you can get shots that would be impossible without AI and get extremely creative.
Biblical Images
One of the coolest things you can do with AI is to generate art based on passages of Scripture. In our policy, we say we steer away from every depicting God (Father, Son, or Holy Spirit) using AI, but that leaves a lot of room for other biblical moments. You can see some I made above. Remember, you can also ask it to create the image in a specific style, such as cartoons for kids. It’s a neat and very easy way to get a custom illustration from a moment in the Bible.
Illustrated Stories
If your pastor wants to tell a story, let’s say from his childhood, to explain a theological point, consider using AI images to visually show the story he’s telling.
How to use Generative Text in the Church
Churches write a lot of a text in a week! Think about all the emails, teaching, announcements, bulletins - so much written content in just one week. There are a lot of cool ways you can begin to integrate AI as a new tool in your writing or editing. We’re not talking about writing whole sermons with AI, in part because it will be the most boring sermon anyone’s ever heard, but adding generative text AI into your workflow.
I use ChatGPT to generate text, but I know of churches also using Claude.ai as well as Google’s Gemini. All of those have free versions but you’ll get the best results and features by paying a small monthly subscription. For example, ChatGPT 3.5 is free right now, but I pay to use ChatGPT 4. I would recommend starting with the free version of any of those and figure out how you could use it, first.
As I’ve used ChatGPT for about a year now, I’ve learned some best practices. Here are a few pro-tips that have served me well:
Ask for the AI to write for a 9th grade reading level: Most pastors are highly educated and tend to write at their own literacy level, but studies show us that the average American reads at about a 9th grade reading level. So let the AI do the work for you and translate complex ideas into simpler terms.
Ask for options: Let’s say you’re trying to come up with a theme for your men’s retreat. You’ve told the AI what the retreat will be about and the main Scripture passage you’ll teach on there, and you’re asking for some theme ideas. Specify how many options you want. When I’m trying to ideate with an AI, I usually end my request with, “Give me 5 options.”
“As if…”: Something that blows my mind is that you get way better results if you ask the AI to impersonate a profession or even a specific author. For example, if you’re putting together a devotional for parents to do with their kids, telling the AI to write, “As if you’re a well published pastor who specializes in teaching parents how to biblically disciple their kids,” will help the AI understand the voice and context. It’s weird how well this works.
Be Specific and Detailed in Your Prompts: The more specific you are with your request, the more accurate and relevant the generated text will be. Include the context, the purpose of the communication, and any key points or themes that need to be included. For example, if you're asking for a newsletter piece about an upcoming church event, provide details about the event, the target audience, and any call-to-action you want to include.
Incorporate Your Church’s Voice and Values: Every church has its unique voice and set of values that resonate with its community. When crafting prompts, include instructions that align with these elements. For instance, if your church values hospitality, you might ask for language that is welcoming and friendly. This helps ensure the AI-generated text reflects your church’s identity and speaks directly to your congregation's hearts. I also always specify which version of the Bible I want it to quote. If you’re using ChatGPT, you can actually upload documents or webpages from your church to help it learn how you write and what values matter most to you.
Correct and give feedback. One of the best parts about any AI is that they’re built for feedback. If you get a result and it’s mostly correct, but there are a few issues, explain to the AI what needs to be fixed and it’ll redo it. It works so well and it won’t even get its feelings hurt!
Now that we’ve covered some best practices, here are some specific ideas for how to use Generative AI text in your church:
Teaching Summaries
If your pastor writes out a summary of sermon points/passages, or if he writes in full manuscripts, copy that text into the AI and ask for a 1 paragraph description of the sermon. This is great for posts on social media or in the video description of your sermon uploads so people have an idea of what the sermon is about. If you’re a pastor and you upload a full manuscript, you can also ask for a point-by-point outline to automatically be created in whatever outline format you prefer (note that you can use tools like YouTube’s auto-caption tool to automatically transcribe a full sermon video into text).
Sermon-based Devotionals
Building on the first idea, once you upload a sermon manuscript, you can ask for the AI to turn it into a devotional. For example, you could ask for “a 5 day devotional that will go on social media, including 1 passage of scripture per day from my sermon.” It’ll use your own sermon to create that devotional and while it may need tweaking, it took 30 seconds to get you most of the way there.
Announcements
This is the lowest-hanging fruit for generative text. Use AI to write your announcement script. Simply tell it the details (why, where, when, where, and who) and the next step people will need to take. If you do video announcements, tell it that this is a script! Make sure you specify length (I like to use time specific length, like “no more than 30 seconds long”).
Teaching Illustrations
If you have a complex idea that you’re teaching and you want a way to distill it into a simple metaphor to help people understand, ask the AI to give you some options! Say something like, “I’m teaching on _______ and I want people to understand ______. Could you give me a good metaphor that families with young kids would be familiar with? Give me 5 options.” You’ll almost certainly get something you can use.
Email Drafts
Like with announcements, drafting out mass emails with an AI is super helpful. Specify the main points of your email, who it’s going to, and what you want people to come out of it knowing. It’ll get you 75% of your email done for you!
How to use Generative Audio in the Church
Generative audio is an easy way to get custom narrations or voiceovers for text content in your church. This gives you the added flexibility of changing voice accents or the “actor” in a matter of seconds. It works best for short-form content, like social media videos or sermon series promos, but there are a few good ones for stuff like audio narrations of blog posts. That’s something I actually use here on my website! I’ve tried a bunch but my favorite is by ElevenLabs.
At our church, our policy is that if it’s under 60 seconds, we don’t have to disclose that AI is narrating, but if it’s over 60 seconds (such as a VoiceOver for an audiobook or blog post), we need to specific.
Our church recently did a sermon series called “The Story of Everything” and we wanted a British male voice. This was the first time we used an AI to do the VoiceOver and we were really happy with the result (which cost us just a few cents to generate). Here’s a sample in this bumper video!
How to use Generative Video in the Church
As you can see, even the best, most advanced generative video has problems with it. It’s best to be used in the place of CGI to imagine things you could never shoot in real life.
I really like Marques Brownlee’s take on AI video in early 2024
Lastly, we come to generative video. At the time of this blog, generative video is the most experimental of the AI’s and is the most difficult to get usable results, but that’ll change within a year or two. Even the best tools which produce high-quality videos have something “off” about them, and making a multi-shot sequence is essentially impossible right now because the AI can’t keep track of the subjects of a scene.
But let’s fast-forward a year (or two or three) to when these tools could be used by a church to make something amazing.
Motion Backgrounds: Generative video can create dynamic backgrounds, visual effects, or illustrative videos that enhance the worship experience. These visuals can accompany hymns, sermons, or prayers and because it’s generative AI, it’s completely customizable. Likewise, you could make an incredible motion background to be used in a green screen environment, such as when shooting VBS videos where your characters may need to appear in a wild space (and you don’t have the budget for CGI).
Bible Stories and Teachings Visualization: Churches can use generative AI to bring Bible stories to life through animated videos. This approach can help in making complex or abstract teachings more accessible and relatable, especially for children and youth ministries. Imagine taking some of those Bible images I shared earlier and bringing them to life through video!
Sermon Series Shots: Like generative images, you could use AI to generate really creative and custom videos for a sermon series. As I mentioned, though, the difficulty is that multiple shots of the same subject don’t work, at least not now. But if each shot is entirely new, you could make it work. For example, if you’re doing a sermon series on creation in Genesis 1, each shot could show something entirely different as though it was filmed by a documentary crew (plants growing, a star being born, oceans, a man emerging out of the dirt, etc).
The tool that seems most promising for generative video is Sora by OpenAI. At this time, there is no word on availability, but expect it sometime in 2024.
The ChatGPT builder showing a little about our custom, Arrowhead GPT bot.
How we Built a Custom Church AI Bot
A demonstration of how the Arrowhead GPT works.
In early 2024, we launched a custom generative AI bot (a custom GPT) with OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. We simply call it Arrowhead GPT. Essentially, you can train an AI on institutional knowledge so that it can give much better results. For example, we uploaded our church constitution, all of our doctrinal statements, our membership curriculum, and our communication guide. We taught it about our church locations, who our pastors are, our preferred translation of the Bible, and what our church is like. We also told the AI the preferred phrases and terms we use and what each of them mean.
Now, when a staff goes to get writing help using an AI, they don’t need to tell it nearly as much and it gives a result that sounds a lot more like “us.” It can simply reuse or rephrase theological statements we’ve already published, rather than inventing new ones from its own knowledge. That’s a big help and gives much more accurate results. It doesn’t invent nearly as much non-sense as a more generalized AI would. A lot of the tips and tricks I gave on this blog post we’ve built directly into the GPT.
Using their GPT builder is actually quite easy. You can simply give it instructions and upload PDFs you think it needs to understand. It does require either a GPT Plus subscription or a team subscription, but you can try that month-to-month just to text out whether it is valuable for your staff. For us, we created just one login for our staff to share to cut down on cost.
So this custom GPT is not for the public - it’s just to help streamline the effectiveness of generative AI for our church staff.
Conclusion
Generative AI is a brand-new field with a lot of potential (for good and ill). I think when used with wisdom, it can enable to churches to create amazing things they never would have been able to produce, such as with generating custom scenes from biblical moments. It can also vastly speed up textual projects, like writing summaries of Sunday sermons or composing emails for upcoming events. But this is a brave new world, and we need to move forward with wisdom and care.
Explore the potential of generative AI in church settings: enhancing tasks, ethical considerations, and creative applications for ministry. This is how our church has begun to use AI to support our team in spreading the gospel, nuture out church, and create new visuals that would never have been possible before.