The Hidden Cost of AI for Church Leaders: Or, AI Took My Job (Satisfaction)
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
Will AI take your job? It’s more likely to take your job satisfaction, especially if you are a church leader - lay or ordained, staff or non-staff. That’s because church leadership, however defined, is an intrinsically creative task. It’s a process of sourcing ancient teachings and synthesizing contemporary meaning, re-telling old, old stories in new, inventive language. As with any creative pursuit, the creative person (i.e., the church leader) is driven by that faint sense of accomplishment that appears following a period of creative exertion. In an age of AI, technological efficiency may erode the inherent sense of accomplishment that comes from creative work. What then happens to our job satisfaction when we no longer need to exert ourselves as part of the creative process? How satisfying is creative work? How satisfying is preaching and teaching?
Like preaching or teaching, writing is a creative task, and it’s one I’ve been worried about as AI continues its unchecked development.
Writing (like church leadership) is not a particularly lucrative activity. It doesn’t lead to "influence." If you wanted steady income or cultural clout, you would do well to make reaction videos on TikTok. Most people don’t write because their words make the world a better place or because society so desperately needs another voice.
Truthfully, most people who put pen to paper do so for somewhat selfish reasons. Personally, I write because doing so gives me a clear sense of satisfaction. Completing a thoughtful paragraph or a clever phrase provides a sense of "job well done" that is difficult to attain elsewhere. I have a bias for achievement. Writing, blogging, sermonizing, occasionally publishing, are activities that feed my bias and nourish my ego. Putting pen to paper or words to the screen, even if they are words to be proclaimed from a pulpit, helps me to feel an objective sense of impact and rectitude, scarce sentiments in a culture of speed, and subjectivity. Even the writing projects that ostensibly achieve nothing --- few views, zero re-tweets, certainly no monetization --- have a way of convincing my egotistical self that my work is satisfactory.
As a lay preacher and seminary graduate, I suspect that many rostered leaders feel this way about sermons, letters, blogs, and other creative pursuits common to the ministry. We preach not because our sermons put a “ding in the universe” ala Steve Jobs, but because hermeneutics and homiletics are crafts that are intrinsically meaningful, even spiritually edifying.
Over the last two years, I've added more technology into the creative process, sermons included. I've increasingly started to work and to write alongside AI. I started slowly at first, apps like Grammarly and ChatGPT serving as high-tech spell-checkers. And then I learned what else LLMs could provide: blog titles and sermon outlines, suggestions for the next paragraph and prompts for the next post, jokes and anecdotes sure to resonate with a specific audience, illustrations for the PowerPoint, recommendations for further reading. I learned that AI could subtly adjust the tone of voice of an entire sermon, reformat a blog post for a different set of readers, and polish scraps of notation into a polished whole.
I've certainly become more efficient after hiring AI as my editor and co-creator. Projects that once took me days are now requiring hours. Tasks that were once tedious are now easy to complete. While I've stopped short of generating entire works from LLMs, I wonder how coherent my words would be if I were to start a project without the support and love of my preferred large language models. I should note that as I type these words, my preferred AI assistant is nudging me to use its own AI to "generate a full-length blog post with a title and images." Do I dare click the magic button and end today's writing session?
Even with this artificially-generated efficiency, I've observed a change in how I feel—in writing, sermon development, lesson planning, even in emailing people with important job titles. Something seems off. And I think I know what's missing.
Thanks to AI, the smug, self-centered satisfaction I used to feel in my writing, even my theological writing, isn't as strong as it used to be. The sense of accomplishment from a clever argument or a witty expression isn't as evident since I started using OpenAI.
Our cultural dialogue around AI emphasizes efficiency gains and existential threats, environmental impact and essential regulation. It's a dialogue that is ever-sensitive to career displacement. But lost in this conversation is the topic of AI and achievement. Whether I am a preacher or a teacher, a knowledge worker or a computer programmer, AI might very well take my job. Must it also take my sense of job satisfaction?
We're all on a learning curve with artificial intelligence, but that curve is more complex than we imagine. It's not that we must learn to master ChatGPT or to work alongside these magical technologies. It's that we must also learn to do so in a way that preserves what makes the creative process worthwhile. The real learning curve for AI is to discover how to use these resources in a way that preserves that spark of accomplishment, that glimmer of a job well done, that visceral feeling that comes when I have envisioned, written, or brought to life something both original and useful.
I'm not particularly worried that AI is going to take jobs - mine or yours. But I'm becoming increasingly concerned that AI is going to remove some of the agency and autonomy that fuels so many of us in our creative pursuits. I don’t know what will happen next. But I recognize that this sense of unease may lead some of us to seek out a pastor, a counselor, a spiritual director. The church’s ancient tradition of meaning-making will be a balm to those discomforted by our tech-shaped culture’s recent obsession with hyper-efficiency.
Will AI make us more productive? Most certainly. Will it diminish the delight we take in our efforts? Perhaps. Will it make the creative process a slog? It remains to be seen. What's at stake is more important than a temporary occupation. What's at stake is our intangible yet foundational sense of purpose and meaning. As AI development accelerates, the very human challenge in front of us is to retain the joy of creativity as AI makes us increasingly productive. And for that, I just may need to talk to a pastor.
