There is a pastoral conference circuit that runs a version of the same talk every year. The title changes, but the thesis does not: you are doing too many things manually, your systems are inefficient, and the right tools will give you back hours you can spend on things that matter.
This is there is a quiet assumption buried in the efficiency gospel that deserves examination: that the things which take the most time in ministry are overhead, and that overhead should be reduced.
What if some of what looks like overhead is actually the point?
Proverbs on the Value of Slow Formation
Proverbs 4:7 says: "The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight." The repetition is deliberate. Get wisdom. Then get insight. The verbs are active, effortful, and sequential. Wisdom is not received passively. It is pursued with sustained effort over time.
"The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day." (Proverbs 4:18)
This is not a description of an optimized process. It is a description of gradual, accumulating formation. The path gets brighter over time. There is no shortcut to full light.
The efficiency impulse in ministry tends to want full light now, or at least the appearance of it. An AI tool that generates a compelling sermon in twenty minutes produces something that looks like full light. **For the building up of the body. For the formation of the minister. For the long-term health of the congregation.
A tool that saves a pastor ten hours of sermon prep but removes ten hours of Scripture engagement per week is not obviously constructive, even if the immediate output is acceptable. The ten hours of engagement were not just producing a sermon. They were forming a pastor. Over a career, a pastor who studies deeply builds up a reservoir of formed intuition, theological depth, and pastoral wisdom. A pastor who outsources the study gradually depletes that reservoir without refilling it.
1 Corinthians 10:31 adds the broader frame: "So whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." The test of any practice, including ministry practice, is whether it glorifies God. An efficient workflow that produces more output while forming fewer ministers does not obviously pass that test.
The Friction That Forms
There is a concept in learning science called desirable difficulty. Studies going back to Robert Bjork's research at UCLA in the 1990s consistently show that learning conditions that feel harder in the moment produce better long-term retention and transfer than conditions that feel easier. The friction is not a bug. It is how learning happens.
This principle has a theological analog. The difficulty of sermon prep, specifically:
- The slow reading
- The wrestling with commentators who disagree
- The failed first outline
- The passage that will not resolve into three neat points
...is not inefficiency to be eliminated. It is the friction that forms the preacher.
No. Using AI for administrative research, finding historical background, or exploring cross-references is different from using AI to generate the sermon itself. The distinction is whether the tool is supporting the pastor's own engagement with the text or replacing it. Tools that deepen engagement are different from tools that bypass it.
Most of it, in ways that are not obvious. The slow reading, the failed outlines, the re-reading of a passage that will not yield its meaning, the wrestling with a commentator's interpretation: these feel like inefficiency but are actually the process by which a pastor develops theological instinct and pastoral sensitivity. Output that looks the same can be produced very differently.
Enough uninterrupted time with the text each week that the pastor is actually being formed by it, a pastor who spends less time in direct Scripture engagement each year than they did the year before is trending in the wrong direction regardless of output quality.
Does this apply to other ministry roles besides preaching?
Yes. Youth workers, small group leaders, and Christian educators face the same temptation to outsource the formation process to AI-generated curriculum and content. The friction of preparing to teach is part of what prepares the teacher. That applies across ministry contexts.
