Using A.I. in Church – How It Lightens My Administrative Load – Transcript
Jim Latimer 00:05
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministry, best practices and quick help wisdom from the field. This is our collaborative Wisdom from the Field Project, featuring short interviews with transitional interim ministers and others with practical help and wisdom to offer those engaged in transitional ministry. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Wisdom from the Field.
Jim Latimer 00:26
Today we have the joy of having with us Reverend Tom Hathaway. Tom as a young United Church of Christ, pastor of many talents with an uncommon depth and breadth of life experiences. I’m deeply impressed with how these experiences have informed his vibrant and authentic Christian faith and ministry. In particular, Tom has become masterful at helping progressive churches amplify their messaging through their websites and other online tools, making sure that what they believe is actually coming through. Of special note is AI – how he uses AI, that is Artificial Intelligence, and how he uses it in church. And when I heard how he’s doing this, how it is lightening his admin load, I thought, Oh, man, that’s brilliant! Give me more! So, Tom, if you could speak to that, please, we’d love it.
Tom Hathaway 01:31
Thank you, Jim. Yes, nowadays in church, there’s just so much demand for content. Every event needs to be in a bulletin on the website, on your newsletter. Every sermon needs a description when it’s uploaded to YouTube. If you want content generated alongside of like my church does we do sermons, we do Bible reading plans that accompany every series, again, it says, content, content, content. I am a solo pastor at a small New England congregation. I have no admin, so I’m doing this all myself.
Jim Latimer 02:13
Let me pause you Tom, you said you have no admin support. Right?
Tom Hathaway 02:15
Yes. No admin support whatsoever.
Jim Latimer 02:17
Okay, just clarify.
Tom Hathaway 1 02:18
It’s me, myself and I. And so, I guess I’m always feeling overloaded, but also wondering how can I best spend my energy and my creativity? Where do I want to be using that? And I do not think my energy is best spent making little event descriptions for the website calendar that a handful of people are going to read, and not everybody’s going to read it. So, what I’ve taken to doing is outsourcing all of that to Chat GPT, which I think most people will have heard of at this point,
Jim Latimer 02:55
A form of AI,
Tom Hathaway 02:57
A form of AI, where you just enter in a simple command or request, and it will just spit out as much text as you want it to, and it’ll be as creative as you want it to, and write it in whatever voice you want it to write in.
Jim Latimer 03:13
So, there’s a free version of this, just FYI, right? There’s a free version of Chat GPT?
Tom Hathaway 03:19
Yes, that’s absolutely correct. There’s a free version. And then you can upgrade for upgrade for $20 a month. And so, so things I do in the course of a normal week is, on Monday morning, I take my sermon manuscript and I feed it in chat GBT, and I say, create a paragraph teaser to accompany the YouTube video of the sermon. And sure enough, in 60 seconds, it will spit out a perfect summary of that. And again, if it’s not, if it isn’t teaser enough, if it doesn’t make the sermon sound interesting enough, you can say, Hey, make this sound a little more enticing for you know, people in their 20s and 30s, and it’ll spit out exactly what you need. Copy, paste. Job is done. Beautiful.
Tom Hathaway 04:08
Event descriptions, we recently had a high tea event at my church for a lark, and again, I wasn’t gonna spend hours writing content for that. So, I said, you know, We’re having this event, we’re calling it Hillside High Tea, generate an event description. And I want the description to be playful, playing at being highbrow. And so that’s exactly what it did. Again, something that I could have spent an hour on thinking about, Okay, how should I pitch this event? And it’s just done immediately there for you on the spot. Those aforementioned Bible reading plans that we do that accompany all our sermon series, that, again, went from a very laborious, multi hour task where you’re scrounging up Bible verses and laying them out in a spreadsheet, to saying, Chat, GPT, this is the topic we’re going to be talking about for the next four weeks. Could you please generate a 28-day Bible reading plan on this topic? I want one verse a day, and can you please give it to me in an Excel spreadsheet? And lo and behold, minutes later, you can download your spreadsheet! It should be double checked, but you have the you have the basis of a really solid Bible reading plan. So, it just takes those bits of work that every pastor has to do, where it takes considerable amount of effort for not a lot of payoff, and basically takes it off your plate and lets you focus on what you really want to focus on. So those minutes that I could be committing to event descriptions I would much rather be putting into researching a banging sermon for Sunday, and chat GPT is, in many ways letting me do that and concentrate on just that.
Jim Latimer 06:19
Wow! Man alive! I think you’ve just changed my whole approach to communicating in the congregations and things, even as I generate content for this, my Wisdom from the Field podcast. I’ve definitely been kind of a lagger in using chat GBT. I appreciate the specific examples that you’ve given people, and especially you know, you’re a situation of not having an admin. I mean, a lot of our colleagues don’t have admins or have admin support that’s pretty minimal, right? And so, they get pushed out of their sweet spot. And we know that effective leaders, joyful leaders, right? Joy has got to be a pretty key part of how we are as Christian ministers, or we’re in the wrong business. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean that. And part of that is being able to be in your sweet spot, your sweet zone. And a lot of us are creatives, we like writing and stuff and not anyway.
Jim Latimer 07:22
So, I appreciate how you’re using AI, Chat GBT, in this case, to keep you in your sweet spot and letting it do stuff that would just be like chewing cardboard for you. Let it do that, which it’s happy to do. And I would guess, Tom, also that the leaders in your organization, the lay leaders, see you doing this. I’m positive that they do and they see how you keep yourself in your sweet spot, and that influences them and inspires them to do the same, because we teach people about leadership, we teach people all these things, whether we realize it or not. As a pastor, people are watching us all the time, and when they see how you’re using your time and efforts in an efficient way, that rubs off and everything is better. The gospel is communicated in a more specifically cultural way that your congregation uniquely can do.
Tom Hathaway 08:20
Yes, I think that the beauty of AI is it both lets you do the things that not everybody in the congregation is going to appreciate and provide as minimal energy to that as possible. And like you said, my congregation would much rather show up on Sunday and have a really rich worship experience. They do not care where the event description comes from on the calendar, on the website, calendar. So yes, you’re absolutely right. They care about what they care about. It lets everybody at the end of the day be more focused in the whole congregation.
Jim Latimer 09:06
Everybody be more focused. Wow. Well, Tom, kudos to you for finding how that works for you personally and for the congregation. I’m delighted that you were willing to share this with us. Many people will benefit from this, and I’m first in line. So, thanks, Tom, God bless. I look forward to the next time we talk. I’d love to do more podcasts, because this is rich stuff.