Most pastors I know won’t touch AI for sermon prep.
The fear is obvious. What if the AI ends up doing the preaching? What if study disappears? What if your voice gets replaced by a language model?
I sat down with Josh Shaw, lead pastor of Vineyard Church in Los Angeles, and he said something that will make most pastors flinch:
“Chat or Claude or Gemini and I — we write my sermons together.”
Watch the full conversation here: https://youtu.be/D5v-1SejrOY
But the more Josh explained, the more it clicked. He isn’t letting AI preach his sermons. He’s doing the opposite. He’s trained AI on his convictions, his voice, and his theology — and uses it to do the part of the job he hates.
The training phase
Josh has been playing a long game.
Every sermon manuscript he’s written in the last year. In the AI.
Every transcript from every message he’s preached live. In the AI.
The model now knows his cadence. His structure. The four types of sermons he preaches — narrative, three-point didactic, semi-inductive. His theological guardrails (Vineyard orthodoxy, ancient creeds, his own statement of faith).
When Monday morning hits and he opens Mark chapter one, he isn’t starting from zero. He’s working alongside something that already sounds like him.
What Monday looks like
Josh opens his “sermon gem” in Gemini — Google’s name for a custom-trained chatbot. He already has a weekly preaching guide he built at the start of the year.
He talks through what he’s sensing for Sunday:
“This is going to be a narrative sermon. The points are a little different than the preacher’s guide. Our context needs to say this, this, and this. Format it the way I always want my manuscripts.”
Twelve pages drop. In NIV. In his format. Straight to Google Drive.
He edits for an hour. Lets it sit. Comes back the next day and edits for another hour.
Total prep time went from eight hours a week to two hours max.
What he isn’t doing
This is the part most pastors miss.
Josh is not saying “write me a sermon on Mark four.” That’s where it breaks. That’s where AI starts preaching your sermon for you.
“Any of the pastors I know who work with AI on our sermon writing — we don’t ever do that. It’s like: here’s your source. Here’s your base of knowledge. Here’s this article.”
The AI is an editor. Josh is the preacher.
He uses it to check verb tenses in the Greek. To untangle a clunky transition. To pressure-test a point. The kind of work that used to mean flipping through lexicons at 11pm.
Your commentaries aren’t neutral either
Josh made a point that stopped me.
“Your commentaries are not always right. You and I both know professors who’ve written commentaries, and you and I do not agree with them.”
NT Wright and John Calvin read Romans differently. Every pastor already does the discernment work of filtering a commentary through their theology.
AI is the same thing. It isn’t an oracle. It’s a conversation partner you push back on — one that happens to have access to most of NT Wright’s published thinking and will argue its own position.
“It’s kind of like having NT Wright in the room. And you get to talk with it.”
How I’d build this for myself
Listening to Josh, I started sketching out how I’d run this using the tools I already rely on.
Notion as the knowledge base. One database for preaching philosophy and church mission. One for demographics. One for the weekly sermon map you built at the start of the year. One for SOPs — including exactly how you want your manuscripts formatted every single time.
Whisper Flow for dictation. Hold a key, talk, and your messy mind-dump becomes input without typing a word.
Then the workflow is simple. Read the passage. Pray. Sit with the commentaries you trust. Mind-dump your insights into a note. When you’re ready to build the manuscript, trigger a prompt like “it’s sermon drafting time” — and the AI pulls from your SOPs, your notes, and your trained voice to give you a draft.
The pressure release
The last thing Josh said is the piece I keep thinking about.
“I don’t believe my actual verbal preaching is as important as the average pastor thinks it is for the Spirit to do what the Spirit wants to do.”
The inspiration isn’t in your words. It’s in Scripture being illuminated in the hearts of the people.
Your notes take you so far. Your presentation takes you so far. If you trust the Spirit to do what the Spirit does — then using AI to get the manuscript done faster isn’t a theological crisis. It’s stewardship.
Josh’s Thursday nights are his Friday now. His family gets all of him. He’s not editing on Saturday night anymore.
That’s the payoff.
Watch the full conversation above. And if you’re a church leader thinking through the systems side of your ministry — AV, workflow, the whole stack — start the conversation with us here.
