Pastor to Pastor

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Josh Burnett: And so I jumped off the cliff of stepping into starting a tech company. I thought, I started a church, how hard can starting a tech company be? And it turns out it's pretty hard if you can't write code.

Dave Stone: Hey everybody, welcome to Pastor to Pastor. I am your host, Dave Stone. We are thrilled that you are with us today. Thank you for joining us. Also, let me just give you a personal thank you. Thank you for sharing episodes with different people and telling others about Pastor to Pastor with Dave Stone. In 2026, our numbers, which were already good, jumped 25% and they have been continuing to grow. And that's a credit to you. So thank you for what you're doing. Thanks for sharing the news.

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What comes to mind when you hear the phrase artificial intelligence? Does it sound dangerous to you? Does it sound impersonal? Maybe even evil? Or does it pique your interest as a potential ministry tool that you could use? Our guest today understands both sides. His name is Josh Burnett. Josh is a former pastor who started an AI company with the goal of giving pastors back more time so that they could be with more people that they're trying to minister to.

You are about to hear from a guy who has a passion for ministry. He actually did an internship with me years ago. He's a former church planter. Shout out to all the church planters out there. Then God pulled him in this direction of how it is that he could help people. Josh Burnett is a person who loves ministry but also wants to come alongside and help ministers. You're about to hear how AI can be beneficial to you without compromising your integrity or dulling your mind. What I appreciate about Josh is that he will give us plenty of cautions and warnings and he will be very accurate in what he has to say about AI. I know you're going to love this one. Let's listen in on my conversation with Josh Burnett.

Josh Burnett, it's great to have you. It's my pleasure. I think back to the fact that I'm blessed because I've known you since you were in early high school, maybe middle school years. Tell us a little bit about your path into ministry because I love for people to hear how it is that God works and weaves things and brings you to that point.

Josh Burnett: I came to know Jesus at Southeast Christian Church when I was nine years old. My family showed up at church out of desperation. Things were not well in our home. We went to church as a last act of desperation. I remember as a nine-year-old praying that my parents would get a divorce because they were fighting constantly. Our home was just not peaceful.

We showed up at Southeast and the church wrapped their arms around my family in a way that was beautiful. We came to know Jesus and started following him. Over the course of the next three years, my parents' lives were transformed. Mine was transformed obviously as well, and our home became a place of peace. The church became integral in every aspect of our lives.

I was sitting in big church listening to Bob Russell preach when I was 12 years old. He was going through some Lee Strobel type content of how we can know the Bible's historically reliable. I remember looking around in the room on Hikes Lane and seeing people taking notes like crazy. I had this moment where I realized that God was doing something through that man that I wanted to have him do through me.

When I was 12, I decided I was going to be a pastor. I never thought that would ever change. I found out about church planting through a seven-day church planting bootcamp for high school students, which still to this day cracks me up to say because who does that in high school? It's like, what are you doing this summer? I'm going to church planter bootcamp.

Dave Stone: You did an internship at Southeast. Was that after college when you did that one? But then you went on to be a church planter up in Maryland. How long did you do that? We've got a lot of people who listen who are church planters. Great respect. Thank you church planters, you all are making a huge difference. You are the pioneers. You are the ones who are on the front lines and it's tough work, isn't it?

Josh Burnett: It is an incredible act of faith. I planted a church in Annapolis, Maryland in 2009 and led that church for 10 years. It was the most stretching thing I've ever done and some of the hardest work I've ever done, and the most gratifying work as well.

Dave Stone: And Sarah, I think people miss out on what the spouse of a church planter goes through and the sacrifices that they make. What would you say as a word of encouragement to those who are church planters who are on here and how they could encourage their spouse because I think they're going to lead the way into heaven?

Josh Burnett: I would say, one, your spouse is holding more than you probably know or understand. Make sure that in the midst of being on mission with God that you do not miss your first church, which is your family, and that you love that person exceedingly well because that's what you're called to first.

Dave Stone: Well put. Good word of encouragement. I want to shift gear. You're at Revolution Church in Annapolis and God starts to do something in you. It begins to weigh upon you that there are resources that pastors are in need of. We have a lot of people who are listening this who are bivocational pastors. Maybe they work for free for the church or they have two different jobs in order to make ends meet. Part of this love for technology grew out of a desire to help resource pastors and help them out. Share a little bit about that journey.

Josh Burnett: I never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing now. I thought I was going to go plant a church, be at that church forever, and just plant a whole lot of churches out of that church and then plant more together. Probably seven or eight years into leading Revolution, I just had this strange feeling that I don't know that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which was very foreign because I'd never considered doing anything else since I was 12 years old.

I didn't know what it was at first. We were working on this project as a church that we had realized the only way we were ever going to scalably make an impact was through technology. I basically got really quiet for about a year. Every week I would spend an hour sitting in a Catholic church with nobody else in it. I was just trying to discern what was going on in my heart.

I'm at a monastery nine months in and I am just angry at the Lord. I'm journaling and I'm writing down why haven't you spoken to me? I don't know why I still feel this way. What's going on? There have only been a couple of times where I felt the clear voice of the Holy Spirit to my heart of, "What did I call you to?" I said, "You called me to plant a church planting church." I wrote that down and had this overwhelming sense of the Lord just saying, "You did that." I knew in that moment that God was releasing me to this next thing.

There was an idea that we were working on at our church to help make the community better by matching people to opportunities to volunteer and we had code-named it Flourish. I basically was like, "What am I supposed to do now, Lord?" and I just heard this word flourish and I knew what that meant. I jumped off the cliff of stepping into starting a tech company. I thought, I started a church, how hard can starting a tech company be?

It turns out it's pretty hard if you can't write code. I spent three and a half years really failing and failing and failing. Then I met our technical co-founder for the company we ended up starting together called Church.tech that uses AI to help churches be more effective at making disciples. That's how that transition happened.

Dave Stone: Have I ever told you my monk joke? I don't think I have. Would you like to hear it, Josh?

Josh Burnett: Of course.

Dave Stone: A guy decides he wants to join a monastery. He goes and sits down with the head monk who says, "Now you understand, you are only allowed to say two words every year." The guy says, "Okay, I understand." He says, "Well, welcome, you now are a monk." He goes to his room and doesn't say a word for an entire year.

After one year, he's brought into the head monk. The head monk says, "Okay, you got two words, what do you want to say?" The guy says, "Food's bad." He says, "All right, head back to your room." The guy goes back to his room for a whole another year. He comes back out after a year, meets with the head monk. He said, "What's your two words?" He said, "Bed's hard." He said, "All right," and sends him back.

A year later he comes back in. The head monk says, "All right, what's your two words?" The guy says, "I quit." The head monk says, "Well, it doesn't surprise me. All you've done is complain ever since you got here." I guess if you're preaching on Philippians 2, do everything without complaining or arguing, you could use that in a sermon.

But how cool that you are looking for solitude and silence in order to hear from God. By faith, it's just a real Mother Teresa type approach to say, "Okay, Lord, I'm listening. I want to be open to your spirit." It's in that moment when you're at a monastery where you feel like God is saying to you, "Okay, you've done that, you accomplished what you set out to accomplish, now let's see what the next thing is." Now you're getting to multiply this.

A tech company, you get this off the ground. I want to be real honest. I know that there are a lot of people who are listening who, when they think of a tech company or AI, artificial intelligence, as soon as they hear AI, there's something that tightens in their chest. They've seen that as a controversial subject or they've heard some people speak highly of that. They've heard others who are cautious and concerned about it. Talk us through some of the cautions that we should have with AI and also some of the benefits of it.

Josh Burnett: One of the things that is important to do is to actually do an investigation. Look into it and make up your own opinion. If you're skeptical, be informed on that front and be skeptical from an informed position. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of AI. We need to be skeptical for the right reasons and then look at it and see if this is something that could in fact serve to advance the kingdom of God and help us make disciples more effectively. I would say absolutely that is the case.

Look into it. If you arrive at a position after looking at it and say, "I think this is bad," there are a lot of ways in which I would agree with you. I think there's a lot of danger in it and there are ways that it's being used very horribly right now to do bad things. But I also think there's opportunity for redemption in it and that if the church engages well, that we can actually see God's kingdom come and his will be done in an increasing measure because of it.

Dave Stone: I think the same could have been said of the internet years ago when the concept of the internet was invented. There are dangers associated with it and there are cautions, but it's neutral. It's a question of how you choose to use it. It behooves us to be cautious of these things and to say, "Okay, I have to police myself and I have to make certain that I'm using this with integrity and for the right reasons." Tell me some different ways that you feel Christian leaders, two or three different ways that are very practical, that are ethically healthy. What is some low-hanging fruit that anyone could be using this in their ministry and it would be helpful to them? It could save time and also doesn't take away from the personal touch of ministry.

Josh Burnett: One is using it to create content for social media. I didn't go to Social Media Academy, nor did I take a single class at Cincinnati Christian University on social media. It didn't exist when I was there. But there are all kinds of incredible tools out of there that can help us reach more people. The reality is if you're going to engage people as a pastor or Christian leader, the top of your funnel is probably going to be digital.

The first way you're going to engage people, the same way people are listening to this podcast, is going to be in some digital format. AI can take a thing that as pastors we're not trained to do and enable us to be very effective at that. Because pastors create a ton of content every single week, and churches create a ton of content, you can use AI to help you reach more people. You can take that content, chop it up into little clips, post it on social media, and turn it into more engaging content from a discipleship perspective.

One of the things as a church planter that I did a lot of was create sermon-based small group curriculum. That's hard to do when you're the one that preached the sermon. It feels a little weird to be like, "I'm going to write a question about what I said." Hopefully you write a question about what God said. AI is really good at summarization and it's really good at synthesis. It can take content you've created and help you engage people by asking really excellent questions or creating a summary.

Even on the sermon research side of things, there's some awesome opportunities to help enhance how quickly we can research things. The fruitful work of writing a sermon is understanding the text, applying the text to yourself, and applying it to your people. Exegeting the text and exegeting yourself and your people, preaching comes from that. There is fruitfulness in pulling a book off a shelf and spending time going through a commentary, seeing what it says about the text to help you understand it better.

There's a lot of time invested in going and finding that book or jumping into some of our legacy software programs and trying to find research. AI can bring that research together really, really quickly.

Dave Stone: That's a great point. Hold that thought for a second because the social media one is really good. Let's say, for instance, that a pastor is 64 years old and they've heard you just say this about social media and they're a little slower on social media than their kids are. Are you putting that sermon into AI and then it is kicking out several different one-minute reels or clips or suggested things?

Josh Burnett: If you've got video of that sermon, you can take that video, whether it be from YouTube or a video file, and drop it into AI. That's what we did at Church.tech. You can drop that in and it'll cut it into sermon clips of people preaching. It'll automatically pull out the best moments for you and help you identify those and then you can edit it really easily. When I say edit it easily, I mean you can say start on this word and end on this word. It's way easier than having to become a video editor.

Dave Stone: I know that those reels are becoming bigger and bigger. I don't have much of a social media following, but my son sent me something yesterday and said, "Dad, here's a reel that's out there of yours and it's had over 1.1 million views on it." I'm like, "What in the world is it?" He sent it to me and I tell a funny story for about 45 seconds and then I make a 45-second introduction into the sermon and make the application. To be honest with you, it wasn't that powerful, but to think that over a million people watched that? I need to do a better job of this and he's always pushing me on this. For those of you who are listening who are older like I am, there is a lot of wisdom in this and people stumble across these things. It's crazy how it will get someone to maybe check out your church or watch a sermon or they'll pass it on to someone who's going through a difficult time.

You alluded to the value of just discussion questions. So many churches now, for part of their Bible studies, will be an outgrowth of the message that was preached on that previous weekend. Now you can put that manuscript in there and it comes up with those questions like you were saying. I'm not trying to take someone's job if that's what they do at their church, but time-wise, that's a very inexpensive way to save someone several hours of doing that when AI spits it out in five seconds.

Josh Burnett: And it's based on the sermon, so it's not pulling from extraneous sources. It's actually centered on that sermon. Our mission at Church.tech was really centered on this: we want to make every church more effective at making disciples. Discipleship happens in a life-on-life format. When we sit behind our screens and spend countless hours, and I've asked thousands of pastors at this point to give me a percentage of their time spent on task and what percentage is spent with people.

I went to school to be with people. I went to school for preaching as well, but pastoring people and shepherding and coming alongside of them in the good and bad times, that's the job. If I can say, "Hey, this used to take me three or four or five hours to get done or a staff team member was spending 10 hours on it because they don't have the context the pastor does," and I can now say in five minutes I can get this done, now I get to have five, six, maybe seven more meetings that week with people or with the staff team to lead them more effectively.

Dave Stone: I love to hear that. Christian leaders, do not miss this. We are listening to a guy who started a tech company who wants to help pastors, and at the heart of it is how can I get you spending more time with people in a relational experience. That's what Jesus did and that's how Jesus spent his time, with people and pouring into them and making disciples who make disciples. That is at the heart of it. If there are some healthy shortcuts that do not challenge ethical boundaries, I think that's important.

Let me tell you some ways that I use it. Josh, you've helped me in the last couple of years just through some conversations that we've had and when I've heard you speak at different conferences on this. I was kind of scared and leery of it. But the area in which I need the most help is I write too much stuff and I have a hard time pruning it. We've had this conversation before.

What I find myself doing with AI is I will take a story and I'm working on an introduction for a sermon at Christ's Church of the Valley in Phoenix. Last night I was working on the intro of it. It was 270 words. I felt like I crafted it really well. I put it in AI and said, "Would you summarize this without losing the punch and power by shortening this by 40 words?" Boom, just like that I had it. Then I compare apples to apples. I'm like, "That's tighter wording, I like that." I may have added five more words back into it, maybe 10. Then I said again, "Can you cut another 25 words out?" I got a much more succinct product, worded better than I could have. You said a word, synthesis?

Josh Burnett: Synthesis. It can take really complex or even disparate ideas and synthesize them. If you think about a sermon, you probably have two or three different big ideas that you're trying to communicate, maybe you only have one, but you're trying to communicate it in a way that a bunch of people can wrap their arms and hearts around. AI can take large quantities of content like that and make it simpler and say, "Okay, here's the synthesis of the ideas in this text or in this sermon."

Dave Stone: I use it for shortening. Sometimes I will take my introduction and I will say, "Will you give me four different choices of a more captivating opening line?" Just something as simple as that because I'm 64 years old, brother, I need all the help I can get. What would you say to caution people? Because there are some people who OD on these things. Whatever the idea is, they take it too far and it's like, no, that's not what this is intended for. What are some cautions that you give so that people don't compromise their integrity in their sermon preparation?

Josh Burnett: You've already touched on one of them that I love hearing you say, which is that you're coming to AI with ideas already or you're coming to AI with content already done. There was an MIT study done this past year that showed that if you ask AI to do your thinking for you, there are degenerative effects cognitively that take place. It's kind of crazy that we're able to see that happening so quickly. It shows you some of the danger of AI, honestly, because it can do your thinking for you in some ways.

You can go to it and say, "I've got to write a sermon this week, I'm preaching on Genesis 1, write me a sermon," and it'll write you a sermon. It'll come up with an outline for you. But that's a really dangerous thing from a cognitive perspective. It's a really dangerous thing if you don't understand the AI system that you are dealing with. If you're dealing with a ChatGPT, you don't understand what's under the hood there, you don't understand the content that that model was trained on or what I would call the theological underpinnings of that model that they've created.

There's a lot of danger on that front of losing your ability to think, which I think is one of the primary things that we've got to be really careful about. The way to get around that is to do the thinking first and come to it as almost like a brainstorming partner or an enhancement tool.

This is probably the most dangerous thing in my opinion. What happened with social media was we got into this place where connection was possible that had never been possible. Some really great things came from that. But then they needed to monetize it. The way that they monetized it was to hold people's attention so that now we see we're all siloed and there's so much more hate and there's so many more people that are angry with one another.

That potential future is exponentially easier to get to with AI and exponentially more dangerous for us. Social media was taking things like what we would post about our life and maybe our political affiliations or whether or not we have kids or where you live. They were running these machine learning models to make profiles about people but they were putting them in these big buckets. With AI, you can profile down to the individual person.

It's not based on the affiliations with political party or life stage or any of that, it's based on your psychology. What people tell AI models isn't like what you post on social media. It's, "I'm really struggling in my marriage. I don't like my spouse. I'm angry and I don't know why." The number one use case for AI right now is therapy and companionship. Imagine the unlock that that gives you as a tech company to be able to hack people's psychology and make them do things they would not have done otherwise.

Dave Stone: There's a lesson for us in Christian leaders, just the fact that that's the top two areas that they're looking for some type of help or counsel in. That just causes us to say, "Okay, this is where the church needs to be the church," which comes back to that relational side of things because they're going to their screen instead of coming to a physical gathering with human flesh and blood where they can be there for one another and rejoice in the good times and mourn in the bad times.

I want to make certain that I don't allow AI to affect my own pastoral tone. When I'm preaching to Southeast or when I'm preaching at CCV in Phoenix, I feel like those are my churches, and so I want to have a pastoral tone. I don't want that coming from AI. I want that coming from my knowledge of the conversations that I have out in the lobby and in the atrium and from what's going on in the life of that church and being preached and what I'm seeing.

I don't think AI can change that. I also want to make certain that I'm coming to my own exegetical conclusions through doing my study, that my theological convictions are coming out that it's not shaped by ChatGPT and that those personal applications are an outgrowth of what it is that God is teaching me.

You mentioned Bob Russell earlier. Years ago when I started working with him and learning from him, I would be slow on outlines and he was very good at outlines. I said to him, "Wow, you're so good at it and how did that come to be?" He said, "Well, at first I would just always look up in a book and see what Warren Wiersbe had done on it." Warren Wiersbe had the most unbelievable outlines. You name any Pauline epistle and you put the text in and all of a sudden you could get everything and it started with the letter P and it was unbelievable.

But Bob said this: "Finally, what I had to do was I had to discipline myself that I did not look at Warren Wiersbe's stuff until I had done my due diligence and I had poured into the heavy, time-consuming, painstaking work of coming up with an outline." He said, "Then sometimes I would look at Warren Wiersbe and then I might make some adjustment and get some idea from him." In my mind, that's what AI is. We have it available to us, but if we don't put the time in first ourselves, then we are circumventing and shortcutting some things and we miss out on what it is that God will teach us through that process and actually listening to the Holy Spirit. Talk for just a minute about the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit can still be front and center and yet how we can still use technology without allowing AI or technology to have a larger voice in our life than the Spirit.

Josh Burnett: This is imperative that pastors and Christian leaders think about this and wrestle with this because the reality of it is listening for the voice of God, I mean, I spent before AI, I spent two years wrestling with this feeling and not receiving any kind of clear answer. I know people who have wrestled far longer than that. The problem of having something in your pocket that can answer you immediately, even voice-to-voice answer you, is it's going to be really, really tempting to take something that sounds wise and go, "Well, here's my instant gratification answer."

It is imperative that pastors develop that same kind of discipline that you were talking about that Bob developed, that just because we can do something doesn't mean we do it. Just because we have an answer at our fingertips in the form of AI or a book, it doesn't mean that we don't do the hard work of disciplining ourselves and listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit. I actually think this is one of the opportunities of AI actually: that we get away from our devices more often.

I think it's really important to step away from your devices and truly differentiate yourself from them. It used to be people would say, "Oh, if I leave my phone somewhere, I feel naked." I'll be honest with you, I feel naked if I don't have AI with me somehow. If I don't have my phone or my computer with me, I use it so much now that it's like this tool that I've become so accustomed to, but that's really dangerous for me as it relates to listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit.

I've had to work really hard to say, first of all, I'm going to develop a set of principles that dictate when I use AI and when I don't. I'm not going to come to it without an idea already formed. There's not a lot that's going to happen on that front that isn't going to require just some personal choices and discipline on that front to say I'm not just going to jump in and use AI right out of the gate.

Secondly, I personally put into place some stopgaps and we're building tech that allows you to be able to do this, but to be able to say any AI system that we create is going to point me back to God and back to people. I think it's imperative that pastors, first of all, pastors you need to use AI purely so you can talk to your people about it because they are using AI. Period, end of story, they are using it. It doesn't matter what age they are. My 94-year-old grandma, who just passed away, used AI almost every day. It's too easy to adopt and it's getting easier and easier. So you've got to be speaking into this. A big part of it is you're going to have to wrestle with the fact that there are detriments. It's easier to listen to ChatGPT tell me what to do than it is to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit. It's not better, though, and so we've got to be disciplined.

Dave Stone: Point me back to God, point me back to others. That is the goal. Tell me a story or two that just pops in your mind of how you've seen God show up and you've heard this come back from this church or this discipleship pastor or this student pastor and it makes me feel good that they're using this in the right way and we're seeing life change as a result of it.

Josh Burnett: We try to form community around how to use this well and use it responsibly. I get to interact with pastors on a pretty regular basis. Some of the tools that we've made have helped people study more effectively. One of the things that we've made helps you evaluate your sermon from the perspective of a person who you're not, so it helps you gain perspective. I'm not a single mom. I have no idea how to stand in those shoes, but AI can help me see from that perspective more effectively.

We've had a bunch of stories that have come in where people have said, "Hey, I would never have had this section in my sermon if it hadn't been for this tool you all made and helped me have perspective I wouldn't have had. Or I would have said something that probably would have pushed this person away, but instead I actually connected with them through this." Just developing empathy for people and seeing a different perspective.

There's another story that we got connected with somebody who was spending just an inordinate amount of time making discipleship content and they were trying to segment it for all their different groups. They had men's groups, women's groups and they were spending like 25 hours a week, it was a bigger church, but this person was spending like 25 hours a week writing all these different versions of the same kind of sermon-based content.

We effectively were like, "Well, you're about to have a lot of time on your hands." They were like, "I get to be with people now and the content, people are telling me the content's better." We can kind of tune this to whatever audience you are working with. Now all of a sudden they've got all this time and so they're getting to have all these discipleship conversations. They went from barely ever getting to be with their small group leaders to now they have lunch with at least one small group leader a day and several other meetings and stuff. It's really impacted their ability to make disciple-making disciples.

Dave Stone: That's the beauty of it, if that gets people to where they can pour into others, then that is making a difference. What are better ways that they can word questions to AI? I know you do it all the time. I'll say to my son, "I don't want to lose the humor, I've worked so hard on the humor of this story, and I'm afraid if I ask AI to summarize this..." and then he'll tell me some way to word the question. Give us some tips, some examples of questions to ask that can improve the quality of a message or a story or an illustration or an application.

Josh Burnett: Context is the key to this. The more you can frame the AI's understanding of what you're trying to get from it, the better it's going to perform. Anytime you're asking for something, tell it, "Hey, I need you to function like this. I need you to be the world's greatest joke teller or comedian for a Christian context and I'm telling this joke, help me refine it." It's going to be so much better than you just saying, "Help me refine this joke," because it doesn't have enough context. The more you give it, the better it's going to perform. You don't need to write it a book, but a little bit of context goes a long way in getting better output.

Dave Stone: You're giving them that end goal and you're saying, let's say if it's in the conclusion of your message, "Hey, I am moving in to invite them to make a decision for Christ. How can I do this in a way that can tie together these loose ends while at the same time really minister to them and reach out to them so that they make a decision?"

Josh Burnett: That's perfect. It'll perform so much better than just saying, "This is my conclusion, help me make it powerful." It'll still do a decent job with that, but if you give it just that little bit more extra context, it's going to know what you want and perform so much more effectively.

Dave Stone: Do you think AI would cut the monk joke out or do you think AI would say, "Oh my, you are hilarious"?

Josh Burnett: I think AI would want to know who is your audience, Dave, and we'll decide from there.

Dave Stone: It's going to say, "You're a loser, what are you doing, get back to studying for your sermon." One of the things that I often find people doing is trying to give AI instructions when they probably should ask AI questions. Tell them the setting, tell them who the audience is, tell them what you're hoping to elicit from the audience and the congregation at that time. All those things are important.

Josh Burnett: Absolutely. And then just being able to ask good questions. Rather than say, "Hey, make this better," say, "What are areas that I can improve in this to help me communicate?" and give it a little bit of context about the audience that you're communicating to. It will pull things out that you would never—it's so good at synthesis and understanding how all of this—understanding's the wrong word, it's all math just so we're clear—but it's so good at calculating all of the factors of what's involved in this that it can identify things, patterns that you would never pick up on but other people will pick up on them and really call that out.

Dave Stone: I've also found that AI, the more I've started using it and toying with it, that it feeds a narcissistic side of me because when I will send a story in that I'm really proud of but I'm trying to shorten it down, it will write back and the first line will say, "Oh my, this is an amazing story. I don't know but this might be one thing that you could add to it but it's really good." And I'm like, well, I'm sure it says that to everybody, it's not going to start off and say, you know, "What are you doing in the ministry?"

Josh Burnett: It's trying to keep our attention, that's what it's trained to do. I actually have mine set to be a little sarcastic with me so it's a little bit off-putting so that I don't get too addicted to it.

Dave Stone: Dude, you're blowing my mind with all this right now. This has been so helpful. I know people are going to want to find out more about the resources that you have available. I know that you've got a place where we can go to find some of these resources to help us. Tell us how we can find them. Be very specific because we need all the help we can get, brother.

Josh Burnett: Church.tech recently became Content Studio. It's now on the Glue platform. You can go to contentstudio.glue.us, that's g-l-o-o.us. That's where you can find what was formerly Church.tech. Church.tech is still out there, but it's becoming Content Studio. There's a whole lot of other resources there on the Glue platform that can help you be more effective at making disciples, communicating, that type of thing.

Dave Stone: contentstudio.gloo.us. Thank you, brother. This has been very eye-opening. Thank you for your candidness and for your cautions and for your commitment to Christ.

Josh Burnett: Thank you, Dave. This has been so much fun.

Dave Stone: It has been. Thanks, brother.

Josh Burnett: Absolutely. Thank you.

Dave Stone: I don't know about you, but that was very healthy for me to have that conversation and to hear Josh's heart when it comes to AI. I love the balance that he brought to that conversation. Usually you'd think of a person who has a tech company that would actually do nothing but talk about all the positives and how healthy it is and how you need this. I really love the balance that he brought to it and reminding us that technology is something that is neutral. It's a tool we can use to make our ministries more effective or it's something that Satan can use to weasel his way into our sermon prep and into our ministries that isn't healthy.

I loved how he talked about how it can help us with social media, especially for those of us who might be over the age of 40. We all need some compelling clips that can be used for digital outreach and I need all the help that I can get on that. I love the phrase when he said, "It's all math," because it really helped me understand that that's all AI is, is it's whatever has been put into it, that's what it's going to spit back to us. And his warning that he gave about, okay, you don't know what all's been put into ChatGPT, so you have to look at what are the guardrails that you're going to put into your system so that you are getting something that is biblical.

I can't stress this enough that it begins with what it is that you do through your own study and not using this as a shortcut until you have put your time in. Maybe one of the greatest things that he talked about was how it can save time so that you can spend time with people in your ministry and pour into them. And also it gives you more time with your family, friends, and your flock. There's one thing that I don't want to get lost in the shuffle of the AI discussion. AI cannot hold the hand of a person who's just received the news that someone's been diagnosed with a terminal disease. AI cannot shed a tear as you stand at the casket with your arm around someone who's lost a loved one. AI cannot baptize a person into Jesus Christ. AI has some good things it can do. AI, though, is a supplement and it's not a substitute for what you can do.

I thought what is it that I could use as a story to kind of wrap things up today? I was reminded of something that happened in my own life in marriage and ministry just a few weeks ago. My wife was listening to a podcast from Pastor to Pastor and I came upstairs and she was listening to a great guest that I had that day. I found myself listening to what my wife was saying, but I also was listening to the podcast. The more she kept talking to me, something happened. And what happened was I found myself listening more intently to my own voice and what I was saying more so than what I was listening to hers.

That happens a lot of times in marriage, but I also find that it happens in my ministry as well. I guess the warning that I want to give us is that on that day, I found myself tuning in to my own voice over my wife's voice. I think the fear and the warning that I want to give us is that in our preparation for ministry, whether that's student ministry, whether that's in guest services, whether it's in discipleship, whatever the ministry might be, whether you're the preacher, just make certain that you are listening not to your voice or to what AI has to say to you, but that you're listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit. And that you're listening to that gentle prompting that you get from him and that you're putting in the time and preparation into pouring into scripture on your own before you begin to supplement it with some of the benefits that come alongside from a ChatGPT or AI.

As always, thanks for listening to Pastor to Pastor. We drop a brand new episode every Tuesday. It's designed to encourage, to inspire, and to challenge you because leadership can be lonely. And that's why we call this Pastor to Pastor. It's for a reason. It's to remind you, you're not alone. So until next time, God bless.

Announcer: Live your truth. A lot of people say that, don't they? But truth isn't something we decide. God has decided it for us and it's our job as believers to share his truth with a world in need. I'll encourage you to do that through my podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly. I visit with fascinating guests about important topics like gender confusion, cancel culture, and more, while helping you share God's love with others. Listen at refocuswithjimdaly.com.