A Church Using AI: Insights from Pastor Peter Haas

Watch the episode on our YouTube Channel - https://youtu.be/XdRXU4xHSbU
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The intersection of faith, technology, and creativity is a fascinating crossroad that church leaders are being forced to face. The recent technological advancements, particularly in Artificial Intelligence (AI), are permeating every area of life, and faith-based spaces are no exception.

In our latest podcast episode, we had the privilege of hearing from the experienced AI user and lead pastor of Substance Church, Peter Haas, on how he has implemented these new technologies into his daily life. As a Christian, AI technologies can either be feared or embraced - Peter is choosing to embrace them in hopes of helping pave the way for ethical AI.
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00:06 - AI Impact in the Church
08:31 - Pastor's Perspectives on Technology
17:47 - Using AI for Sermon Writing
32:30 - Deepfake Technology in Preaching Potential
36:58 - AI's Impact on Church Sermons
46:32 - Technology's Role in Churches Changes
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Follow Peter Haas on Instagram at @peterhaas1
Check out Substance Church at substancechurch.com
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For more information on technology resources for your church, visit tithely.com

Transcript

Frank Barry: 0:06

Guys, welcome to another show, another episode of Modern Church Leader. Back on the pod, mr Peter I guess it's Mr DJ pastor author Peter Haas from Substance Church. Welcome back, man.

Peter Haas: 0:20

Man. I love you, Frank, it's good to be here.

Frank Barry: 0:24

It is great to be here. I don't remember what color glasses you had on the last show. I want to say they're orange.

Peter Haas: 0:31

I mix it up, man it's on orange. You've got to match the buttons and the shoes. That's the key, everybody, that's the key.

Frank Barry: 0:40

I would agree. What about the belt? Do you go for the belt?

Peter Haas: 0:45

Because I'm an untucked guy, doesn't matter as much.

Frank Barry: 0:50

Oh, wow, yeah, yeah, well, the watch. I see the watches in sync there.

Peter Haas: 0:56

Yes, thankfully I have like I go for the old school swatches. They're cheap and remember back in the day freestyle BMX skateboard swatches when you get multiple ones up, your I totally remember, yeah, yeah, and I have a really cheap prescription glasses so it's sweet man, I can accessorize.

Frank Barry: 1:18

You can just go all day long. That is awesome. Well, man, ai, you're one of the guys I knew. You're techie, you're into all the things and I don't know what. Ai has kind of exploded on the scene over the past three months or so.

Peter Haas: 1:35

Yeah, it really kind of felt like it. It really felt like it did explode, didn't it Fully it's had GPT. It just felt like everybody was suddenly talking about it.

Frank Barry: 1:46

Yeah, like bigger than anything. You know I'm 45. You're somewhere in there Like, I'm not sure. Yeah, social media was big. Websites when they hit were big, but I don't really remember anything like this Like my.

Peter Haas: 2:01

Nothing that really was impressive, I don't think. I think I think those who were, who were into the conversation about chat bots and things like that, were aware of how sophisticated it was. But you know, when people started, you know writing songs with it and you know generating images of celebrities with it, I think it suddenly started rattling our collective conscious. Yeah.

Frank Barry: 2:29

Yeah, yeah, I mean because, again, I think, even think the last few years, right, you got like crypto, Bitcoin, you got metaverse, you know like there's these things that have hit, that have been again in like techie, digital universe, right Things, but chat GPT seems to be like I was. We're kind of working on a product that we've been working on for a few years at Tidely and I was telling the kids about it and I was like, oh yeah, we're putting some like AI stuff with chat GPT in it and they were like my kids are 11 and they all lost their mind. They were like dad, you know about AI, you know chat GPT, like you're doing something with it. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And they're 11, right, like they knew all about it. And I was like, wow, this is fascinating.

Peter Haas: 3:12

Well, I think part of the reason why it was people were slow to even respond is because you know we all use chat bots like Siri and Alexa and we also hate them, and so we figure you just kind of assume Apple has to be the best you know, and then, and then when it's not, we're like, oh, there's stuff that makes that look stupid, yeah, you know. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, maybe I misjudged it and there's way more for us, and that's kind of what happened. You know right.

Frank Barry: 3:44

Right, and I would say chat GPT, because of having an interface on the internet that you could go to kind of like you do with Google, right, and you could type it into the search box or the chat box and then interact with it. Like that was the moment where, you know, everyone was like holy cow Because, yeah, ai has been working inside of things like your iPhone, right, something like auto complete or, you know, spelling correction, that kind of stuff, like that's all bit of AI. Or in Gmail, same kind of thing, right, if you're using Gmail and it's completing your words or it's correcting your stuff like writing sentences for you. But I don't think anybody connected. I didn't. I wasn't really thinking a lot about AI when I saw that stuff. That's like helpful, nice to have.

Frank Barry: 4:34

But they yeah, chat GPT. I mean I wrote I had chat GPT write like some legal, like contract documents right as a test. And no way I would ever use it because I'm not a lawyer and I don't know how to know if it was good or incorrect. You know what I'm saying? Just to see what would happen. And it was shockingly good, you know, because I compared it against another one written by a lawyer, right. So like I think, yeah, people are just doing stuff like that now and it's wild.

Peter Haas: 5:06

Well, and chat GPT, yeah, I mean, I even started writing, like we had this funny thing on our staff at Substance where we had to write songs about each other, you know, using chat GPT. And then, you know, one of my execs wrote all these like affirmation letters to his relatives using chat GPT and they were so blessed by it. And then it was like this big joke, like when are you going to tell them that you didn't write it and that it was an AI? And then you know what I mean, like we and the funny thing is, is chat GPT is definitely not the best of them. You know, I've found so many that are even better. And then again, it depends on what you're doing, right, if you're trying to do a legal document, there's the ones that are better at that, right, right, so in some ways it's been now that I've been kind of deep diving into it, it's like oh, my word Like it's a. There's a lot more we could be doing if we just knew what's out there.

Frank Barry: 6:07

And so it sounds like, just from those comments, like you guys, you personally, even your staff, like you've embraced using AI. Absolutely Well in my mind, at least playing with it. You've at least embraced playing with it Like and seeing, oh for sure.

Peter Haas: 6:23

More than that, more than that, I think we're starting to almost get a rhythm of depending on it for certain things. Really, that you know, even from our media department, there's just, there's life hacks that you can do from auditing or just like editing sermon clips for Instagram, or there's ones that are, you know, image generation for, like, our LED wall at church or for our, you know, easter promotion, like we need a picture of Jesus, but it's a we need a very specific type of picture of Jesus that fits in these parameters, and it has to be, you know, royalty free. Well, we don't know what the law will say about AI driven Right.

Frank Barry: 7:13

Images yet, but today it's free, right, right Exactly.

Peter Haas: 7:18

But like everything from sermon prep to social media to blogs, I mean I've been experimenting with all of it, trying to even find out like what's the best at which and why, and it's been fascinating to really kind of deep dive into it. But in my mind, I think every pastor really needs to be just, even if it's exploring with exploring it, I don't, you know, it's just like what's the new social media craze? Let's just see what it is Right, sign up for it Right. And then the same thing with AI, I think. I think we all need to just see what it does and then and then make sure that we're not living in the stone ages, because there's just so many things that can cut 30% of your, your time.

Peter Haas: 8:08

Like and who doesn't need more time? Right, right.

Frank Barry: 8:12

Yeah, I've heard, so I want to jump into the sermon thing, but before I, before we go there, I've kind of heard both your approach, like yep, we're into it, we're playing around with it, we're seeing what's there, and you might even be further on in some of the most of the ones I've talked to you in terms of like we're using it and it's doing work for us. Now I've also it's the complete other side from pastors like nah, man, I'm like this thing scares me, I'm out Right, like I've kind of heard the two sides of what. What are you like hearing in terms of like you know you talk to lots of pastors and church leaders and you know you live in that world Like what's your, what's your take on how pastors are thinking about this?

Peter Haas: 8:57

You know, every time there's a new technology out there, there's both reactions. There's the the I'm scared of it and I'm tentatively exploring it, and then, well, there's really the opposite. There's the I'm stopping my church and doing only you know digital AR church or something weird like that. You know where they go way overboard before there's even you know clarity as to how the Bible even hits it. And in fact, actually it's funny how I started. You know, like, literally like I remember when Christians, when Christians were first embracing radio, there were all these Christians saying, no, the devil is the prince of the power of the air, and so, like, we're giving the devil the ability to afflict our message. You know, like, and so you have all these like overreaction to Christian radio, and now we look at that as like archaic, like, does anybody even listen to radio? But like I you know what I mean Like, I've seen that trend. I always see technology as a tool, but it happens every time, right.

Frank Barry: 10:09

It happens like every time, though right. It happened with radio, it definitely happened with websites and the internet, it definitely happened with social media and it definitely happened with the metaverse, right, like the same kind of I'm afraid or it's, you know, not something we should be doing reaction and eventually we should we should be mildly afraid, like I'm a very, very big advocate of.

Peter Haas: 10:36

We need to get some legislation for AI, and we need it fast, there's no question about it. Yet, at the same time, if we know how to use it for the gospel, I want to be an early adopter, only because I just the world is changing faster and we just have to be willing to get a little uncomfortable, right. And I remember like even when churches were like first embracing websites, everybody was like, why, right and understandable, or even just digital church, you know, like, yeah, I'll admit, it is inferior substitute for in person, right, I think there's certain advantages currently, but like that's the problem with all disruptive technology is it's an inferior version until it's not. And so I just want to be in the laboratory saying, okay, what is it that this does? Where is it inferior? What can I do to harness it for good? It's just called stewardship, right, and so obviously, I think we do need to be aware of, you know, big multinational AI. You know, and I think it's okay to be a little conspiratorial, but I also think that you know, at the same time, listen, if I could get an extra thousand people to the scriptures, hundreds of thousands of people to the scripture that wouldn't have otherwise engaged it, then I would be an idiot.

Peter Haas: 12:09

To you know? Again, it's a butter knife. You can make peanut butter sandwiches for the neighbor kids or you can kill your neighbor kids with it. You right, it's a tool. That's all it is in the hands of a good person. It's good in the hands of a bad person. All I want to do is make sure that I know how to use it for good and minimize the evil early Right, instead of be this, you know, just constantly rip on Facebook as the you know, demonic, whatever you know or whatever. I just don't want to be the whiner. I'd rather be the guy that you know is in early and figuring it out.

Frank Barry: 12:44

I mean, it's here to stay Right. It's like the internet. It's like email or text messaging or social media or church online or metaverse or any of the things that it's here to stay Like. It is now a thing. It's been unleashed. It's like I think I read something right. Like chat, gpt is the fastest growing app ever. Like. It got to like. Whatever the number was a million, 10 million, a hundred million, a billion users like faster than any other product that's ever been created. And it didn't like 10 times faster. It wasn't like oh, it barely barely won. It was like it beat them all significantly.

Peter Haas: 13:19

Well, I remember a while back, when we were first experimenting with it. You know, one of my execs said chat GPT, I want you to write, write the book of third Peter, do it with the expressions and phrases of the apostle Peter, and you know very specific prompt, which, of course, is, you know, heretical. But we thought, let's just see what it does. And I was blown away. I literally was like this is kind of good and then I felt bad. But the whole point is is that you see it's, it's perverted potential, but you also see it's brilliance as well, and so it's just making sure that we understand it enough to know how to even coach the team and how to use it. So when did you guys start?

Frank Barry: 14:17

playing around with it, you remember.

Peter Haas: 14:19

Well, I, I had a friend telling me to experiment with chatbots, like four years ago, so I, you know, I knew about like a lot of the GPT one, two, three, four iterations, and they had kind of were learning with each one and so in some ways I got in a little bit early way early compared to most way, yeah, compared to most. So which, because of that, I think I've just experimented with it a lot more in terms of like oh like, for example, I actually prefer, like after chat GPT, I actually prefer chat Sonic as a better version of chat GPT, because it it's based, it's got the GPT 4.0. It can do image interpretation and then it's current.

Peter Haas: 15:17

Or, like my favorite that I actually use is perplexity AI, because not only is it totally current in its data, unlike chat GPT, which does that to the last couple of years, but what makes perplexity AI brilliant is that it gives sources for its answers, so you can actually click on links to Encyclopedia Britannica and so, like the you know. Because that's actually the flaw of chat GPT is you don't, you don't know if it's plagiarizing, you don't know if it's even accurate, and some of its stuff is completely inaccurate, right, totally. So then, just to have a link of sources that you can click on with perplexity. But you know some of these you have to pay for, but I think it's it's worth it for those of us who yeah just went to perplexity just to check it out.

Frank Barry: 16:13

I hadn't heard of that one.

Peter Haas: 16:14

Yeah, I mean for those of us who deal with precision. We need precision. I don't want to ask chat GPT a theological answer and not get scripture references. What is perplexity built on, Do you know?

Frank Barry: 16:25

What's that? What's perplexity built on? Do you know like is it his own thing? Are they building on top of chat, gpt or?

Peter Haas: 16:34

No, well, maybe they are Actually, I don't know. I've never researched that, but you know, because everybody's got their own. I mean, essentially, ais will all be like industrialized right. We're just going to go with one of these eight companies, that Google Facebook chat you know, plug it in to one thing.

Peter Haas: 16:58

Right, right. So I mean because it obviously it requires a lot of work. But, like you know, or or like you know, one of my favorites is edify AI, like because it can summarize video podcasts for me, and so I think chat GPT can do it too. But like if I, if I needed like a like, I like if Craig Rochelle did an entire sermon series on marriage, and so did Andy Stanley and so did Chris Hodges and I I don't have the time to watch the whole video, Right, so you can go on edify AI, plug in the link and say give me a 500 word summary of Craig Rochelle's main points from a sermon. Research tool or snippet for audio podcasts is where I go. I'm just the SNIPD, consummarize Audio Podcast, and some of these are built on other platforms too. Yeah, that's great, but they're just better Like platforms that are better at that one slice, yeah, that thing. And then you just have to know how to use it really well for what you do I mean?

Frank Barry: 18:13

which totally makes sense because, like chat, gpt or Bard, have you played with Bard from Google?

Peter Haas: 18:19

I haven't. Bard is the one that I have not played with.

Frank Barry: 18:22

I feel like it's the newest in a sense. But those guys are, you know, moving along fast, like they just added. I think it's all recent, I think it uses up to date internet. It also they added, I think this week, like images in your searches and responses and all this kind of stuff. So you know they're definitely moving along. I don't know how it compares or anything, I just know they're in the race, you know so.

Peter Haas: 18:43

Well, and I think even I mean maybe edify AI is it might be based on Bard, because it's a browser extension program for Google Chrome. Oh, there you go. So you know, like you do, once you get into the research of each, you can kind of see which, what it does best, right, right?

Frank Barry: 19:05

right, okay, let's so. Like sermon writing, right. This is the topic we actually just to give context to it, like I keep asking pastors about it cause, like two years ago, we started building a product called Sermonly and it's a sermon writing product for pastors and we're giving away for free. It was just a way to kind of you know, instead of just using a Google doc or a Word doc. Like, let's give you a SaaS product. You can write your sermons, you can look up scripture, you can go to the thesaurus, you can do all that, but it stores them all in the cloud. You can do some collaboration. All that Like just a simple thing, kind of a fun side project for us.

Frank Barry: 19:44

But AI comes out and we're like now AI for sermon writing is legit, right. So we've been doing a bunch of work for the last couple of months bringing AI into the product. But that's an interesting thing to like debate, right. Like using AI to write sermons, like I'll just leave it there. Like, what's your take? How are you approaching it? How do you think about it? What are you hearing?

Peter Haas: 20:12

Well, first off, if you're a teaching pastor who sucks, ai probably will help you. I mean, let's be honest, some people there's a lot of teaching pastors that should not be teaching pastors AI is actually gonna be more biblically accurate than they are. So it totally depends. Like, obviously I'm at a phase in my life where I'm so worried about copywriting and infringement and because I'm at that phase in my career where I am commoditizing my messages in books, so I am not very quick to rip off Groschelle or Stanley or Hodges or if and if I do, it's very clear I'm quoting them or citing them. But I think for other pastors who are just getting started and they're overwhelmed, they're deep, they're in the deep end of the pool and they're still figuring out how to be an executive and write a sermon every week, I think this is the greatest thing ever to be able to kind of dive in, asking really good. I mean like even just for exploring it, like as you're just even feel like, for example, I was doing a. I finished an end time series where I did basically a presentation to our church on all of the major approaches to the end times, like pros and cons, like I didn't even tell them my opinion until like week six, and I kind of wanted them to feel the tension and ambiguity. I wanted them to come deeper into scripture, right? So I'd written like nine blogs on how to develop your eschatology, and then all these weeks and then. But then every week someone would come out with a really, really weird question and I was like I have no idea and I would just go to AI chat bot and just start throwing it out there, getting different, despite having hundreds of books on this. The problem is is the answer is somewhere stuck on page 192, but I don't have the time to get there. So that's where AI would help stimulate the thought process.

Peter Haas: 22:43

So, obviously, sermon series, research, indispensable Bible study research, if I am wondering. Well, what are some of the top preachers actually saying about this? A lot of times you can't get the transcripts, like you can for Groschell, but you can get the videos on YouTube for anybody. So then I'll do the summary. But then, actually, the most helpful thing when it comes to sermon writing, it's not my sermon itself, so I'll develop my own sermon, but every time I preach a sermon there's what I call bonus content, stuff that I know is super helpful, but it's too much for Sunday, like I need to give them the entertainment intro to this subject. And then, oh, if you want more research on point number one, I just wrote a blog on blah, like. So, for example, I was just preaching, I did a marriage conference at a church in Toronto and I, in the process, I'm like, hey, oh, I would hit a topic like sexuality. I have a book worth of blogs on sexuality just peterhaussorg. And then Google this. Or fighting how to fight fair, what to do before, during and after a fight with your spouse. Like all of this bonus content that would be too much for Sunday. But now I have the benefit of because I've been doing this for what? 27 years. I have thousands of blogs and sermons.

Peter Haas: 24:17

Most pastors do not, and so I think you could go to one of these chatbots and just say, hey, bonus content, how would a beginner get into their Bible? You can have chatGPT write your little blog, you edit it, post it. How would an advanced person study it? And then you get these. You can get your template, 70% of your bonus content, and then your people, if they want it, you can just constantly refer to it, and then your sermons end up being way more meaty because you're throwing for further reading type of stuff. You can kind of you can invade their Monday, tuesday, Wednesday more with your sermon. It doesn't just get crowded out on Monday because then they're like, oh yeah, on social media you can kind of pump it out, remind them of what they heard on Sunday. Oh, you're right, pastor Peter did that blog on how to talk about dating with your kids, with your sixth grader or with your. You can get specific, even with chatGPT, like I even was like okay, like my daughter just got married and Congrats, that's awesome.

Peter Haas: 25:31

That's awesome Like. What does a Christian bachelorette party look like? Right?

Peter Haas: 25:35

that was the question that we were all debating, and so I literally asked chatGPT what does a Christian bachelorette party look like for primarily Christian women under 25? And it was very specific and I was blown away by the specificity of the advice and it was, honestly, it was dead on. Now are you gonna get mixed results sometimes, of course, yeah, yeah right, I was blown away Like that could easily be a very helpful piece of advice or additional bonus content blog for a message that you could just throw up there where it's too specific in terms of your target audience. But that's where everything is at now. I mean, preaching is like a multivitamin. Blogs are much more laser-like. Yeah, in terms of-.

Frank Barry: 26:36

Yeah, so like where you wanna go deeper, that people can listen or read or whatever, right, exactly Like I mean, I think it's interesting, I lean your way right and just generally speaking, like man, the tool is here. It's actually pretty incredible. It's not without fault, and when I say it, meaning kind of just AI, all of them right. So like it's not like they're perfect, and I think chatGPT or Bard or all of them are pretty clear, like this is an experiment and you're use at your own risk, kind of thing. But man does it do a good job at certain things, right.

Frank Barry: 27:14

And I mean, that's where I think you know, and I don't know how globally this kind of goes with pastors, right, but I would hate for pastors to get afraid of it, right, cause you get questions like oh well, you know, like the spirit should be involved in writing the sermon. It's like what God's putting on the pastor's heart and God using the pastor to bring it to the church and all of these maybe theological things that come into it. But then I'm also sitting there going like, well, every pastor does research and they're doing something to do research. They're reading their Bible, hopefully, and you know, probably, and but they're maybe they're using logos, maybe they're using Google to look things up. Like maybe they're using books that they have, like they're doing things to do research in order to build a sermon, not just praying one time and then writing it all out, like I would assume. So I'm like this is researching on super like steroids.

Peter Haas: 28:18

You know, frank, what it really is. I think the resistance. I think, at the end of the day, we all know those are kind of lame excuses, because you could point out to any one of those pastors all of the technology that they depend upon. You write their sermon, and they would never say that that negates the spirit. So then, why the resistance?

Peter Haas: 28:39

Well, I think, first off, number one we all have many examples of how social media has not benefited us, and so technology is not always healthy and it's not always good for the church. We also have the rate of change that's being forced upon us is more than ever, and we all know that there are bad corporations and government actors that are using technology in a way that is very scary, and so there is a necessary vigilance. At the same time, I think it's actually no different, though that like if you really think about how preaching has even changed in the last 25 years. Let me just like quick history lesson. I remember when I first started preaching, our church had a tape of the month club like honest to God cassette, tape of the month.

Frank Barry: 29:31

I remember cassette tapes, especially at conferences. Right, yes, you'd get the tapes. Oh, the world's cassette tape booklet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Haas: 29:39

Oh man, I thought I was so cool. When I got my first one I was like dang, I've arrived as a preacher. I got four cassettes. You know, like man.

Peter Haas: 29:50

But the thing about it this way, back in those days, pre-internet, people didn't know if you were bad as a preacher because they had no reference comparison, right, unless they subscribed to a tape of the month club. But, like in those days. So then the moment the internet came out any you know, podcasting, video cast everybody now can attend any church anywhere around the world. Now they know you're not good, right, right, yeah.

Peter Haas: 30:20

So what I was concerning was that, as a preacher, when everybody's comparing you to the world's greatest, okay, so then at that point you either double down and you become the best teacher, or maybe you decide maybe I'm not a teaching pastor, I'm a pastor. So, like, I think what happened over the last 25 years is you went from just this is the bar to now it's like college level, now it's like profession. Right, you're not a preacher tainer every Sunday, and if you aren't a preacher tainer, you're not going to work on social media, right. And so that happened, this comparison, the technology. So a lot of pastors hated that because they just didn't like being demoralized by their church members saying you're not as good as whoever, right, right, so that's a swallow yeah.

Peter Haas: 31:13

Yeah, exactly, and there was also, you know, sermons got more multimedia compatible. You have to have like video built into your message, documentary film style teaching. It's not just PowerPoint anymore. Right, you got to be more visually engaging, but then audiences got broader, right? So now AI is essentially going to do the same thing, except on steroids. Okay, so the audience what's going to happen is we're going to get some global preachers are going to start using AI plugins to do auto translation for their messages, right.

Frank Barry: 31:52

So we're going to get some preachers I was talking with someone yesterday about actually doing that for their lessons translating it into other languages with the audio in their voice, yep, so that that pastor can be preaching in I don't know, like Mexico, anywhere, tim.

Peter Haas: 32:11

But I don't know, we're going to have global pastors from India now becoming popular in America. Right, because now the AI not only has the ability to auto translate, but it can literally reanimate your lips to you know. And yeah, it's not fully accurate yet. Yeah, you know, like I was looking at a company that can literally take my image, create an accurate avatar, and then all people have to do is plug my script in and then it'll be a fake deepfake of me preaching my message.

Frank Barry: 32:44

Like I'm creating my own deepfake and it's going to be awesome, right.

Peter Haas: 32:48

Right, okay, so like you can talk about how weird it is or crass it is, but I mean the very fact that I can take my sermon now and create, pick an actual African American avatar, have him deliver my exact message, or I can literally have my message, it's my message, but a woman preaching it, like the amount of interesting and scary implications to all of that are. I mean, they're infinite.

Frank Barry: 33:22

So somebody could take you and have you preaching something totally like Rhetical Bananas yeah, just not biblical crazy. And you're there on the internet doing it right, and it was like you know there's all these actors that have done their avatars.

Peter Haas: 33:40

So, like you can, you can do your training videos just by plugging in a script and then it'll animate this. You can choose out of 40 different ethnicities. I mean it's ridiculous. And the one rule of using the software is you can't do profanity or you can't. They have these rules, right.

Peter Haas: 33:57

But I kept thinking about these people who have sold their faces to this thing, right, and so they literally it's on the site legally. You cannot use it for anything sexual or you know, and I mean it's a different era. But the bottom line is people like, as bad, as scary as it is to maybe us, this is going to change the third world church, this is going to revolutionize the rural church in America, which is some of the most unchurched pockets of the world are just, it's rural North Dakota, it's rural wherever, where they just don't have as many churches or as many teaching pastors that are interesting to listen to. And so you know, we can always focus on the negatives, but somebody's going to use it in a not just an ethical way, but in a profound, powerful revival technology sort of way, and I just I want to be one of those guys who like sees the potential and experiments with it so that we can kind of get a gut sense about it Right.

Frank Barry: 35:12

Yeah, no, I love that way. Is there anything that's been surprising to you? We've talked about a lot of stuff, but there's anything you haven't shared, where, like, oh this surprised me, this was cool, or different AI driven video content, okay, like where the AI can not only generate.

Peter Haas: 35:29

So I was doing a series on heaven and I was talking about how we don't wrap our minds around heaven quite enough and I was kind of giving people this mental exercise about what vocations might look like in heaven, on a new heaven and new earth, and I was just kind of making jokes about how, you know, god will put some of you in charge of of planets with lots of waterfalls and you're gonna be mine crafting the heck out of that planet and you're gonna be like come, hey, we got dog horses over at our planet, let's go ride them. And it was kind of like a joke. Well, somebody took an AI generated they literally were like describing my sermon with dog horses and then gave this like picture and I was like and they're like, I mean I could have converted that into a whole video where it was just me monologuing on top of this video and it was meant to be humorous, right. But I thought for me to take live animated video content just for any old Joe that can just dictate it into a computer and let that be a sermon aid. It's just way more creative than what we're currently doing? Yeah, totally, and like, in some ways, teaching pastors are gonna have way more fun than they ever had because you can go as far as your imagination. Right, right, you know what I mean? We're gonna literally have think about it.

Peter Haas: 36:58

There's eventually we're only a couple of years out from having AI sermon cuts that are based on maturity, like oh, you're live streaming substance church and you want the seminary cut of the sermon where I go twice as deep. Or you want the comedic ADHD teenage cut of the sermon. Or you want the atheist cut with all sorts of skeptic data that is auto edited. Like I'll preach a longer message and then the AI will edit it down, just deliver it to you. Yeah, with the right announcements, with the right ministry exposure that appeals to where you are at in your faith journey. Like customizable sermon content. Like we're here, yeah, yeah, we just have to know.

Peter Haas: 37:43

Yeah, if we can wrap our minds around it, we can capture it and have that first mover advantage that comes from innovative anything, right? So that's kind of what I'm trying to do is, the more I experiment with it, the more I can imagine what it could be, yeah, and the more I can tap into it now and have my teams. I don't want my graphic designer doing everything from scratch. The gospel is too important, our time is too short and God's money is too valuable to waste time trying to do everything when AI can literally free up 15, 30% of our staff salary. Bandwidth, right. You know what I'm saying?

Frank Barry: 38:31

It's stuff like that, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, like you know, again, more from a business perspective, on our side, right At Tithley, it's like whether it's the marketing stuff writing content, creating graphics but even into customer support and doing online chat-based support, but doing it better because AI is better at it Figuring that out right, it's still early, but trying to figure it out, and all the way even into engineering land.

Frank Barry: 39:00

Right, you got guys like Microsoft, like CopilotX and things like that that are, you know, assistant engineers that make them more efficient. It's coding your own software. Yeah, yeah, at a minimum, it's making every engineer that chooses to jump in and figure it out. It's going to make them all better, right, I don't know how much better, you know, is it 10%, 20%? Are they twice as good, you know? Are they twice as more efficient and effective? And less bugs? More code, because they have, you know, the sidekick that's working with them to do it you know, faster kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean I think all of those, I mean those improvements are coming like this year, right, like we will all see they are.

Peter Haas: 39:42

Yeah, they'll all happen. We either embrace it or we dig our heads in the sand. We become obsolete and the implications financially are terrible. Like we're at a stewardship precipice, like a transition point where if we want to steward God's church well, we have to. And I know it's equally scary for me, but I always tell pastors who are maybe a little afraid of it. I always tell them hey, if I could increase your salary, cash your income by 30% by giving you some hacks, or if I could prevent you from losing 30% of your income because you're not changing fast enough, would you be open? And then you put it in those terms. You start to see it more as mission critical, not, oh, we're just trying to be cute with using JetGPG. Like we're a bunch of overly. Like we're hobbyist forward thinkers. I mean, the bottom line is this is going to transform half of our church vocations in the next 10 years. Our job descriptions are all going to shift 10 years is probably.

Frank Barry: 41:06

You're playing the long game on that. It might be yeah, no, that's true. It's going to be 12 months, that's true. Now, this stuff is evolving.

Peter Haas: 41:14

Exactly, exactly, and that's all the more reason why we've got to think it through. We've got to yeah, yeah.

Frank Barry: 41:24

What worries you the most?

Peter Haas: 41:33

Well, I'm very worried that governments aren't going to regulate it fast enough, I think. So there's that. I'm not worried about the Terminator scenario.

Frank Barry: 41:47

The robots aren't taking over yet, yeah.

Peter Haas: 41:51

Yeah, I'm worried about algorithms like Google, youtube and things like that censoring Christianity because of our belief on sexuality and then because we don't have software solutions. If we're overly dependent upon these corporations that may or may not be Bible friendly or tolerance-based, that Christians are going to not own. I mean, churches are already losing the ability to get financial loans based on biblical worldview, licenses for all sorts of things, and so part of me thinks that AI will only exploit that power. So that concerns me. I'm also concerned about churches. Sure, churches are naturally slow to embrace new technology. It's been always traditionally true. Sometimes that could be a good thing, but I think the harvest is so plentiful right now if churches could even figure out.

Peter Haas: 43:13

I remember when we first did Facebook live stream, like years ago, when a lot of churches thought it was ridiculous. They tested it by posting two minutes of my sermon at the very end when I was praying the prayer of salvation, and I shared this text number like if you wanna give your life to Christ, text it, and it was literally a test. I don't even think it was like more than 90 seconds. They threw it up there. Within five minutes, six people gave their lives to Christ just from a stupid test, and then they were gonna delete it just to see how it worked, and that is how ripe the harvest is, and that is how much these technologies can help us. I'm afraid churches are gonna be slow because they think it's a weird niche thing when in reality, no, this is the greatest microphone. This is the greatest microphone you've ever been given. But you may not perceive it for another couple of years. That's not here.

Frank Barry: 44:29

Yeah, yeah, I mean I agree the church is amazing in every way, but our ability to adopt the new thing, whatever it might be, we're just slow. We're slow at it and I live in technology so I might be way front, you're probably. You live there too, so there's some healthy place, but it'd be nice not to be 10 years behind and maybe make it. It makes it fun.

Peter Haas: 44:54

Well, that's why I'm fun, that's why I'm such a big advocate of good church governance, because most church governances were designed for churches when they were 200 members, and so they're overly bureaucratic, where even good people will behave badly when there's a bad governance. So, unfortunately, most churches, they're good people, it's just their system is too slow to adapt to, I think, what the Lord is doing, and so there needs to be some changes there. But you know.

Frank Barry: 45:32

What? Is there anybody else that you've talked to that whether you can say their name or not, up to you, but like any other pastors, church leaders that you've talked to that are like into it or doing something cool or something you can point to or you know like what in terms of churches being on the front and doing things, is there anybody out there where you're like, man, go look at these guys, or I thought this was cool, like just people out there being on the front in the church?

Peter Haas: 46:01

Hmm, I wish my brain was overwhelmed with churches.

Frank Barry: 46:10

With the answers. Yeah, All right, we're on a mission, we're gonna go, we're gonna do this again in like three months or six or something and we're gonna just see what's happened. We're gonna come back and three months is like a year in AI right released right now at this current.

Peter Haas: 46:27

Yes, yes, Lord help us. There's a lot of churches doing little tech stuff, but it's not earth shattering and you know so.

Frank Barry: 46:42

All right, next go around, we're gonna have some. I'll come around too, because that's I mean I literally just only in the last you know week I was like, oh, I gotta go start talking to people about this in the church because I wanna see who's doing what and start getting some awareness out there and at least people talking about it more.

Peter Haas: 47:01

Because, again, so many things. Like there's an AI named. It's durable AI. It can literally generate a website in once, just in a minute Done. I mean, pastors spend thousands on this. Right, you could do a website for any little announcement. Yeah, how fast is that? Like once people understand how much. Because there's also a lot of these technology middlemen who are just kind of mooching off of churches. I think, yeah. So I think that a lot of churches are gonna find that, oh, we can kind of do some of this in-house, we don't need all of oh yeah.

Frank Barry: 47:47

I mean hopefully it's gonna make tech better in lots of ways and lots of tech is gonna become like different. Certain ways it was done in the old days will be obsolete and there'll be a new thing that does it. You know better, so it's not just about the humans but the tech will change too.

Peter Haas: 48:05

Well, exactly, and it always does Like so, Frank, we at Substance, like our downtown Minneapolis campus is a historic 130-year-old building.

Frank Barry: 48:16

Yeah, the dome, I have it. You know the whole. Yeah, you've described it to me. I just got to see it one day.

Peter Haas: 48:23

Yeah, so, like, what's so insane about it? You know we're talking about. Here's the church that the LA Lakers started in. Right, they were the Minneapolis Lakers at the time the Lenth's Church Gym. It's got so much history to it. But, like, this building was built before people used deodorant toilet paper and they didn't even have left and right-footed shoes when they packed that place out.

Peter Haas: 48:48

That's true, it was 30 years ago and I started studying what did the world look like in those days? And you know, most roads were covered in manure because it was horses. Yeah, so they would have it on their shoes. Most 14% of people in Minneapolis had bathtubs in their houses, some ridiculously low. Like most medical doctors, like it was somewhere like 10 to 20% of medical doctors had any degree outside of high school.

Peter Haas: 49:19

And you started thinking about the world in those days and then, 100 years later, like somewhere upwards of like 95% of all vocations have changed in 100 years. Now, if you would have told them, hey, mr Cobbler, who does shoes, you're not going to have a job because you know there's going to be some sort of manufacturing of shoes that's going to change, they would all have been like, well, what are we going to do Like surely it's not going to change that much. Well, it did, but it took 100 years to do it. I think to your point, the same change is going to happen, but it's going to happen in just an astronomically shorter period of time which is going to cause a psychological reaction in everything, and so I think there's also going to be a grieving process that we're all going to have to go through.

Peter Haas: 50:16

But those of us who go through it faster will harness the benefit of the new era, and so we're going to see literally the rise and the fall of a lot of Christian denominations overnight in the next 10 years. So it'll be very interesting to see who embraces it and who doesn't, but I want to be one that cracks the code.

Frank Barry: 50:43

It's on the front. One last question for you Are you doing anything, or have you been thinking about helping your church with it? Like the congregation, the members, like you know, like hey, this thing's here and I don't know. You know, like you saw, when social media blew up, right, there was just a lot of teaching, you know, helping parents with their kids or just all kinds of different things. Right, is that something that's hit your guys' list? Yet?

Peter Haas: 51:11

Absolutely, in fact. Actually, this became a big topic of conversation for our staff A while back. We were doing a big fundraiser for all the different things that we're investing in, and one of the lanes that we were fundraising for is all of our digital initiatives. And I was testing out my vision on the staff and I was talking about AI and immediately one of my staff members said my dad's going to be here and he's going to freak out. When you say that, you might as well say I'm going to receive the mark of the beast. And I'm like what do you mean? And she's like you have to understand my dad like this is a conspiracy. My dad thinks it's literally you're going to get the AI, is going to insert the computer chip into your forehead in a year or two. So you saying that you're basically saying I'm signing up for the Antichrist.

Frank Barry: 52:13

I actually think that that's not uncommon. I don't know if it's age related, I don't really know, but I feel like the sentiment of very, very scared or anti is out there big time.

Peter Haas: 52:28

Everybody's got a conspiratorial anti or grandma or mom nowadays, because the rate of change is happening faster and I think that older generation is seeing how out of control it is. It's kind of like nuclear proliferation. I mean, I think that the way we monitor AI is going to have to be similar. I think older generations see it. They saw that.

Peter Haas: 52:50

Yeah, Potentially a weapon of mass destruction. We're going to need some regulation. And so they're more afraid of it. But, like I had to redo that whole central portion of my sermon, Actually, our whole staff decided hey, Peter, why don't you use that? Why don't you use that fear to drive them towards embracing it? Right, hey, we can actually be a force for good, advocating for ethical AI and almost use their fear of it to say that's all the more reason why our church has to lead the way, getting into biblical ethical AI and help some of these corporations, like you know, putting the pressure on them to make sure that it represents us.

Peter Haas: 53:39

And all of a sudden, I'm even getting the conspiratorial old guy saying I'm in, this is the battle. Thank you, pastor. You know which. It sounded funny, but like we had, like I thought, if I can make a point without making an enemy, then so be it. So this is one of the ways that we're doing it. And then, sure enough, you know, some of those families you know wrote out some pretty big checks for our digital initiatives. They're into it Well, because they're so glad that we're being proactive and positive in the midst of a world of reactive. That's, that's awesome.

Frank Barry: 54:12

Well, man, this has been great. I know we could talk for a bunch more time, but you know you're a busy guy. We got things to do, we got AI to figure out and let's do it again in a few months. You know, whatever three, four months, come back and see what's going on.

Peter Haas: 54:26

In fact, this whole interview. This isn't even me, this is an avatar.

Frank Barry: 54:29

This is actually AI doing the whole thing. That would be pretty awesome.

Peter Haas: 54:36

Someday, right, it'll actually be that, true, well.

Frank Barry: 54:41

Substance Church Peter Haas, you can Google him. You can Google the church. You can probably look it up on chat GBT. You'll find all the things May not be accurate yet. We don't know if it's correct, but it'll be 2021.

Peter Haas: 54:54

Peter Haas with bad glasses.

Frank Barry: 54:58

Oh well, man, great time. Guys, thanks for listening or watching, whatever you're doing. We'll catch you next time on another episode of Monitoring Church Leader, see ya.