The American Churchman: The Pastor vs. the Algorithm: Navigating AI in Ministry

Welcome to the American Churchman Podcast, where we encourage you to take dominion in the world and responsibility at home, and above all, to love Jesus Christ. I'm your host, John Harris, and Matthew Pearson should be with us later.

He's, I don't know what he's doing. We'll probably give him a hard time when he comes, but he'll be coming soon. And you might notice, I probably have to explain this. Two things now, I have my monitor in the way, and I'm black and white.

And I don't know why it's never, I've never had this, but I queued up the camera. I turned it off and on a few times, and I'm still black and white, so I'll play with that after the podcast. But I thought it was appropriate because we're gonna be talking about AI, and I'm gonna leave it to BeaverWorld.

So I can ask all the dumb questions about technology I want to, and our special guest today, Mark Coppinger, who I'll introduce in a moment, can answer them. So I wanna let you know, though, we do have a conference coming up, and that's coming up, let's see if I can, there we go.

Musicandmasculinity .com, men's retreat, so conference retreat. But that is in September in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains. We've got a great lineup, check it out. I think we're gonna be packed. I think we will run out of spaces, so you're gonna wanna sign up as soon as possible.

And that's it. Oh, also TruthScript, yeah, truthscript .com. If you wanna donate, we're a 501c3. If you wanna submit an article, go down to the bottom, there's a tab for publish and donate. So with that, we're gonna be talking about this article by Dr. Mark Coppinger called The Pastor and WWAID, What Would AI Do?

And it's a great article. I would encourage you to go to TruthScript, read it, share it. But it is written by my friend, Mark Coppinger, who is a retired professor of philosophy from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and ethics, I should say.

And he's a former pastor, a military officer, and you can go to markcoppinger .com to find out more. Thanks for joining us, Mark.

Great to be with you. Thanks, John.

Why AI Feels Both Useful and Scary for Ministry

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm really happy to have this conversation because I get a lot of requests to talk about this, and you're a philosopher, and I think you have really astute views on these things. And people are scared, or as the case may be, they're excited because they think AI is gonna solve all their problems.

So maybe explain a little bit of why this is important and why this is an interest to you. I don't know to what extent it is. We've had C .R. Wiley on, you referenced him, and I know this is like his world right now.

Right, right.

He has like AI glasses and stuff. But as a philosopher, I mean, what do you find intriguing or interesting about this topic?

Well, and by the way, when I was out in Idaho teaching for a year, I would walk down the hill 7 tenths of a mile and up the hill 7 tenths of a mile, and I listened to a lot of podcasts. And thank you for making my life easier.

I really loved listening to you when I was out there running around Moscow, Idaho. Yeah, I mean, of course, Wiley came. I said in the article, he came and spoke three times. He's a trustee at New St. Andrews.

And then we would, after the hour-long chapel, so to speak, we would go to the faculty lounge and he'd talk to us another hour. So we were just saturated in this sort of thing. And at the outset, and I'm not a technical ace at all, a technician at all, or R &D ace or something like that, but it struck me that it was scary.

I mean, I can imagine you can imitate my wife's voice and she says, oh, my car's broken down out here on the Palouse, that's the rolling hills around Moscow. And I need help, and guys are lying in wait for me, but they could imitate her voice so perfectly.

And others were saying, oh, we can have all these little robots and the like. And I guess my initial reaction was something like, every time we get a new invention or a new discovery or breakthrough, then there are rocks on both sides.

I mean, I mentioned fire in the article, like, yeah, you can have a boiler to heat a schoolhouse and help kids, or you can martyr polycarp. I mean, all these things are useful and horrifying. The wheel, you can, Hitler can do a blitzkrieg into Poland, but also Batten can relieve Bastogne.

So I guess I've come at it like, what are the horrifying things or the troubling things? And then what are the cool things? Now, when I do a search, like a Google search or whatever, I'll get an AI treatment upfront, and it's a good summary.

And I'm so thankful for so much technical stuff. I mean, I was working around a traffic jam coming back to the house today, and I go into my map and it says, here's red and go around this way. And that's a great thing.

Wikipedia, internet, I'm preaching in a church in South Carolina on Sunday, and I needed some images. And so I just go up on Google image. And so I, boy, it's wonderful to have this kind of stuff, but creepy things can be done with it.

When I was teaching, when I was planning a church in Chicago I was teaching at Wheaton and Elmhurst and Trinity, different places. And I remember at Elmhurst there was a environmental ethics paper. And I thought this girl doesn't know these words.

I mean, it was too sophisticated. And so I did what we call a Boolean search and you could put the quotes around a few words together and boom, it's from popular science or something like that. So there are moves and counter moves and the like.

This one's a little more scary because it's, well, I mean, look, we have Photoshop. So you can do weird things and have Trump's face on Putin's body or something. I mean, we can do tricky things, but the sophistication here deals with two very precious things, our visage and our vocabulary and our voice.

And that kind of strikes at the heart of our humanity and our expression. And once they can start monkeying with that in more and more sophisticated ways, then we're, well, I turned to C .S. Lewis and I think of the old deluder, you know, Satan, and he is the deceiver.

And I think he's just licking his chops and said, okay, we're gonna take deception and lying and mendacity to the next level. I can just make it so perfectly grand that we can mess people up big time.

So it is scary. But, you know, I was taping a conversation the other day and after we were done, you know, the guy said, and you know, we can run this through AI to kind of clean it up or something like that.

Like, hey, you know, it's everywhere around. But so anyway, I was overwhelmed. And then it didn't help the other night that I went to see the latest Mission Impossible movie.

Yeah, we saw that.

And, you know, it's just all this entity thing is controlling everything and devouring all the knowledge and you know, and so it's kind of mind blowing. And so in my little old black and white, leave it to beaver mind, you know, I kind of said, I read an article about how pastors and churches can use it.

And I've been homing in on that saying, look, we'll let like robots in outer space and planning Mars or something. We'll do that another day. This troubles me, this thing about how it could get into the church and undermine the development of the best the church has.

AI, Writing, and the Loss of Pastoral Presence

Yeah, there's so many things that we could talk about. Maybe we will, but maybe let's start with the ministry angle since that's why you wrote the piece. You specifically talk about a pastor. I think you might mention crafting a message, but you also made a specific reference to toning down an email and taking the edges off for making it more friendly.

And so I think, I mean, I'm gonna be honest. I think most of us have probably done this at this point. I've tampered with that a little bit. I've just tried to see what it can do. And sometimes it can, it'll give you words that you never would have thought of.

And it'll rephrase things in ways that do seem more clear. Other times it's just a mess. And I'm like, that's not what I wanted to say at all. I've actually, it's funny. Cause so I've, I started to, so almost use it as a personal assistant a little bit just to save me time.

And sometimes it does, it does. And other times it actually costs me time. And I've become, I think less dependent on it actually over the last few months, just cause not that I was ever super dependent.

But anyway, let's go back to the ministry there. When a pastor does that, like what's the concern that you have that just that he loses? I mean, is he like putting a wall in front of the Holy Spirit? Is he losing his own humanity?

And that's part of the shepherd. What's the pro and the con?

Yeah.

Once I was talking to my kids about something when they were teenagers and at the meal and I raised this issue and I overdid it. I mean, I was more concerned about, I don't know whether it was getting in on time or something.

And then I had to apologize for going global. So in a sense on this article, I've kind of went global. And so you could say, well, this is kind of a hobby horse of mine, but no, it's not a terrible thing.

What I said is nested in something I've observed over the last 20, 30 years, teaching and pastoring. And that I just think we're less literate and we're less concerned about expression. I read somewhere, I think it was, I don't know, probably 20 years ago, it said that in 1950, by the time a student graduated from high school, he had written six papers or something like this.

Now, maybe two. They were not writing as much. I don't know that, well, having been a teacher, grading is a bear. So I can imagine teachers not wanting to read so many essays, but we are writing less than you have, what was it, 140 figures on Twitter and we have emojis.

And I've just come out of grading tons of papers over these eight courses. And I do think that mistakes that we would have not made in the 60s and 70s are made quite regularly, that they're more inclined to have run on sentences or to maybe go into rants or to not capitalize things that should be and so forth and so on.

And I just think we are losing the art of careful writing. Now, of course, you have it. I mean, my goodness, you write wonderful things. But it's like, okay, here's one more way to not become good at writing.

Now, look, we all need help. I mean, it helps to have a wife, after you come away from church and says, maybe you shouldn't have said that that way. You're like, oh, what did you think about that conversation?

Yeah, I don't know who I'd have brought that up. So I've had my little AI sitting in the car with me, so to speak, cleaning up my speech.

I'm a pastor's kid. I know there was a rule in my house that my mom had to wait till Monday.

Oh, that's a good rule.

That's a good rule.

And not have pastor for lunch on Sunday. But yeah, I do think that, and I talk about how you kind of up your game with writing and writing is rewriting and how you increase your vocabulary and you pick up illustrations and you hone this and that.

So part of it was just like, come on, guys. I mean, when you go way back to the day of the chancellor in England, the chancellor was the one, he was a man of faith and he was like a bishop or something.

And the king would be on his throne. And then the chancellor would go to the, it was called ad consulos. He would go to this kind of lattice screen that kept the peasants away from the king. And he would listen to them.

And one little fellow would say, oh, I signed this with an X. I didn't know what I was signing. And the rich man took all my pigs away or something. So he listens to that. And then he comes back to the king and explains it.

Well, one reason he was in that exalted position was he was one of the few literate people in the ministry and the office of chancellor and chancellery courts today and courts of equity and the like, kind of grew out of the real Christian, what?

Eloquence and sharpness of the guys. I just think now we are not as concerned to, I mean, we pick up, I mentioned these ticks. We pick up these ticks like saying right after every third sentence or something like that.

Yeah, I drove down from Chicago, right? Boy, interstate 65 can get crowded, right? Like, okay, don't quit asking me questions. Just tell me what you did. And so we have these little ticks.

I'd say like.

Yeah, or like, yeah. And of course that's

As a filler, right?

It's filler.

I'm from California originally. I had a little bit of an excuse, but still.

And I'd say, oh, and I've listened to myself right there. I listened to myself on video sometime. But at any rate, that's a bigger kind of concern. But I do think that we are moving more toward a, I don't know what it is.

I'm kind of an executive handling pastor, shop this out to that and that and do your list serves and then get back to your broadcast. And it seems to me that there's a lot to be said for that personal note from the pastor on a birthday.

When I was at Wheaton, I think he was a captain of the football team was in our church. We became very good friends. We went to the same seminary and he would go out, I think many afternoons to his little church where he was a youth director.

And he said when he got there, quite often the pastor would say, let's do 10. Now you get there at like three or four o 'clock. I mean, get in the car. We're gonna go visit 10 houses before supper. And they were just quick hits, but just a knock on the door.

How's it going? We're here. Oh, you know, I see, you know, you did a new painting or how are the kids or something. And you may only be there five minutes, but you do those. And that notion of being pastorally connected with your people, I don't think is prospering so much.

And these simple, I mean, it's like, well, what do you really wanna do? I remember listening to some guy say in view of a call when I was in grad school, well, you know, I don't work Mondays or something because I work Sundays and I don't work Saturdays.

Or, I mean, it was kind of negotiating how he wouldn't be put upon or someone say I don't do hospital visits or I don't do this and that. And I started thinking, what is it that you'd really wanna do?

I mean, pastoring is so wonderful how you have that personal touch. You know, you can teach the birds out of the trees in a lecture on Cod and they'll say, whatever, play with it in the street and they'll take notes.

But as a pastor, I could go visit someone in the hospital for, I don't know, two minutes. They were in a wreck and I say, I just ran by and oh, you know, what can I do? And let me pray for you. They'd walk on glass for the rest of their lives for that, for that visit, they'll never forget it.

And I thought, what a wonderful thing it is to be a pastor into the lives of your people with a personal touch. And you'll tell anecdotes from your life where like, oh, I've never seen one of those. And you have the little conversation.

And I just think a lot of people are putting more and more distance. And by the way, you could be a doofus. I was a doofus in a number of crazy ways as a pastor and have been, continue to be. And even just the act of apologizing or we had revival in our church once.

We had some guys coming. I know that's not popular today. So we'd have a guy coming each year, a different one. And I said, before this one, if you know someone I need to make up with or apologize to, tell me.

And that was one of the hardest things I did. I went, I think, to six homes and just, and it's awkward, but the life of connecting with your people personally and letting them get to know your wards and you their wards and all that, that's such a rich experience.

And I think this, oh, I don't, I can't say this note or I'll put this and I'll crank it out. Like, welcome, we're glad you're there. And when it's in, it's like, I've never lived in Idaho, that's interesting.

And again, fine, it's not evil, but it just seems to me, you miss the kind of gnarly richness of the pastorate. And then, you know, they might say something like, boy, what you said really blessed me.

And I'm thinking, what did I say? Well, what was it that it said, the entity said? So again, it's kind of a predecor, yeah.

And also, sorry.

I was just gonna say, Matthew joined the chat. So Matthew, meet Mark, Mark, Matthew. We just need Luke and John here. Well, we got John, we just need Luke. Yeah.

Yeah, there we go.

So it's funny, we have no comments yet. I've never had this on a podcast. This is, I think, the first time. We've been going almost 20 minutes and people are just in awe of Mark's wisdom.

I think they went to supper, I don't know.

No, they're here.

I can see there's, you know, the numbers are growing. We're up to 230 streamers and it's growing, but they're not commenting. I figured someone would ask me about my black and white appearance,.

But that was the first thing I thought of when I got here.

I leave it to Beaver, man. I don't know, my camera just did that and I kept it. So we're just doing it.

Some great, I thought aesthetics and some great photographers work only in black and white.

That's right.

And, you know, there's some great, great, great guys.

Oh, Jimmy Starfish just agreeing and nodding along. Everyone just agrees. Everyone, see, and who knows, that comment could have been AI.

That might not.

No, I don't. I don't. I just did. I do think like the awkwardness of being a pastor in touch with your people. And I will say this, I think maybe some churches have overdone the older thing to the point that, you know, the people are just, I even thought that at the SBC occasionally, the platform people like, we got this, we got this, you know, well, if we don't want you to know, and just to get down in the trenches with your people and hear what they have to say and interact and defend yourself and reword things, that's part of the richness of pastoring.

And I think we miss that a bit. Also, I mean, I talked a little bit about, there's a certain way to make yourself, and by the way, don't we need it? And I've needed it again and again. Like, I think you, sometimes after sermons, I think, oh Lord, let them forget that third point, you know, let them go deaf to what I said.

So yeah, we do need cleaning up, but let's say that I'm always, I have a little edginess to me. So I always put that AI, like clean this up so I'm nicer. Well, you know, after a while you kind of think, boy, those poor guys in the Bible should have had AI.

I mean, you know, I talk about go to the slugger like, Solomon, you know, let's tidy that up. Like if you have a tendency to kind of be slack, maybe you could study this insect. It could be helpful. I don't know, you know, or something like that.

Or if you are a kind of, you know, real weak, kind of a soy boy and something, you think I need to step up my game. Then you could push the other kind of AI and say, like, instead of Paul saying, I thank God for all of you when I think of you, like you could say, you know, I thank God for most of you.

And those that don't, you know who you are. And, you know, we'll get back to you. It's just like, no, be who you are. I do think there's a kind of ingratiationism that's abroad in the church today where we are trying not to turn them off and, you know, not drive them to the world.

How are you gonna clean the fish if you don't catch it first and all this kind of stuff. And I'm thinking we are losing some of the edge. And I gave you examples in the article from Dwight Moody and Timothy Dwight.

Yeah, those are good.

There's an edginess to the ministry. There's, it's sort of like the patron saint today is not so much Paul, but Barnabas. And I'm thinking sometimes you need to dial up the Paul AI a little bit more, a little more surgical strike.

So yeah, the Moody quote is there are some people who ridicule these revival meetings, but remember there will be no revivals in hell. And would AI have smoothed that out some and changed the phrasing, you know?

Yeah, I think what you're saying.

Not bad at all, yeah.

The Need for Edginess, Truth, and Personal Ministry

Yeah, what you're saying resonates. Cause so I wanna make a quick point and then Matthew, I wanna throw it to you since we've been talking just to catch you up about the effect that AI can have or is having on pastoral ministry.

But it seems to me that especially in the social media age and I guess I didn't realize I was kind of on the front end of that. The podcasting thing has really taken off. I didn't really know. I actually thought it's a lot quicker to record my words than to write them down.

Cause I always wrote on a blog and it just, it took time. I was in grad school. So I thought I'll just, and I wanted to do audio. I think I started that, but then I got my phone, you know, and started recording myself.

And I didn't realize what I was on the front end of this almost a revolution. I mean, that's, everyone's got a podcast. Every pastor's got a podcast now. And I'm like, this is a tool you can use for good.

But, you know, it's like Paul saying, I'm glad I speak in tongues more than all of you. I'm glad I podcast more than, no, I'm glad that there are good podcasters and we need that. But, you know, if everyone's a podcaster, if this is all we're doing, and there's not a personal connection as much anymore.

And that's what you think a pastor does is he, and he's got to comment on everything. The quality goes down. You can project an image that's fake. You can actually, and I know of people who have, I think done this to some extent, they have projected something that people that don't know them well find attractive.

And so you can develop an audience out there that knows you one way. And then at your church, the people who actually know you, they know a different version of you. And it creates attention and it can create problems.

Cause people come expecting one version of you and then they're disappointed or, you know, they put you on a pedestal, it creates a celebrity. So this was already happening. When everything you're saying about AI to me says it just makes the image cheaper and more easily manufactured.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, look, when I went to this church in Arkansas, I mean, I had a PhD in philosophy and they thought I would be liberal. I mean, you know, they looked at my resume and they thought that, and since they were in Arkansas, I thought they'd be conservative.

Boy, did we get a surprise. I was a redneck and they had been tutored by a quote moderate for 20 years. And they knew who the bad guys were. And then they discovered I was one of the bad guys. And I discovered they weren't like good old boys down in the Arkansas pine forest.

So we had some really interesting times of adjustment. You know, at the deacons meeting, someone would raise this and that, and it'd be awkward and I would dread this and that. And, you know, you would have people come to you and say, oh, you said something critical of Mormonism.

And my daughter married a Mormon and they have wonderful family nights at home. And, you know, and so you'd say, well, run away, run away. But as you get into those conversations and you sit down in their homes and you, and then you say, come on, let's take a trip in the van.

Let's go together. Let's all do this kind of thing. That awkwardness was so deliciously awful. I mean, that to me, that's a big part of pastoring. And we had a little bit of a backdoor revival. I said, let's sing, I'll fly away after a sermon on heaven.

And the organist got huffy and quit and wrote a note. And then they had a called meeting to see if I needed to be evaluated. And then a federal judge stood up for me and said, let's table it. And the guy left and he became an alcoholic and then a couple others left.

And then we started to grow. And it's like, hang on, baby. I mean, this, the pastorate is a wild ride if done the way I did a combination of right and wrong, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. I could tell you so much about those people and they could tell you about me.

And I loved, I mean, here was one of the best things that happened to me. We went on a mission trip to Brazil and I got hepatitis down there. These nice people brought, I don't know, punch or something to the work site.

And it was not clean. And so I had that. And so I was out of the pulpit for a couple of weeks and I was yellow. I had hepatitis and they weren't quite sure what to make of me. But all of a sudden the church just poured all kinds of graciousness on me.

I got bass fillets, magazine subscriptions. One deacon wrote me, he makes me to lie down. That was all the message was. And yet when I got back in that pulpit, there was a sea change. And it was that I had put my life on the line in a sense.

And again, you think you pray for the health, the cake of health or the bread of health and you get the cake of sickness. Whoever prays for bread doesn't get a stone. Well, I prayed for bread of a safe mission trip and I got something better, the cake of hepatitis.

And going through all that and then with our kids and my wife and relationships, it was so intense and immersive. And I think that was the pastorate. And I'm just afraid that this is one more way to kind of hold people at arm's length a little bit where they don't really get to know you.

So I don't know, let's just say I'm kind of going global but I'm coming from the background of how I see a decline in, I don't know, comfort in writing and speaking. And then also a decline in the grittiness of here's who I am, here's who you are, let's do church.

AI, Affection, and the Limits of Outsourcing Thought

Yeah, Matthew, you have any thoughts?

Yeah, I do have many thoughts on AI. And on the way here, I was reading, I was listening to the article, I thought it was very good. So thank you for writing that. Yeah, and I have a lot of qualms with AI personally.

I mean, mainly from using it. And part of my qualms with it is just, I think the root issue, like with the discussion that we're having right now is that AI just, and you stated this in the article, it takes away humanity, essentially.

You can get it to say whatever you want and you're outsourcing your own affections and emotions and way of writing and pouring yourself out to something artificial, to not even a real person, just a conglomerate of all this data and information and the way that it's programmed to respond in this way.

And it's pre-programmed to be, oh, be empathetic in this way, do this in that way, yada, yada, yada. And it's entirely programmed. And so you're taking away the humanity there. And part of the issue, particularly in pastoral ministry is that, because sometimes people think of pastoral ministry as purely preaching, as that's like all it is, but there's so much more to it than that.

Like part of it is counseling and not just counseling, but part of your knowledge of the scriptures and things like that is its primary purpose is for application, not just from the pulpit, but in daily lives.

And if you're relegating all that you've learned to just outsourcing it to AI, you're getting labor and work that's not your own. And not only is it not your own, but it's not even human. If you consult like a book written by somebody else for wisdom, that still is their thought poured into that you can glean from, and it helps inform you.

When you're outsourcing everything to AI, you don't get that added benefit. And another qualm with AI I have is that it just gets things wrong all the time. I'll play around with it a little. I'm transcribing an early modern book right now from the 17th century.

And I'm like, AI, rephrase this sentence in a way, which is like still precise as to the wording, but like helps like give this word a better, like more modern meaning. It'll just get it wrong. I was doing textual criticism for a class and I'm like, I wonder if AI can do this.

It just gave me the wrong manuscript. It told me this is a part of the Byzantine tradition. No, it's not, that's Alexandria. Like it just gets things wrong all the time. It'll cite things that are false.

So I'm sure over time, those things will get fixed. But on top of it being outsourced to humanity, like, you know, it just, it's unreliable. It gets things wrong all the time. And it shows that you're not like willing to do the work, not just like the heady work, but like just the heart work.

If you can't, you can maybe outsource your head if you really want to. If you don't want to do critical thinking anymore and you want to outsource to the AI, go ahead. It will still fail you, but you can't like outsource the heart.

And the big thing with pastoral ministry is not just the theological knowledge and knowing things, but having affection for people. And I think that that is, that's absolutely huge. And AI just can't cover that.

The Need to Think, Suffer, and Speak for Yourself

Yeah, I mean, I think for one thing, sermons can be just lectures after a while. You're not really connecting to your people in a way. But yeah, I really do think that, I think it was Elmer Fudd who said, people is the craziest wabbits.

And just being crazy wabbits together in a church is really messy. And for them, for us to see each other warts and angel's wings and all, that's part of it. I do think too, it's a little bit like a pill you take.

Let's just say you get anxious before you preach. And so you've got this little pill, I mean, whatever you want to call it. And it just calms you, you know? And it really does. And you come off more confident in the pulpit.

It's like soma, you know, it's like a brave new world.

Yeah, it's a different, come on. I mean, part of, I used, when I was preaching sometimes, I would go out during Sunday school and just walk around downtown, just to kind of muse and to relax a little bit.

But being prayed up is important. Sometimes you think, oh, I have a tendency to be snarky or something like that. Lord, help me not to be snarky. Let me rethink this thing. I remember Stephen Alford once talked about how he had to, before he preached, he had to preach through all his illustrations to see if they were holy or if they were correct, you know?

He might be in a plane landing and, you know, he was witnessing and then the guy gave an indeterminate answer and like that, but it's a much better illustration to say. And as I finished witnessing, there were tears in his eyes and he turned, you know, you can jazz it up.

And so he said, I've got to preach through all my illustrations to see if they are true. And so that's the hard work. It's not just a matter of coming up with something charming and engaging, but something that comes out of the depths of your spiritual wrestling and prayer.

Do you see positive applications for AI for pastors to use? Because we've been talking about negative stuff and we can probably keep doing that, but I want to also give the other end of it.

No, I mean, I think there are rocks on both sides. Look, we all turn to commentaries. I know it's loaded every time I go up for any amount of time. I see the Wikipedia has, you know, a load, but boy, I love to watch baseball and here's this guy or Tyrese Hillbrand or what was it, Halliburton, who just played for the Pacers.

And Sharon, I'll say, yeah, I wonder if this guy is a Christian or I wonder whatever. And we'll just bring up a sports guy and then say, he was born in so-and-so and the like and like. And boy, thank God for Wikipedia and Google search and coming up with images, you know, for this Sunday, I'm going to project an image from Isaiah.

What am I thinking? Six, 61, one through three, I think it is. It's one through three, it's Isaiah one chapter. And it's like the spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me and he can preach good news to the poor.

And I thought it'd be nice to have an image and boy, you can go up and Google it up and then you put images and boom, there it is and take it. And I love it. I mean, I love so much of the technical stuff we have.

I can go to find ancient texts. I can't remember, is it bartleby .com or there are others where you could find something from the medieval time in a quote and like, so, oh, it's wonderful. The stuff you can get.

And look, I have a really solid, solid ineritous standing up for all the right things. He would applaud your podcast all the time. But he asked me the day, what about going up there to get some sermon outline suggestions?