Mobilized in the right ways, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can drive all three
By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
As one might imagine, A Seattle Church is full of early adopters.
Located in the middle of the Amazon campus and across the street from the Meta Seattle headquarters, the church sits on a corner with Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google Cloud. Many members work for these big tech companies.
The love of technology extends to church leadership — especially true for Co-Founder and Lead Pastor Tyler Gorsline, who is making the most of AI technology to simplify sermon prep, better (and more quickly) equip small group leaders, and maximize the impact of every message.
If you ask A Seattle Church Co-Founder and Lead Pastor Tyler Gorsline about his “early adopter” status, he’ll laugh.
“I don’t realize I’m an early adopter until later,” he says. “I’m a nerd, so I just love learning and just trying to take advantage of emerging technologies.”
Case in point: Artificial Intelligence, or AI — the ability of computer systems to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving and decision-making. In his role, Gorsline had already developed myriad ways to use ChatGPT to simplify sermon prep. So, when the church’s app platform, Subsplash, introduced a new feature called Pulpit AI, he was onboard right away.
“It’s helpful to have even greater integration of the two systems, being that we’ve used Subsplash for virtual giving, as well as our app,” he explains. “It’s just a way for us to use tools that the people in our community — the leading technologists in the world — are even helping to create.”
To start, Gorsline used Pulpit AI to take his sermons and create discussion questions for small group leaders. Before this new feature was launched, that process was a lot more complicated and time-consuming.
“I would send my notes to a leader in the community, and then they would have to do some translating of those notes into particular questions,” he says. “Now, each sermon and its transcript are uploaded directly into Pulpit AI. So, it’s using my language and then auto-generating some leading content for our small group director. It has really given the leaders in our community a head start.”
Pulpit AI has also been instrumental in helping Gorsline prepare those sermons in the first place.
Before, he might have needed to visit a library and comb through resources. Pulpit AI is the equivalent of having that library on his desktop.
“I think of it like a conversational partner,” he says. “I have to check sources and be diligent; but as someone who often sermon preps alone or is combing through books, it’s nice to try and synthesize the different things that I’m learning via AI.”
This synchronicity is especially important for bi-vocational pastors who rarely have enough time or staff to make the most of the messages they work so hard to create, he adds.
“Anyone who’s spending all these hours working on their sermon, wants to maximize its use,” Gorsline acknowledges. “The good news is, with Pulpit AI, you can quickly go beyond just delivering that sermon to creating a bunch of tools, like blog posts or a study guides. You can even take your sermon video and break it into clips that you can share on social media.
“It basically gives you an opportunity to maximize all that hard work that you’re putting in, to minister to the people right in front of you,” he says. “This is the case even if they miss a Sunday. And you can also use it to serve others in your community who don’t walk through the doors of your church.”
For all these reasons, the leadership team at A Seattle Church embraces technology in the same way as Gorsline.
“We’re very fortunate that our people value the use of these tools to aid ministry, versus feeling threatened by them,” he acknowledges. “Our different staff members see emerging technology as a way to make their work more efficient. And if they can save time in the processes of their administration and other necessary tasks to do the ministry and programming, that allows them to spend more relational time doing ministry directly with people.”
Accordingly, the staff uses Pulpit AI to summarize Gorsline’s weekly message for the church’s newsletter; to generate social media prompts for creating copy for posts; and for research assistance. “It’s really instrumental in helping us find ways to simplify what we’re trying to communicate,” he shares.
Built for pastors, by pastors
From implementation to training, Gorsline’s experience with Pulpit AI has been crucial in ensuring that the app is truly suited to a church leader’s needs. As he uses the tool, he shares his questions and suggestions with Michael Whittle, Pulpit AI founder and VP of AI at Subsplash.
“He has been accessible for my questions and ideas relative to ‘Hey, this would be helpful if I could do this’ and ‘Can we make this change?’” Gorsline says, adding: “Subsplash has also been sending along good resources via email, as well as social media, to show different ways of using the product.”
All of this translates to tangible, real-life ministry benefits at A Seattle Church. As Gorsline puts it, it’s making work faster — and that’s no small thing.
“Whether it’s creating a small group guide or a blog post, or it’s helping us fast-track our social media content development, it’s all enabling us to empower and equip our leaders with tools that maybe they don’t natively have,” he explains. “The Church’s job is to equip the saints for works of service, as Ephesians 4 says. Using this tool, I and others on our team are spending more time with the people in front of us.”
Change can be comfortable
Of course, some church leaders will remain unsure about using AI in their own roles. For them, Gorsline offers an analogy: You can use technology to work for you, or you can work hard for technology.
“With Pulpit AI and other AI technologies, we can choose to have an attitude of skepticism, or we can be open, like the Church has been with the printing press and with other helpful technologies that allow us to spread the gospel and encourage people,” he offers. “We can either be afraid, or we can be on the cutting edge of reaching people with every tool at our disposal.
“I believe that [AI] is just another opportunity to keep the main thing, the main thing, by using tools to support reaching the lost and transforming the found.”
Even as Gorsline encourages other pastors and church leaders to keep an open mind about AI, he also urges them to keep it in perspective.
“It’s not magic, it’s not perfect. You have to be diligent and faithful,” he says. “But if you let it work for you, it can be a helpful tool, just like anything else we use.”
