I was working on a short devotional thought to tie together the worship set for Sunday morning — the kind of thirty-second spoken transition between two songs that’s supposed to land with some weight, the kind that helps the room understand why we’re moving from one song to the next. I’d been staring at the blank page for twenty minutes. The words weren’t coming. So I opened ChatGPT and typed: “Write a brief worship transition that connects a song about God’s faithfulness to a song of surrender, evangelical tone, 80–100 words.”
It came back in about three seconds. And it was fine. Genuinely fine. Theologically solid, appropriately humble, usable rhythm. I could have dropped it into the service order and nobody would have known.
That’s when I stopped and sat with what had just happened. Not the output. The output was not the problem. The problem was the path I’d taken to get there: twenty minutes of sitting with God, then twenty seconds of letting the machine do it instead. What had those twenty minutes been? Failure? Warm-up? The actual work?
I pasted what ChatGPT gave me into a new document and closed the tab. Then I went back to the blank page. It took another forty minutes. The transition I ended up using was not as clean. But I knew every word. I’d wrestled it into existence. And when I stood up Sunday morning and spoke it, something in me was already there.
The Difference Between Output and Formation
This is not an essay about AI being dangerous. I work in network security. I use these tools every day. I run Claude for code, ChatGPT for first drafts of technical documentation, Copilot for the tedious parts of scripting. I am not coming at this from a Luddite corner. I’m coming at it from the inside.
But spiritual formation is a domain where the process is the point. And that makes it categorically different from almost everything else LLMs are useful for.
When I use AI to summarize a long contract, the output is what matters. The hours I would have spent reading it aren’t formative — they’re just hours. The contract doesn’t change me; understanding its terms does. AI accelerating that is a net gain.
Formation doesn’t work that way. The Psalmist didn’t write “meditate on the law of the LORD” because the content of the law was hard to access. He wrote it because the meditating was the point. The return visits. The slow absorption. The moment when a verse you’ve heard two hundred times suddenly lands differently because you’re carrying something new into the room. That doesn’t happen at generation speed.
What We’re Actually Losing
Three practices. Same story each time.
Scripture memorization. I grew up an AWANA kid — and later a Royal Ambassador — so memorizing passages wasn’t optional. It was the assignment. It was awkward and repetitive and it required a kind of boredom that is increasingly hard to manufacture. But somewhere in the third or fourth day of running Romans 8:38–39 through my head, it stopped being something I knew about and became something I knew inside. It moved from content to reflex.
Now I can ask GPT for the verse and have it in two seconds. And I do, when I need to confirm a reference mid-sermon. That’s fine. But if I never do the memorization work, the verse is never inside me. It’s in my search history. Those are not the same thing.
Sitting with a hard passage. There’s a kind of reading that’s closer to arguing. Habakkuk. Job. The hard half of Psalm 88. Passages where the honest response is I don’t understand why you would allow this. That’s not comfortable, but it’s formative. The friction is the feature.
Ask an LLM to summarize Habakkuk’s lament and it’ll give you a clean, structured explanation of the prophet’s complaint and God’s response. It’ll be correct. And it will have completely skipped the part where you sit in the discomfort long enough to realize it’s also your complaint. The tool is too helpful. It solves the discomfort before the discomfort can do anything to you.
Writing the words that tie worship together. This is where I feel it most directly, because it’s where my own temptation lives. A generated transition can be theologically accurate. It can name the right attribute of God and bridge cleanly into the next song. But writing one yourself — really writing one, not editing one — forces you to locate yourself. What is God actually doing in our church this week? Where is our congregation right now? What thread is the Spirit pulling through these songs that I’m supposed to name out loud? A generated paragraph bypasses that excavation entirely. It hands you something that sounds like worship without making you do the work of listening for what worship is supposed to be on this particular Sunday.
Why This Isn’t the Same as Every Earlier Technology
The standard counterargument is: every generation says this about new tools. Socrates worried writing would erode memory. The printing press disrupted Bible copying. Study Bibles and commentaries give you somebody else’s interpretation instead of working it out yourself.
True. But there’s a meaningful line that LLMs cross that earlier tools didn’t.
The printing press gave you access to texts you couldn’t otherwise read. A commentary gives you a scholar’s perspective, which you still have to weigh and accept or reject. Even Google just retrieves — you still have to read, evaluate, and synthesize. Those tools serve the cognitive work. They make more of it possible.
An LLM performs the cognitive work. It doesn’t give you the ingredients for synthesis — it hands you the synthesis. The distinction matters when the domain is one where synthesis is formation. The commentary says “here’s how Calvin read this.” The LLM says “here is a reflection on this passage.” One puts you in dialogue with a mind. The other removes the need for your mind to engage.
That’s the line.
What I’ve Changed in My Own Practice
I don’t claim to have this figured out. But I’ve built some rules for myself.
When I get the chance to take sermon notes, I prefer to write them by hand. Pen on paper. Not because I think handwriting is holy, but because the friction makes me slow down enough to hear what I actually think. When I type, I edit as I go, and the editing is often a way of smoothing out the rough places where the real work happens. On paper, I can’t move that fast. The roughness stays visible longer.
I don’t let AI write the words I speak from the platform. Not transitions, not devotional thoughts, not the short reflections I share between songs — nothing. Not drafted, not “polished,” not “enhanced.” Every word I speak in worship has to come out of me, imperfect syntax and all. This is a hard rule and I’ve broken it exactly once. I felt it Sunday morning.
I read hard passages with a physical Bible and the notebook I keep with it for devotional reflections, no tabs open. If I don’t understand something, I sit with not understanding it. I might look it up later. But I let it be difficult first. That window of difficulty — ten minutes, sometimes twenty — is where most of the formation happens.
I still use AI for almost everything else in my life. Ticket drafts, policy documentation, research summarization, code. I’m not making a blanket argument against the tools. I’m making an argument for protecting specific domains from them.
What This Means If You’re Forming Someone Else
If you’re a parent, a pastor, a small group leader, a youth director — you are in the formation business whether or not you’d use that word. And the temptation you’ll face is the same one I face: when a kid asks a hard question, it’s faster to give them an answer than to sit in the question with them. When someone in your group needs a verse, it’s faster to pull it up on your phone than to ask them to find it. When you need a devotional for Wednesday night, it’s faster to have ChatGPT draft it than to write one yourself.
Every one of those shortcuts is fine in isolation. The pattern is what costs you.
The formative moments in my own life — the ones that are still doing work in me now — were almost never the ones where someone handed me an answer quickly. They were the ones where a pastor sat with me in a text long enough for me to find my own footing. Where I was expected to memorize something instead of look it up. Where I had to bring my own words into a room instead of borrowing someone else’s.
Friction is the mechanism. Remove enough of it and you don’t have a more efficient formation process. You have no formation process. You have content delivery.
The soul doesn’t grow at generation speed.
Unworthy, but His,
Nick
Scripture
“But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”
— Psalm 1:2–3, ESV
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