Churches and Content: How to write better prompts for ChatGPT

This post is the fourth in a series on the intersection of Christianity and artificial intelligence. The previous post in the series, which explores why AI might push church communities offline, is available here.

Since the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, much has been said about what AI can and cannot do. For example, ChatGPT can write a simple five paragraph essay. It then struggles write prose that is truly creative or authentic. ChatGPT can come up with a coherent lesson plan. It's less effective at coming up with hands-on activities that facilitate learning. Thus, AI right now is more of a tool for organizing your thoughts, rather than an autonomous creative agent.

But while its true that ChatGPT has technical limitations, its constraints aren't always due to algorithms, models, and predictions. Across all domains, if we want to get more out of AI tools, we need to ask better questions. The prompt, or our request to an AI system, is the most important and most overlooked aspect of AI. When we ask vague questions, AI gives us vague answers. When we prompt AI with context and even nuance, we get outputs that are more useful, more likely to evoke our own creative response.

On a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, the host interviewed a prompt engineer, someone tasked with finding the best ways to ask questions of AI. And while we are unlikely to staff prompt engineers in most ministry contexts, the church out to think about the ways we prompt AI systems. What questions should we ask? What context do we provide? And how should we respond to the answers we receive?

Several marketing blogs have come up with ideas to write better prompts, with suggestions ranging from instructing ChatGPT to adopt a particular persona to specifying to instructing ChatGPT to write with language suitable to various levels of educational attainment.

With these in mind, here are three ChatGPT prompts to help church leaders utilize AI efficiently:

Don't just ask ChatGPT to create a Bible Study lesson plan. Ask ChatGPT to create a Bible Study lesson plan that:

• Defines your audience. Be specific on whether your audience is youth or adults, traditional or progressive, in-person or via Zoom.

• Places the lesson within an overarching curriculum. Is this group meeting one time, or is this a weekly meeting? Is this study taking place on a retreat or at a workweek lunch?

• Reflects on one key question the group is currently engaging. Are they working through a strategic plan, or a staffing transition? Are they exploring a particular topic like care of creation or inclusion?

Example prompt: We are a Lutheran summer camp in Waupaca, WI. Create a Bible Study lesson plan based on Genesis 1. This Bible Study is for youth ages 10-16. The Bible Study will take place outdoors on a camping trip. The themes of the study should focus on care of creation and environmental stewardship.

Don't just ask ChatGPT to write your newsletter. Ask ChatGPT to write a newsletter article that:

• Addresses a specific audience. Is the article for new or established members? Is it for visitors? Defining the readership makes sure the tone aligns with the interests of the audience.

• Includes a catchy subject line. Once you've drafted your newsletter, ask ChatGPT to generate 10 subject lines for your email that will lead to the highest open rate. Select the option that seems most relevant.

• Reads free of misspellings or grammatical mistakes. Paste your email text into ChatGPT and prompt it to proofread and spell check. AI is a great tool for better grammar!

Example prompt: This week our church has worship Sunday at 9 with a pot-luck to follow. Our first Confirmation night of the year is Wednesday at 7. Parents should attend. And our Men's Group is meeting Friday morning at 7 AM. Next week we'll be looking at Romans 14 during worship. Use this to generate 10 subject lines for our announcements email.

Finally, don't just use ChatGPT to generate ideas for a sermon. Ask ChatGPT to come up with ideas for what types of stories or illustrations could align with the scripture passage and the themes of your message.

Example prompt: This week we are preaching on Romans 14:1-12 and the theme of hospitality and inclusion. Generate 10 ideas for illustrations or stories I could include with my sermon.

While these systems will never be great theologians or caring pastors, they can serve the role of virtual assistant. Whether we are intrigued, afraid, or enthused by artificial intelligence, we can learn how to use systems like ChatGPT to communicate and create more effectively. When we practice writing better prompts, we can find use cases for ChatGPT far more expansive than what we initially imagined.

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@ryanpanzer teaches classes on religion and technology for Luther Seminary's Faith + Lead.

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Can AI Increase Church Attendance? It Might. But Not in the Way You Are Thinking.

This post is the third in a series on the intersection of Christianity and artificial intelligence. The previous post in the series, which explores how AI can help us to communicate and collaborate more effectively, is available here.

The holy sacrament of the altar... also has three parts which it is necessary for us to know. The first is the sacrament, or sign. The second is the significance of the sacrament. The third is the faith required with each of the first two. These three parts must be found in every sacrament. The sacrament must be external and visible, having some material form or appearance. The significance must be internal and spiritual, within the spirit of the person.

-Martin Luther, "The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ," 1519

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I heard Jim Keat say something profound that would come to shape my view of church online: "Virtual is not the opposite of real. Virtual is the opposite of physical. They are both real."

With these words, Rev. Keat provided a handy retort that could be deployed anytime someone questioned the validity of digital or hybrid ministry. For now, I still agree with Jim. Real Christian community is in fact convened and sustained in digital spaces.

Still I wonder how Rev. Keat's ideas might evolve in a post-ChatGPT culture. Artificial intelligence was an afterthought for most of our culture until November 2022. When we thought of digital ministry during the pandemic, we thought of online communities led by people we knew and recognized. Whether listening to a sermon on YouTube or reading a Facebook post devotion, we accessed content that was created by people we trusted.

Our pastors may not have been the best podcasters. Our directors of music may not have been the best video producers. But we trusted their digital creations because we trusted their creator, even viewing them as authoritative. Prior to 2022, interpretations of God's word, even those rendered digitally, had a certain fidelity. But when AI takes over our virtual experiences, to what extent is it "real?"

And herein lies the problem with AI tools, and the great challenge they pose to our idea of church. Anyone can prompt a tool like ChatGPT to create digital content on their behalf. This moment is the start of a challenge of authority, where all AI systems have the freedom to interpret scripture for themselves, and the power to project that interpretation as a definitive answer. In such a culture, words of any sort, including the Word of God, can and will be repeatedly contested. They can then copy and paste the output of those tools and claim it as their own work.

Suddenly, the blog post by our senior pastor is no longer his or her reflection on Romans chapter 8, but the output of a predictive algorithm.

Even the sermon manuscript that is read from the pulpit could be the copied words of a large language model.

For what ChatGPT lacks in theological validity it more than makes up for in coherence and clarity.

Is ChatGPT's take on Romans 8 proof-texting, or is it looking at the arc of Paul's entire body of literature?

Does this AI interpretation rely on a dialectic of Law & Gospel, or is it beholden to the American prosperity gospel? Are its reflections Lutheran, Catholic, Unitarian, or Agnostic? We cannot answer such questions. All we have are the words the tool produces - compelling, cogent words, devoid of citation or footnotes. In a digital ecosystem saturated with artificial intelligence, our virtual experiences may come to be replete with voices that are fragmentary, untrustworthy, and potentially even deceitful.

A post-ChatGPT culture may come to be defined by an eroded trust in words presented digitally. Even interpretations of scripture may come to stand on flimsy ground.

There are no easy solutions to this challenge. That is, no easy solutions other than to remain committed to a church that is instituted by both Word & Sacrament.

AI tools have the power to project an unreliable word.

AI tools cannot change or affect the sacraments.

They cannot dilute the physical elements of bread, wine, and water shared by analog communities around physical fonts and tables. Sacraments, the synthesis of God's words, physical signs, and the Spirit's faith, give life and salvation. When all our other words start to fail us, we can still place our faith in the words spoken around the font or before the table. When the authority of the words we read online is called into question, the validity of the words spoken by sacramental communities is retained.

Perhaps the unintended impact of AI on Christian ministry is that it will draw us back to old-fashioned sacramentality. It could well be that the further our digital technologies advance, the more our culture will react by seeking out the analog. The more AI accelerates, the more our culture will search for the sacramental.

In this emerging digital ministry moment, the church can still be inviting, connecting, and hospitable in digital spaces. But the unreliability of online voices will leave us wanting something more.

It is in the physical elements of water, wine, and bread, experienced while standing shoulder to shoulder with Christian communities, that we must come to put our trust. Just maybe this ancient expression of Christian community will prove to be a balm for a world inundated with unreliable, artificial words.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of two books on digital ministry.

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Book Review: Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Charles Taylor, famed sociologist and author of "A Secular Age," argued that secularization is not a process of subtraction. Taylor writes:

Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.

In other words, secularization is not a product of our surrounding culture stripping away faith and religiosity. Rather, secularization is a product of positive construction, where our surrounding culture produces a new spiritual identity apart from the traditions of the church. And nowhere has this been more true than in the technology industry.

Carolyn Chen, author of "Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,"

has observed that the tech industry has become a leading laboratory in this great spiritual reconstruction.

By tracing the stories of once-religious tech workers who relocated to Silicon Valley, Chen demonstrates the encroachment of the workplace into spheres once occupied by religion. The mechanisms of this encroachment are often described by Silicon Valley corporations as amenities, as enhancements to workplace culture. From meditation programs that teach "scientific Buddhism" to coaching offerings that promise "inner transformation," the tech industry has used these cultural offerings to displace the role once held by pastors, rabbis, and spiritual directors.

The once-religious emigrants that Chen describes are not rejecting Christian doctrine. They are not making an active choice to leave their upbringing in the church. Rather, they are shaped and molded by employers seeking to make the mundane into the transcendent. As our work becomes a source of our spiritual identity, we become more attached to and dependent on our employer. Chen's emigrants often look back on their religious past not with judgment or criticism, but with an acknowledgement that they have moved past their past spiritual selves.

When work becomes a spiritual journey, we approach it with an enhanced sense of purpose. We work harder, we produce more deliverables, we work longer hours. Chen is quick to point out that this transformation is taking place within a late capitalist frame. One wonders, while reading Chen's work, what will happen to the Google engineer or the Facebook account manager upon the next round of layoffs.

How will individuals who derived their spiritual identity from the workplace react when those same workplaces replace their jobs with AI? How will those who found transcendence through coaching and meditation regimes respond when their access to such programs is suddenly revoked? In a time where organizations are leaner and less committed to their employees, the juxtaposition of faith and labor has all the makings of a looming spiritual crisis.

Chen concludes her book by describing this transformation as a "cautionary tale." She asks:

"What kind of society do we become when human fulfillment is centered in the workplace What happens to our families, religions, communities, and civil society when work satisfies too many of our needs? Silicon Valley is a bellwether of what happens when we worship work - when we surrender our time, our identities, our resources, and even our cherished traditions in service to work. It is what will happen if we don't invest in building and sustaining social institutions and traditions that nurture community, identity, and purpose outside of work." (pg. 197)

As a sociologist, Chen asks these questions with a remarkable sense of clarity and urgency. The workplace has indeed encroached upon the spiritual sphere. Employers, not congregations, are forming faith identities. Chen has supplied the questions. It is time for the church to come up with the answers.

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press.

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Ryan Panzer (@ryanpanzer) works in the technology industry. He received a master's in theology while working full time for Google. He now wonders whether the seminary or Google has had a more profound influence on his theology.

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