Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Well, unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about chat G p t, and it is an enormous opportunity for pastors and church leaders. But there are a few things that pastors should never use chat g p t for. We're gonna unpack those in this conversation. Let's do this. You are listening to the Reach right podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Hey guys, I'm Thomas.
Speaker 2 00:00:29 And I'm Ian.
Speaker 0 00:00:31 And today we're talking about chat, g p t for churches, and specifically about ways you should never use chat, g p t if you're a pastor or a leader of a church. Yeah. Uh, we have done a few episodes and other pieces of content, uh, about chat. G p T. Yeah, we had a great one we just put out, um, that got a lot of great feedback so far, but it was about six prompts that churches can use for chat, g p t, so good things. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, and we'll link to that up here in the, uh, in the show notes. Uh, or actually in the, we'll make a card on YouTube here. If you're watching us online, you can see a link to that there. Uh, we'll get some links down in the description for that too. But today we're gonna do the other side of the coin, things that your church has no business using chat, G p t four. Uh, you now the, I I'll say this, it's not because chat g p t will necessarily do a bad job of it. Yeah. Like, that's not the reason why I think that there's other reasons for all of these. Chances are, I think almost always when I use chat G p t now, it amazes me at what a good job it does. Right.
Speaker 2 00:01:36 Right. At whatever
Speaker 0 00:01:37 Questions I ask it. So, some of the things we're gonna uncover, I think you'll find that you, you'll, you'll be tempted to use chat g p t for them because it probably could do it faster for sure. And in some cases, maybe even better than you think you could do it. Right. Uh, but, um, maybe there's a just kind of a theological reason we might uncover as to why you shouldn't be doing it. So I think it'll be a good conversation, a fun one. Yeah. And I hope it doesn't bring too much conviction because you're not doing these in your church already. <laugh>. Uh,
Speaker 2 00:02:04 So yeah. And you know, our team here at Re Wright, we've, we've been using more in your right. We've seen that. It does a phenomenal job. It's surprised us, you know, for, for, you know, several different things we don't need to get into. But, um, that's, I think, I'm glad you you mentioned that, Thomas. Cause I think that's, that's why this episode and this, this topic if you will, these things to not do, you know, cuz at first glance someone might say, well, yeah, I wouldn't use it for that. But once you start using chat G p t and you see what good of a job it, great job it does on certain things, a lot of things that there, it could be tempting. So, no, that's good. Do you want to dig into the first one
Speaker 0 00:02:40 To not be I will, uh, let me just before we jump in, I do, I do wanna say, cuz there, there is, if you've been living under a rock, um, maybe you don't know what chat g p t is yet. Uh, it is an AI system, uh, where you can ask it any kind of question or you can tell it to do any kind of a command. And if you're looking for something that is written as the response, uh, whether it be, um, a story, facts, quotes, links, uh, HTML programming, anything like that, it can spit that out for you with remarkable accuracy. Uh, as of recording, we're on chat, G p t model four. Uh, it is ultra powerful and it's really great for a lot of things that churches can be doing. So that's a little bit of a precursor. Again, we really recommend you watch some of our other videos if you want to dig in more about that's good, what churches can be doing with it here.
Speaker 0 00:03:28 But here's what we can't be doing. So the first one, <laugh>, and the most obvious one is that you should not be using chat p t for sermon writing. Uh, it is not a tool that you should be using for that. Now, again, I want to say it could be used for like, it's, it's possible to be used for church write sermon writing. Yeah. Uh, but it's just something that you should not, you ought not to do that. Yeah. Uh, and there are a few reasons why, um, because we think the primary one is that's a activity reserved for intimacy with the, the Holy Spirit and Right. God speaking to you as the sermon writer and as the preacher. Right. That is a holy moment that I think that cannot be abdicated. Uh, so I think that it's just something that we need to avoid.
Speaker 0 00:04:13 Um, that being said, there are many things that you can use chat g p t for in the process of your sermon writing. So, yeah. Uh, number one, looking for, uh, biblical references. Uh, let's say you wanted to do something like you're preaching on forgiveness and you wanted to ask it, Hey, can you give me 10 verses in the Bible that deal with forgiveness? It can give you 10. It's not gonna Yeah. Tell you, you don't ask it. Hey, can you tell me how to preach about forgiveness? But asking, Hey, you know, it helps you find references faster. Hey, can you chat bk? Can you give me quotes about forgiveness from mm-hmm. <affirmative> Christian leaders and thought leaders. Can you give me quotes on those kinds of things? Um, can you help me come up with a title, uh, that is seo, SEO optimized for my sermon Yeah. About forgiveness and give it some details on those kinds of things. It can help you with that. Yeah. But just in the actual meat of it, don't go to it and say, I want you to write a 10 point or a 10 point would be bad. Yeah. But <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:05:14 Write
Speaker 0 00:05:14 A four point sermon for me Right. About the topic of forgiveness. You could do this and, you know, include scripture references for each point, uh, and an illustration for each point. And it would give you something that if you were, um, if you were nefarious, that you could probably use and get away with. Yes. It's only a matter of time, I think, Ian, until we have our first church scandal where a I know prominent pastor is using chat G p t to write sermons. Yeah. And doing it that way. I know
Speaker 2 00:05:42 It's just not
Speaker 0 00:05:42 Something you should be doing. So
Speaker 2 00:05:44 Do you have to add to that? Not much. I think you covered most of, of what's important there. I think it, it's good. I like that you differentiated, you know, the two as far as you can use it as a tool and a resource for, um, you know, coming up with, like you said, scripture references and different ideas for your message, but the actual delivery of the sermon, uh, not a good idea. So yeah. No, I think you covered most of that. The next one I think should be ob obvious as well, but don't use chat G B T for church financial decisions <laugh>. So again, again, you can probably, uh, you know, if you're bad at math and money, there's probably some resources and things you can utilize with chat GB G P T. But as far as your church's financial decisions, well that has a lot to do with your unique congregation, you know, uh, finances that your, the situation you're currently dealing with and, uh, and, and you know, this, this has to do with people.
Speaker 2 00:06:39 And, um, and so it's just not a, not a good thing. Um, you know, it, it takes some discernment and, and understanding and some planning as a individual local church, right? Yeah. Every, every church. And now there's certain things within churches that, that are, uh, common from church financial, uh, situations to from one church the next, like, you know, look, you know, the tithing, the giving each month and all of that each week, what's coming in and all of that. What are all, all, all of the overhead stuff, but yeah. You shouldn't use it for your decision making for financials.
Speaker 0 00:07:13 Yeah. So I, I think about, we have a blog post. It's one of our most, uh, viewed blog posts and actually have a, a YouTube video about this as well, about, uh, the pastoral housing allowance for churches. Uh, so yeah, the ins and outs of that. So very financial decision that every pastor and church needs to make together on compensation and how to designate compensation. Um, and just as some testing, we've done a lot of research to put out these videos and articles, and so we're really confident with the research that we've done, but sometimes we'll get questions on the blog or on the video where people are looking for answers about very specific, uh, tax questions basically, or financial questions about the pastor housing allowance. And so we've done the research to answer those, but just as a test, I've kind of plugged some of those questions into chat G p T.
Speaker 0 00:08:03 So I would basically just copy the person's comment on the blog post of, you know, it's really intricate things. Like, I live in a parsonage, but I only live there half the time and it's this kind of stuff. Yeah. So are we eligible for the housing allowance? Yeah. I'll copy and paste that into chat G P T. And surprisingly, it got the answer right, the vast majority of the time with those comments. Yeah. Just to kind of test it. We did these things here, but, um, there was one time that was glaringly wrong information that it gave, which I'd hate to give someone wrong information. Or if you're a church, you know, and you have one pastor and he's relying on this housing allowance and it's gonna totally affect his tax situation. Yeah. Please do not trust these big decisions to chat G P T at least yet.
Speaker 0 00:08:45 Yeah. I think it's not ready yet. Exactly. So the next one is kind of similar to it, uh, yeah. Church legal documents, and this is one that is actually tempting. Uh, so legal documents, I mean things like, um, you know, uh, background check documentation. Yeah. Uh, bylaws, uh, you could be, could be maybe tempted to use it for privacy policies. Mm-hmm. Uh, some of those kinds of things that you would have on your website, things that are ultra boring, uh, nobody really wants to take the time to do. It's, you're hard to, like, it's, it's a hard idea to say, Hey, I'm gonna hire a, a lawyer to write a privacy policy for our church website. Right? Like, that just doesn't feel right to use money for that kind of a thing there. But you, you want to be careful with this. And so I say that this is one to be, to be careful with here.
Speaker 0 00:09:32 Here's an interesting fact. So they have put chat G B T against the bar exam. They've actually posed all of the bar exam questions to chat G P T and listen to this. They actually, it actually outscores lawyers. It's in the top 90th percentile how smart chat G P T is with actual lawyers taking the bar exam. So yeah, by that reasoning, like, you know, you're gonna get 90 per, you know, a top 90% lawyer, uh, if you just use chat g p t to write your legal documents for you. But yeah, it is not there yet. There are two, there's too high of a likelihood for a mistake. Uh, and so I think it's not ready to do it. Now. This is being recorded in April of 2023. If you watch this video in 2025, I would bet like I'm, I'm seeing that it's going to be, it might be very different.
Speaker 0 00:10:21 It might actually make sense to use this for some of your legal documents. I saw another statistic from Goldman Stacks, and what they said was they were looking at positions that will be replaced by AI over the coming next five years. Remember seeing that the second highest segment, like, so the first one was like administrative and clerical, almost 50% of people that are in administrative and clerical type jobs might lose their job in the next five years because of ai. The second highest percentage was legal and lawyers. Mm-hmm. So paralegals, lawyers, there's gonna be a major upheaval in that industry because AI can do such a good job with some of these kinds of things. So just a yeah. Uh, a warning out there. This may not be relevant in a few years, but I think as of April, 2023, be cautious about that.
Speaker 2 00:11:09 That's good. Nothing but Chad, other than, uh, I do like that you pointed out because there's a likelihood, um, and even if it was just a small likelihood for it to make a mistake when it comes to legal matters, you don't want to have any huge likelihood of that <laugh>. And that could have Yeah. Huge. Uh, yeah. Ram just a huge Yep. Ramifications. Yep. So, uh, next one, theological statements. Um, so this one, you shouldn't use chat G P T to, you know, for as well, because, you know, this requires someone to have, you know, deep understanding of scripture. It's it's context, it's, it's, uh, tying your church's beliefs and values into this. Yeah. Um, so probably not a good idea here as, as well. There could be some misinterpretations that come out of AI for this, um, as well. So,
Speaker 0 00:11:56 Yeah. All right. Story time. I have a funny story about this here. <laugh>. So we had a, a church recently, and what we, what we thought to do is, Hey, you know, we needed some placeholder content, uh, on a church website that we were doing. Uh, and our design team said, Hey, instead of just putting loam ipsum content that like fake Latin text that kind of holds place, yeah, let's actually just ask chat g p t to make some content for the church website. And so the team actually did it again with the idea that it was placeholder content. Uh, and so they did it for the what we believe segment, and we typed into chat G p t something to the effect of, Hey, uh, I am a, I'm looking for a statement of faith for a Baptist church. It's Southern Baptist. And, um, kind of some details.
Speaker 0 00:12:43 And then we had it spit out, Hey, here's a statement of faith you could use on your website. Here's the 10 categories about God, about Jesus, about the Holy Spirit, about we believe about humanity. All those things you would normally see. And like it actually spit out something that like, I, I didn't know it was AI content when they showed it to me here, uh, but <laugh>, here's the scary part, is the church that we did it for. They said, oh yeah, that looks fine. Like, so that, that's, that, that's what was scary. So if we didn't have like a check-in place that said, Hey, that's not good. Like, to not do that. Like this church would've just had their theological statements, their statement of faith was written by ai. It was, it would've been that easy to creep in there. So that was pretty i'll to say, like, you could fool somebody with this, but it, it really is something you cannot do.
Speaker 0 00:13:34 There's obvious reasons for that, is that, you know, you'll wind up with things that you don't actually believe in there. Yeah. I think especially when it comes to issues of our day, uh, such as, um, LGBTQ issues. Yeah. Abortion issues, some of that kind of stuff, right. To life. Those things. Like, it, if you're, if you're not very specific, you can get it to write theologically conservative content. It'll do that for you Yeah. If you specify it. But if you just say something broad like, Hey, write a statement of faith for a church. It'll give you language that might not be something that you're comfortable, uh, putting out there. So, um, just as a caveat, I don't, I, I feel like I'm teaching you how to make a bomb, basically, when I say this kind of stuff, <laugh>, don't do it. Don't do those kinds of things. You don't want to be, uh, you don't want to be making that kind of content on there. So, um, it's not for theological statements.
Speaker 2 00:14:26 That's good. You got the next one. I think this next one's obvious.
Speaker 0 00:14:28 Yeah. Next one is pastoral blogging. Um, you know what, like you could use it and you could fool your entire church, uh, into thinking that you wrote this content, but the reason why you don't want to do it is because it's inauthentic and it's mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's similar to the sermon writing thing, right? If you put something out there that you, uh, did not write yourself, uh, but you present it as if it's a original thought from yourself, it's not technically plagiarism because it's not somebody else's original thought, but it isn't yours. And so it's the same kind of, uh, it falls in the same category as sermon writing, in my opinion. A blog post Yeah. Is really very similar. It's a theological thought that you may have. Yeah. Now, I guess you could make a case for something that is more reference oriented, right? So let's say your church wanted to give people a resource on, uh, scriptures about baptism. Uh, yeah. And you said, Hey, write a blog post that talks about, um, 20 verses about baptism that my church, that people may wanna research on their own. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I guess you could maybe make a case for that, but I think if it's anything that involves storytelling or personal reflection or theology, you want to avoid having chatty pt write it for you.
Speaker 2 00:15:43 Yeah. And it, the reason I thought this one was obvious that you should not do it is, I, the first thing I think of as a blog is it's, it's creative, right? It's a, an ex expression of the person usually blogging. And again, it depends on, like you said, the kind of blog and like sermon writing that we talked about on the, the first point there. Um, you know, you, you can use it to for references and, and information for your blog. Yep. Um, you know, into research. But, and I think this should be something creative and very personal with the, the people that are following your blog. So, yeah. Yep.
Speaker 0 00:16:16 Yep. That's good stuff. Good.
Speaker 2 00:16:17 Next one, I think is also obvious one-on-one communication. <laugh>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Now, not a very pastor is, you know, I think you think of the average pastor as a people person. They, they, they usually are. I've worked with literally thousands of pastors. I've pastored myself. Most of them are people person. I could see it be tempting, like if they have a difficult member, uh, that they're dealing with or a situation to <laugh>, maybe lean on AI to get some help for this one-on-one confrontation that they may have. But no, a one-on-one, one-on-one is one-on-one, one person to another is, I, I think of it just simply like that. So, yeah.
Speaker 0 00:16:56 So I think that, again, this is another one of those examples of things that you probably could get away with it and no one would know. Um, I could see all kinds of things like, hey, if someone writes you a, Hey, I had a question about your sermon. Yeah. You could, you know, if you're writing something back, you could ask it, Hey, you know, help me respond to this question, and it'll give you probably a coherent answer that could fly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, if someone has, you know, a complaint or something like that, you know, how do I respond to this angry person? Um, yeah, there's, there's lots of kind of, I, I think another one is with visitor follow up type things. Um, if you are going to do visitor follow up, I'm fine with using a template that you wrote. Uh, but if you're gonna use a to, to try and make it feel more, uh, individual, you're secretly using Chad G P t, I just think anytime you'd feel uncomfortable disclosing that Chad g p t helped me write this, then you probably, as a rule, shouldn't use chat g p t to do it.
Speaker 0 00:17:53 Uh, so if it's email or text, I, I'm reminded there was a South Park episode that came out just a couple of weeks ago where all of the, the boys in town were so annoyed by their girlfriend's long texts that they just used chat g p t to respond to them. And all the girls like fell in love with their boyfriends because, oh no. They were giving these nice, thoughtful responses to their texts again. So, you know, it's something that if you're not willing to disclose it to people, uh, then you probably want to use it as a rule of thumb to say, nah, I shouldn't be doing it this way here. So that's something to, to consider with that. So be careful with youth, youth pastor,
Speaker 2 00:18:28 Pastors, ears, just perk, who are listening to our podcast so that, uh, in any way, don't get any bright ideas there. <laugh>. Yeah. That's, or don't worry too much. So, no, that's
Speaker 0 00:18:37 Good. Yeah, it's tempting, don't get me wrong. Yeah, it's tempting. So we, we handle a lot of emails here, at least less text, but a lot of emails here at Retre. It's tempting to do that, but yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I think that's something to be avoided there. So yeah. Hope this has been helpful to you guys. Um, do use chat, g p t, that's the whole thing. Yes. As a general rule, I think it's fantastic to do at brainstorming anything. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So it's really great for coming up with ideas, helping you wordsmith a little bit, some of that kind of stuff. And really all of these things you can bounce ideas off it. Like, so hey, if you're looking to write a pastoral blog, a, a blog as a pastor, hey, you know, asking, Hey, what are some, some, uh, some ideas for titles for this blog that'll get more clicks and use it for those kinds of things.
Speaker 0 00:19:19 That's all well and good, but when you have it, do the entire thing and represent it as your own. That's kind of the line that you cannot cross there. So if this has been helpful to you, and if you have maybe another idea of ways that we should not be using chatty pt, I'm sure that there's hundreds of others that you can think of, let us know about those in the comments. We'd love to hear other things maybe that you've seen or heard rumors that pastors are doing there. Um, yeah, so write that in the comments there. Rate, review, subscribe, do all those kinds of things. That means a lot to us. Helps us to get the word out there and gets the algorithm going in our favor for that. So thanks for being a part of the Reach Right family. And we'll catch you next week
Speaker 3 00:19:55 To you.
