Why can't it be turned off?

I continue to be frustrated by the defense of using AI tools.

One of the changes that I brought to our church was implementing a preaching team. Before my arrival, there were a variety of guest preachers of varying ability and biblical knowledge. Then, after I arrived, I took over 95% of the teaching in order to gain more practice for myself as the preacher but also for the congregation in learning how to listen to sequential, expository preaching. Since then, the teaching has expanded out to two others and we’ve settled into a really good rhythm.

In that time, my own process for sermon prep has evolved quite a bit in that the process if almost entirely analogue now. All of my notes go into a single notebook that contains only notes for sermons that I am preparing to preach¹. I do have an Obsidian vault that I try to put stuff into, but I am not so far behind on transferring things from my notebook that I don’t know that this will ever actually get done. Thankfully, I am better at keeping up with the index in the back of my notebook².

I will probably share more about my process at some point, but I mostly want to explain a particular frustration point in my process and it’s all to do with Logos Bible Software.

My second greatest frustration with Logos Bible Software at the moment is the simple fact that AI is working its way into nearly every single feature in the app. My single greatest frustration is that there is not a way to turn it off.

There are practical, pastoral, and ethical reasons why I am against the use of generative or even assistive AI in most use cases. The pastoral and ethical reasons are closely intertwined. When it comes to ministry and gospel work, I am wholly against using it.

Do you trust your tools?

For practical reasons, I cannot trust a tool that will lie to me. For me, this isn’t only about the use of technology in ministry.

In a past job, a part of my job involved CNC machining. I had tools which were used to orient the tools and materials so that the code would run properly. If something was off centre the tools would cut incorrectly and then materials and time would be wasted. One of the tools that was available to me was basically a laser pointer that was meant to find the true centre-point on a cutting tool. The trouble was that the laser dot would move by a millimetre or two when the chuck on the lathe was rotated.

I couldn’t trust that tool, so I had to find one that I could.

What are they paying me for?

It would be very easy to open up Logos and have it write out my sermon headings for me. Or to use its AI tools to summarise commentaries on the passages I am preaching. I tried to use it in order to write the Bible study that I lead during our prayer meetings but if I was to follow the workflow provided by the app, it keeps wanting to highlight discussion questions that were generated by AI.

But I know that these things are a slippery slope, making for an easy journey to Joppa to buy a ticket for Tarshish³.

In The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson writes:

I need a drenching in Scripture; I require an immersion in biblical studies. I need reflective hours over the pages of Scripture as well as personal struggles with the meaning of Scripture. That takes far more time than it takes to prepare a sermon. I want the people who come to worship in my congregation each Sunday to hear the Word of God preached in such a way that they hear its distinctive note of authority as God’s Word, and to know that their own lives are being addressed on their home territory. A sound outline and snappy illustrations don’t make that happen.⁴

Not only does this take more time, it is work that cannot be done while using a machine. Part of my job as the pastor of this people is to demonstrate that God’s word is not easy to understand but that it is worth the time spent thinking about it and trying to penetrate through text and context to discern what my Father is saying by these human authors.

If I outsource any part of the process to AI tools, then I have abandoned the vocation to which I have been called by this congregation to do. If I outsource any part of the process to AI tools, then I will miss the opportunity for my own heart to be shaped by the struggle to understand God’s word. The tradeoff simply isn’t worth it because the only way to actually achieve the goal is to go through the struggle.

I suppose what I am really trying to communicate here is that I wish the good folks at Logos would let me use Logos as a simple, searchable library. I wish that they would let me turn the robot off. There is no good reason to include access to tools which use LLMs. I have a brain which was given to me by God in order to do the work that I am doing.

1. While that system works for now, I am planning on consolidating some notebooks at the start of 2026 so that I have more stuff living in one place.

2. This one from Andrew Kern is really helpful.

3. Why, yes, I have been reading a lot of Eugene Peterson this year. This is a reference to Under The Unpredictable Plant.

4. Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (Eerdmans, 1980, 1992), pg. 20-21