Why Generic Chatbots Are Not Enough for Sermon Preparation

I think a lot of pastors have had the same strange experience with AI. You open ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever tool is popular this month. You type something like: Help me prepare a sermon on John 15. And at first, it feels impressive. You get an outline. You get illustrations. You get a few application points. Maybe you even get a title that sounds like something from a conference breakout session. But after the first wave of novelty wears off, something feels off. The output is not necessarily heretical. It is not necessarily useless. It is just… thin. It does not know your congregation. It does not remember the last three weeks of your sermon series. It does not know the pastoral tension in the room. It does not know whether your church needs comfort, correction, courage, or clarity this Sunday. And unless you know how to guide it well, the tool slowly turns you into two people at once: the pastor trying to faithfully prepare a sermon, and the prompt engineer trying to coax useful…