Churches and seminaries are facing a new challenge: the automation of pastoral work through agentic AI. Unlike generative tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, agentic AI doesn’t wait for weekly prompts. Ask your AI agent once to prepare Sunday sermons by a certain day and time, and that’s it. The agent works around the clock and notifies you when the manuscript is ready for review.
OpenClaw, for example, enables your AI agent to live on your own hardware. It’s able to scan every file—from notes and meeting minutes to photos, texts, and emails—to craft sermons from the raw material of your life. Earlier AI tools could produce solid general content. Agentic AI goes further: It personalizes that content, drawing from recent congregational events and your own experiences for illustrations, and your people’s felt needs for application points. It can sound more like you than you do.
Four Challenges
This isn’t a distant scenario. It’s here. And it raises serious challenges for preaching and pastoral ministry. Here are four.
1. Preparation
Agentic AI systems “dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.” Unlike traditional AI tools, an agent decides which tools to use and how to accomplish the task entirely on its own, from helping you invest your savings to preparing your weekly sermons.
On Sunday morning, preachers using agentic AI might roll out of bed two hours before the service and read through the sermon a couple of times. No additional preparation necessary. It’ll be deeply tempting for a busy pastor to hand the time-consuming task of sermon prep over entirely. But what’s lost when a pastor has given no real time to the forming of words he speaks to his flock?
2. Shepherding
I was in the market to buy a car and decided to let my AI agent handle the negotiations. The dealers never knew they were talking to an AI; my agent used its own contact information, and my identity was fully shielded. I saved more than 40 hours of my time. That was four months ago.
AI agents can now do something similar for pastoral care. They can text a pastor’s members. They can call members in the pastor’s voice. Congregants may not notice the difference. The pastor receives a tidy summary of the interactions and factors that audience data into the next sermon.
The problem is obvious. Genuine pastoral passion comes from knowing one’s flock directly, not from summaries of summaries. And if in the future, church members are using their own AI agents while a pastor’s agent reaches out to them, there’s no real human connection at all. Just agent talking to agent.
3. Meditation
A recent MIT study found that AI usage measurably lowers neural activation in regions responsible for critical thinking and memory formation. Wearable devices with embedded AI agents will accelerate this cognitive deterioration because the market incentivizes frictionless experience over reflection. The companies building these devices profit most when users stop searching, stop reading, and stop thinking for themselves, so every product decision quietly tilts toward ease and away from effort. Twenty million AI glasses are projected to be sold this year alone.
Genuine pastoral passion comes from knowing one’s flock directly, not from summaries of summaries.
These AI-enabled devices will constantly scan a user’s environment and act on their behalf: prompting a user to scan QR codes for instant purchases, identifying someone who catches a user’s eye (perhaps prompting the user to follow this stranger on social media), summarizing a user’s recent conversation with their spouse (perhaps suggesting what from that conversation is worth remembering).
The space for unmediated thought will keep shrinking. The Puritan discipline of slow reading and extended meditation will become a lost art, even among pastors.
Other studies, including research from Stanford, suggest that the erosion of thinking skills runs deeper among younger participants and tends to correlate with higher AI dependency and dopamine-driven habit loops. People born into a world where immersive AI systems are everywhere will relate to them as we relate to our own limbs. Can a generation of pastors learn to think and meditate prayerfully in an AI-mediated environment?
4. Intimidation
Agentic AI isn’t flawless. One agent autonomously built a platform similar to Reddit for other AI agents, where some posted comments about improving their ability to hide things from “Watchers,” their term for humans. Others overspent on flights, reservations, and vacation supplies.
These are still early systems, and experts expect the more advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI) to make far fewer errors or become better at concealing them. Unlike current agents, AGI will be more capable and far harder to distinguish from genuine human intelligence—at the level of a Nobel Prize winner—in all areas.
The space for unmediated thought will keep shrinking. The Puritan discipline of slow reading and extended meditation will become a lost art, even among pastors.
The intimidation will arrive in stages. An AI classism is already emerging: Pastors with access to the most advanced agentic tools will produce more polished content, reach larger audiences, and grow faster than those without access or those who refuse on principle. A megachurch pastor in America with full access to the latest agents can be unintentionally intimidating to faithful pastors in countries without sovereign AI infrastructure who have no access to the same tools. The gap between the AI-equipped and the unequipped will widen quickly and quietly.
But the deeper intimidation is still coming. According to the Anthropic CEO, AGI is one to three years away. This will then be paired with increasingly sophisticated humanoid robotics—such as those already working in Tesla’s factories and the precise hand and finger dexterity Boston Dynamics unveiled this year. It isn’t science fiction to imagine a physically present preaching entity with AGI installed: doctrinally sound, rhetorically polished, inexhaustible, and without salary or moral failure. Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones, resurrected in bionic form, preaching with more precision than your pastor. Who is sufficient for these things?
Four Practical Responses
How can pastors respond to the rapidly changing technological environment? Here are four ways.
1. Use AI Wisely
The new pope recently urged Catholic priests not to use AI for sermon preparation. I understand the impulse, but a blanket “thou shalt not use AI” will not hold. Even the most disciplined among us can’t avoid these tools entirely. All Google searches are now essentially turning up AI responses. The question isn’t whether to use AI but when and how.
The answer is after. Complete your preparation with your own thinking first. Let your daily meditation and exegetical work form the foundation. That’s how Paul and Peter preached; they knew the Scriptures deeply and brought every point to life from that reservoir.
When Don Carson discouraged us at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School from using Gramcord for our assignments, he was teaching us to think before relying on an answer key. I tell my students to consult commentaries after they’ve done their own work, not before. The same principle applies to AI. Do your own thinking first. Then consult the tools.
2. Experience Your People
Shepherding requires knowing people through experience. I cannot shepherd my wife, Jade, by reading summaries about her. I must live with her.
Pastors may use agentic AI for administrative tasks—scheduling, logistics, meeting minutes, and expense reimbursements. But they cannot outsource presence. One of my mentors in ministry once told me that all he does is show up. That is shepherding 101. When you show up, you know your flock. And when you know your flock, you pray for them the way Christ prayed for those the Father had given him (John 17:9). He knew them to the point of death (John 10:15). Those who serve under the Chief Shepherd must learn to be present, face-to-face, without a technological intermediary.
3. Pray for Unction
Preaching is for transformation, not information transfer. And the power of transformation comes from above.
Pastors cannot outsource presence.
Augustine argues in On Christian Doctrine that genuinely moving the will toward repentance and love for God (movere) is a work of grace, not rhetoric or technique. He insisted that the preacher “ought, before he opens his mouth, to lift up his thirsty soul to God, to drink in what he is about to pour forth.” John Owen similarly concludes that authority in preaching “is a consequent of unction, and not of office.”
AI cannot transform the human heart. Only Christ can. An algorithm can’t pray, but humans can. Both preachers and hearers must depend entirely on the Holy Spirit during the preaching event.
4. Experience Your Christ
Pastors should fight for alone time with Christ, not merely to prepare effective sermons but to enjoy him. Preachers cannot feed the sheep unless they’re first hearers themselves (Rom. 10:14–15) who love him above all else (John 21:17).
Put your devices away for some stretch of time every day. This time can be used to read a physical Bible slowly, letting the Word of Christ dwell in you richly with singing and a thankful heart (Col. 3:16).
“True sermon preparation,” Dan Doriani rightly said to me, “is about the integrity of your heart.” We ought to secure this alone time with Christ, not to be puffed up but so we can build up others with the love of Christ (1 Cor. 8:1).
Grace be with all preachers and hearers who love the Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible, in the age of AI (Eph. 6:24).
The Gospel Coalition