You’ve just delivered a sermon your team also captured on video – one that took you hours of research, plus hours of practice. It went over well, you think. At least that’s what people are telling you. Now you need to pivot to counseling sessions, wading through the stack of admin paperwork on your deck, and checking in on the community event happening this Friday.

But wait! Before you do, your communications director would love for you to help them grab sermon snippets for highlight reels, quotes for social, and summaries to post online so that your congregation can review things in their own time, as they prayerfully contemplate the message through the week. Your communications director also notes that the blog content she repurposes from your sermons sees a lot of online engagement.

AI Gives Pastors Much-Needed Time Back

You know how crucial it is to lean into doing more with your sermons. They’re key to a thriving community, to church growth, and to connections. But you’re balancing multiple responsibilities on top of the hours it takes to perfect your sermon. Social media and video snippets just aren’t in your top five – or even your top 10 – list of things to do today, let alone this week. That’s where Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven sermon video clip creation for church leaders comes in, offering a way to maximize the value of your sermon by creating video clips, quotes, and snippets … and even giving you a score of how the topics really went over. Let’s walk through it.

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence, often called AI, refers to the ability of computer systems or machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience, understanding language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and making decisions. In simpler terms, AI is like teaching a computer to think, act, and learn more like a human, allowing it to perform tasks we once thought only people could do.

Demystifying AI for Church Leaders: NLP Algorithms Explained

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one component of artificial intelligence. At its most basic level, it’s the ability of a computer program to understand spoken and written human language. Think of it like a translator between computers and people. Around for more than 50 years, AI gave NLP a turbo boost. NLP’s two components are data preprocessing and algorithm development – both of which can help church leaders.

Sermon Video Support Clip Creation

Sermon Shots is one example of an AI tool we recommend church leaders investigate. It can be used to:

  • Search for hooks – the parts of the video that will pull your audience in
  • Pull highlights out of a video sermon, after preprocessing has made the audio squeaky clean
  • Produce transcripts that you can make summaries and clips out of later noteworthy sermon sections
  • Analyze the audio’s sentiment by scoring positive and negative words and phrases

More complex sermon AI tools can help you identify if people in a crowd in a video reacted positively, negatively, or disengaged with your sermon. If you want to achieve it, there’s likely an AI tool out there that does it. And we’re constantly researching them and will share them as we find ones of value to your efforts.​​

New Sermon App Launching Soon! Sermon Creation Inspiration 24/7

Ready to gain back two hours a day that you would usually spend researching and preparing your sermon by utilizing sermon video support? Ready to see your sermon’s message travel up to 5x further – with little to no effort on your part? Like Timothy to Paul, AI can support you. Reach out today to learn more about our AI Sermon Preparation and Distribution app that’s launching soon.

Join the Sermon App Waitlist >

David Thorne
Research and Development Leader: Missional Marketing
Ed.D in Leadership Studies
Masters in Management and Leadership, Practical Theology, and Counseling

A natural choice to lead the AI for Churches AI Ethics Board, David is a pastor, writer, and family man. He earned his doctorate in Leadership Studies and masters degrees in management and leadership, counseling, and practical theology. Passionate about marketing strategy and helping churches utilize technology to achieve outreach goals and foster community engagement, David has a deep understanding of the hurdles church leaders face in a changing world. Helping pastors utilize AI to optimize their sermon writing process and multiply their sermon’s impact is an area of focus for him.