Church Music with ChatGPT: Will AI Change Liturgical Music?
Photo by Peter Burdon on Unsplash
Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine that you, the worship planner, could magically improve the “quality” of your congregation’s experience of worship? All of the sudden, you could immediately add a choir or cantor. If you already have a choir or cantor, you could instantly improve their intonation, pitch, and presence. Missing a trumpet for your Easter brass quintet? Problem solved. Need a timpani for Good Friday? Consider it done. And what if you want some new music to sing, music that fits the context of your congregation? Suddenly, you’ll have access to an ever-expansive repertoire. The question is this: If you could magically make all of these changes to your congregation - would you do it?
This thought experiment is hardly theoretical. These questions are rapidly becoming a reality due to advancements in artificial intelligence. AI tools can already integrate with all aspects of liturgy. They can write sermons and prayers, compose new pieces of music, or provide a needed bassline for the praise band. They can speak and talk and sing. They can pray and praise and even lead. These technological capabilities have the possibility of redefining worship leadership, just as they may redefine the expectations of our parishioners and congregants. AI has the potential of both simultaneously enhancing and contesting the experience of both liturgy and church music.
During this time of technological disruption, worship leadership in general, and church musicianship in particular, requires a rootedness in our traditions alongside a posture of experimentation if we choose to try AI. The worship leader must carefully balance the promise of new technologies with worshipfulness. Our task is to examine how these new capabilities will enhance and impede the sincere reverence for God.
AI will make an immediate impact on liturgical music by giving us access to “more.” It will give us access to more instrumentation, more vocalist backing, more original music. To illustrate what this will look like, consider Easter Sunday at a church that has a traditional and a contemporary service. The traditional service has typically involved a brass quintet plus percussion, along with organ-accompaniment hymns. The contemporary service has typically featured newer compositions, led by a praise band, whose music features guitar and keyboard-based instrumentation, plus lyrics that emphasize an individual’s spiritual searching. Prior to AI, the worship planner would work to coordinate, prepare, and synchronize each of these divergent elements: rehearsing with the choir, hiring external musicians, and licensing new praise band songs. But even with all of these efforts, it could be challenging to line everything up for a single Sunday morning. Musicians would cancel at the last minute due to an illness or personal emergency. Rehearsal time wouldn’t happen as hoped for or disappear completely, and certain pieces of music would not be ready. These realities would create challenges for both quality and coverage.
AI has the potential to address such challenges. From technologies that provide autotuning or real-time instrumental backing, to tools that can spontaneously write new music for very specific occasions, AI can greatly simplify the worship planner’s efforts of coordination, preparation, and synchronization.
This presents the worship planner with two dilemmas. First, the limitations of musicianship contribute to the creative process. Second, the imperfections in liturgical music reflect a central theological premise of the liturgy: that in public worship, flawed and broken people are filled and nourished by a gracious God.
The limitations of musicianship contribute to the creative process by drawing the boundaries of musical invention. One cannot compose or direct what cannot be played or performed. These boundaries give the musician a certain degree of focus. When we know what we cannot accomplish, we attend to what we can achieve. Constraints are a necessary starting point for the creative process, whether one is a painter or a pianist. With AI, these boundaries have become permeable. We can paper over constraints through technological augmentation.
Yet I am not so much worried about the creative process as I am about the theology of worship. What happens to our understanding of worship when our music can approach a high level of perfection and polish with minimal effort? What happens to our understanding of what it means to be the hands and feet of a crucified God, when technologies can so easily erase our musical imperfections? The soprano who overpowers the tenor, the new praise band song that just doesn’t quite land, the organist who rushes the hymn - these are subtle indicators that liturgy is a moment when we, broken jars of clay though we may be, are nonetheless filled by God’s living water. These are small reminders that Christian worship is not just for the elite or the seemingly perfect, but for all who seek divine mercy through Word & Sacrament.
What then, can we conclude, about the appropriate level of engagement between worship planners, church musicians, and artificial intelligence? First, we must recognize that we are stepping into a moment of tension, where our capabilities may be enhanced but where our commitments to foundational theologies may be contested. Second, we must have the humility to understand that nobody can predict with certainty how these tools will evolve. And given this uncertainty, we should maintain a posture of openness and even experimentation, willing to try new technologies as we evaluate how they change what it means to lead and experience Christian worship. Ultimately, we must recognize that liturgical leadership and musicianship is a craft based on worshipfulness, not perfection. Our question, then, is whether our applications of technology lead us towards greater reverence, both whether and how these new tools make us more capable of offering thanks and praise to God.
