How Long Will It Be Before the First Megachurch Pastor AI-Sermon Scandal?

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All right, Tim. The question for today's episode is, how long will it be before the first megachurch pastor

AI sermon scandal? Well, I have no idea. That's a good open to the episode.

Here's the title question. I mean, I would not be surprised if many of them are not already getting their sermons from AI and realizing that they can cut out the middleman and just get the

AI to do it. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're not doing that now already. Yeah, the chat GPT thing is free, right?

Yes. So I think the quality is getting better, and I think we're on the threshold of it being somewhat passable.

I mean, it's obviously not going to have a whole lot of personality in it and that kind of stuff. But then just doing some of the brunt work,

I wouldn't be surprised if that's already happening too. Well, maybe docent, they can corner the market and have a monopoly on all of the stories and examples.

Like, here's examples for this kind of sermon, and then you can just throw them into your

AI -generated sermon as needed. And then there you go, a sermon of, like, what, 15 minutes?

What I thought would be really funny would be if docent was using the AI. I mean, if it wasn't

God's money that you had to be concerned about, right, like it being spent in this way,

I mean, it would be pretty hilarious to think that docent was using AI chatbot sermons that they were getting for free to give to these megachurch pastors who are paying arm and a leg for this stuff.

So that would be a strange kind of sense of – that would be an imprecatory prayer that we could pray towards megachurch pastors.

That they get swindled. May docent use AI chatbots that you could have used for free and you have to pay for them.

But no, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they're not pastors who are starting to do this now.

Now, it's just a matter of time before – how long will it be before we detect it?

So there's that. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. Well, I mean, if people are willing to use docent, which why don't you explain for some of the people out there who might not know what docent is, why don't you explain who docent is?

Well, yeah, you had a group, docent research group, that was marketing themselves to megachurch pastors to essentially do all their research.

And you had a bunch of big -name pastors like J .D. Greer and Ed Litton who were – I think

Ed Litton was using it, docent too. But J .D. Greer was a big proponent of doing that and talking about how these guys make him look smart.

And so I think there's many people who wondered if maybe docent gave Ed Litton and J .D.

Greer the same servants that he was plagiarizing and that's why they got in some of the trouble they got into. But I don't – that's somewhat speculation at that point.

But a lot of – docent basically is a group that was basically hiring themselves out at pretty expensive rates to pastors to write their sermons for them, the bulk of their sermons for them.

So it's supposed to be just like research, but it seems like they were doing a lot more than that. So when it comes to AI, we framed this as like AI sermon scandal.

So why would it be a scandal? A scandal implies there's something wrong somewhere. So what exactly is wrong in that kind of scenario?

Yeah, I mean this is just a plagiarism discussion in general. So it's just a – and I mean plagiarism obviously isn't an exact science in that way.

But plagiarism – like the biblical idea behind plagiarism is plagiarism is theft. Like meaning you're stealing like certain ideas.

Like you're taking credit for – so there's a theft discussion that's related to like this.

And like I think there's a real debate you can have on whether or not like the idea of intellectual property is something that fundamentally belongs to anyone in particular.

So there's a theft discussion related to that, but then there's an honesty discussion in that most people are hiring a pastor with the expectation that they're not just an actor, right?

Sure, yeah. Like there's qualifications for the job that go beyond just acting out a script.

And it seems like with a lot of the plagiarism scandals with the peggers pastors, essentially what you had is you had a bunch of actors who were acting out certain scripts that they bought.

And so there's a theft kind of component to that. And then like more primary to that you have dishonesty and qualification kind of components to that where the role of a pastor is to be someone who is teaching the

Word of God to people. And it's supposed to be like the Word of God that they have processed and know and have certain convictions as far as what their teaching is.

And so they should be men of the Word who are studying the Word and not just like having other people pass them along information that they're going to be copying wholesale and regurgitating as some sort of actor.

So it's their responsibility to do the work and do the state. Now when you go to sermon prep, obviously you're going to consult many and variety of sources.

And there are individuals who like this. There's obviously not an exact science in how you're dealing with these things, like meaning like you're operating on a certain spectrum, right?

Like some people are leaning way more heavily on these secondary sources than they should be.

And then there are those who are consulting these secondary sources after their own personal study, meaning they have ideas that are original to them.

But I mean I remember, I think it was at G3 conference, that Paul Washer essentially said something along the lines of, if he listened to a pastor long enough, he could tell whether or not they were doing their own personal study or not, right?

It's not that hard. It's the kind of thing that the more familiar you are with the

Bible, the more you begin to see, like the more you can, like if you listen long enough, you can tell like does this person know the

Bible on their own or are they just kind of cutting and pasting stuff that they're finding in certain ways.

And so there's like, it may not be intuitively obvious to everyday common, you know, Jodo person, but like it is, there is a big difference between talking to someone who knows the

Bible and someone who doesn't. And most of that will show up in just simple conversation you have with them too.

Like there's a big difference between talking to someone who has devoted their life to knowing this book and trying to apply it.

And that's the job of a pastor. And when you, like you're short -circuiting that process by just stealing things straight up or lying about where you've, you know, taken a whole sermon, lifted it from someone, put your name on it.

There's real like lying integrity kind of issues in that you're, you know, and particularly with some of the

J .D. Greer, Ed Litton stuff. I mean, you have Ed Litton, like stealing personal stories about going to the

DMV or, you know, taking a driving exam or whatever it was. I think it was taking a driving test or something along those lines.

It's like, that's dishonest. That didn't actually happen to you. You're just stealing that. And so there are lines as far as these things go.

Right. That's especially egregious considering the fact that you could have just as easily have said someone

I know went to the DMV, you know, or whatever the story was.

Like it's not that hard to just change the story. It's not like it has to be, you know, it's not like it's integral to the story, you know, that it be personal for you.

But that's just, that's more of an aside. But, you know, I think when it comes to this kind of discussion, that second point you're making is probably the more convincing for me that there's something wrong here.

I know a lot of people really make a big deal about the plagiarism thing.

And I, you know, personally, I'm just kind of like, I don't know that I'm that interested in that angle.

You know, I think from one perspective, I sort of see where people are coming from.

Like we've basically, I mean, a lot of, it seems like a lot of people have collectively come together and for some reason agreed that, you know, when a pastor teaches a lesson or prepares a sermon and preaches that sermon or writes the book or whatever that, you know, those ideas belong to them in every single way, right?

And if anyone wants to use those ideas, they need to get permission from that pastor.

And I know not everyone thinks that way, but there's a lot of people who really push this angle.

Even people who would probably agree with us on the AI sermon thing and, you know, the docent research group stuff, they really push the plagiarism stuff.

And personally for me, I'm just not that interested in it. I think the much larger problem in all this is the second point that you bring up.

Basically this idea of what a pastor, part of a pastor's responsibility and, you know, probably the biggest responsibility they have is understanding the

Bible and being able to teach the Bible to their sheep, right?

I don't think you can claim that when you're, you know, instead of committing a lot of time to studying the

Bible for yourself week in and week out to be prepared for a Sunday morning or Sunday evening or Wednesday night or whatever, when you're just, when you're, you know, putting that on like a research group or you're putting that on a robot to do it for you and especially like you're blindly trusting it or you're just going off of like the understanding that you have of the

Bible right now and not allowing any opportunity to be, you know, convinced that maybe you're wrong or maybe, you know, you've forgotten some things that you thought you remembered and if you had gone back and done the research yourself, you would have realized and your mind would have been changed.

But you've totally missed that opportunity because you put the research on someone else, you put the study time on someone else.

That seems like the much more concerning, the plagiarism thing is just kind of like, yeah,

I mean, whatever, honestly. I think it's useful as a category to understand. So like in terms of like if you're writing an academic paper at a university or something like that, like there is, there are clearer ways to distinguish between like ideas that are original and ideas that are not.

Okay, so meaning like if you just borrow the whole outline of a book that is an expert on the topic, they're going to be able to sniff that out and ferret that out that you didn't actually put any thought into this.

You're not producing anything new. So in that way, like what I'm trying to say is with the plagiarism discussion, you at least have categories for understanding how much you should be leaning on an

AI and secondary research in general, right? Meaning we've kind of sorted that out under the plagiarism discussion like to some degree, right?

To where we know there's a difference between stealing an outline, you know, stealing examples, right?

Direct quotes, direct block quotes, like direct pages, right? Yeah.

So like when you write a paper, you are expected to write it in your own voice. Like quoting certain, you quote certain information.

Now when you bring that into a sermon, I think we should be aware that it's fuzzy where the standards are, you know, in terms of a sermon with some of those things.

It may not be the same kind of thing, okay? So I mean one of the things that MacArthur always said was, you know, you can take anything that I've ever written and if it's true, you can say it.

You don't even have to quote me on it. And I really like respect that kind of posture that he's had.

There's been people who have asked me for information, you know, online and I'll just send them like entire studies

I've done on certain topics and say use it however you want to. I don't care if it's true. If it's helpful, use it, you know?

So I think that there is a part of this where we're learning from each other.

We're looking at the stuff that other people are doing. We're benefiting from all that. But that shouldn't, you know, as you're saying though, short -circuit the personal work.

And a lot of the megachurch pastors who are doing these kind of things, there's been a sensation when I'm looking at it.

It's like did you not think about what you're saying here? Like, you know, God whispers about sexual sin, J .D.

Greer. Have you ever read the Bible before? Like, you know, how could you say that? And I think that there is a very real, like a person who has become accustomed to having other people hand him his script that he's reading.

He hasn't, like, learned to think through these issues like he should, right? Right. And, you know, there's been plenty of times where I've done sermons.

And in the process of doing it, I realized that my starting point, like fairly late in the game, is fundamentally flawed, okay?

Right. Like I've just, like I thought it was right. But then as I've gone and I was working on it, and I was working on it, put a bunch of work on it, and I realized that all my points are wrong, okay?

Like, and I have to fix them, you know? Right. Because they're wrong. I can't just stand up here and say this because I've, like, realized that I didn't know what

I was saying here, you know? So, like, that mechanism of, like, wrestling with the text, you know, when guys are doing this kind of thing, they are depriving themselves of that mechanism.

But that's the very thing that helps you to learn the Bible is to wrestle with the details and try to put it together.

And, like, you're doing all your research, and you're looking at the passage over and over again, and it refines you.

But those are the people who know the Bible and know the people who are going to shepherd well than, like, the ones who are just doing this actor game.

Like, they may be able to stand up and give, like, an impressive sermon or whatever. They'll put on a show.

They'll put on a show, but they're just actors. So that is the more fundamental problem for sure. Okay. Fair enough.

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