Ep 13: The Pre-Loaded Congregation - The Spiritual Formation Challenge

Every preacher has a clarity gap. Find yours. Take the free Clear Preaching Self-Assessment at clearpreaching.com/assessment

------

You spent twenty hours in the text. You wrestled with the passage. You wrote and rewrote your Take-Home Truth until it was honest and precise.

And somewhere in your congregation, three people already pulled up a summary of that passage on their phone this week. One asked ChatGPT what it means. Another got a six-point outline from an AI devotional app before you ever opened your mouth.

That's the room you're preaching into now.

In this episode, Jonathan McClintock addresses something most preaching podcasts haven't touched yet — not AI sermon tools, but what happens to your preaching when your congregation is already being formed by AI before you open your Bible on Sunday. This is a preaching preparation question and a discipleship formation question at the same time.

Drawing from 2026 Barna State of the Church data, Jonathan walks through what the formation gap actually looks like, what it changes about how you prepare, and why it makes clarity more important than ever — not less.

What changes when your congregation arrives pre-loaded:

• Objections are already formed — In a pre-loaded congregation, the resistance may already be seated before you begin. Anticipating that is a newer preparation skill most preachers haven't developed.
• Authority is established differently — The informational gap between preacher and congregation no longer exists in the same way. What you carry now — pastoral relationship, embodied presence, spiritual accountability — is a more essential authority. But it has to be claimed consciously.

And then the argument at the heart of this episode: a sermon is not a theological summary. It is embodied, pastoral, Spirit-led proclamation aimed at specific people in a specific moment. A scattered sermon has less to offer than AI already provided. But a clear, structured, single-idea sermon delivered by someone who knows the room — that's irreplaceable.

The congregation doesn't need a preacher who out-informs AI. They need a Spirit-led preacher to discern the heart and deliver the Truth.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Forty-nine percent of professing Christians, according to a Barna 2026 survey, forty-nine percent say they have used AI for personal spiritual growth. And really, that's largely without any pastoral input. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Clear Preaching Podcast. My name is Jonathan McClintock, and today we're going to look at this idea of a preloaded congregation. What do I mean by preloaded? I mean a congregation that you preach to on a weekly basis that already has their mind made up about certain things, not things that necessarily they've been taught in Sunday school or taught from the pulpit or even learned in a good method on their own and asking questions and coming to a conclusion about certain truths. Many of them are coming to church already filled with ideas they've learned from AI. What does that mean? Is that a big deal? Maybe you don't think that's a big deal. Maybe, and for the most part, and some parts, maybe it isn't a huge issue. But I still think it's something we need to think about, and something as pastors and preachers we need to be aware of. Think about it this way. What you you spent you as a preacher, pastor, you spent 20 hours in that text you're going to be preaching from. Twenty hours. You did a lot of praying, you did a lot of research, a lot of reading, a lot of meditating, a lot of searching the scriptures, searching the spirit, trying to determine what truth you're going to deliver, what message you're going to speak from that text. You've wrestled with the passage, you've written and rewritten your take-home truth. It's honest, it's precise, you've worked hard at it. And you stand up on Sunday morning and imagine this. There's a few people in your congregation who already looked up a summary of that passage, asked Chat GPT about it, and what does that passage mean? And they've watched as AI has curated responses from all different types of sources, and we really don't know what those sources are. Yes, there are there are AI models like Perplexity that works with all kinds of AI models who will give you here's the site I got this from, here's the here's the place I got this idea from. But do we truly go search out that and find out is that a reputable source or not? There's others sitting in the congregation, they have formed opinions on biblical passages based on what a computer, based on what a artificial intelligence model has spit out to them. That's the room we're preaching into. Now it's not a new phenomenon per se. We as pastors and preachers have been preaching to rooms full of people for decades who have gotten their philosophical, their theological understanding of scripture and truth from radio preachers back in the day, television preachers back in the day, now YouTube preachers, podcast preachers, Instagram clip preachers, Facebook Real, Instagram Real preachers, and they're gathering beliefs from algorithms. And I think as preachers and pastors, we have to understand what we're getting into. We are dealing with a congregation that's preloaded. Now, this isn't really simply a technology question, because I'm not for let's cancel AI. Let's cancel technology. In many ways, in the past, many times in the past, people have just the technology's bad, let's get rid of the technology. Technology is scary, let's just get rid of the technology, let's cancel the technology. And we got to understand that technology is not necessarily the problem. It's how technology is used. It's how technology is adopted and how much it's adopted into our lives and for what purpose and for what reason. So this is not simply a technology question. This is a preaching preparation question. This is a challenge to pastors and preachers. This is a discipleship formation question. And most preachers have not thought about it yet, or they're just beginning to think about it. Again, the 2026 Barna State of the Church report that I referred to at the very beginning of this podcast says that 41% of practicing Christians are using AI for Bible study. 12% of pastors feel comfortable addressing AI from the pulpit. 88% don't. Forty-nine percent of professing Christians have used AI for personal spiritual growth, asking ChatGPT, what does this passage mean and what should I do about it? And is this relevant and should I do this in my life or not? And what would this look like in my life? And is this something I should listen to? They're treating AI as if they're people. I think that's one of the major differences between what Google used to be, or if anybody remembers askgeevs.com, where you would go and through a crude internet search, ask a question, you know, what's the plan of salvation? And it would curate a bunch of websites that you could go visit if you want to, but it never really gave you an answer. It just told you, here's some places that talk about it, go look for it. Now with AI, AI's giving you an answer. And believe me, AI is very confident in their answer. And they're very confident in what you put in there. You might say, well, I'm struggling with this. And you know what AI is going to tell you, Claude, ChatGPT, any other other models? You know what? That's a real struggle. And it's all right that you're struggling with that. It's okay. Not everybody believes that. And it's okay if you don't believe that, or something to that degree. So the challenge we have is how do we as preachers and pastors deal with this phenomenon? How do we address it? How do we talk about it? And how do we help our people navigate it? Because the Barna study also found this that one in three practicing Christians want their pastor to help them navigate AI. Now, if we just say we're scared of it and we're going to cancel it and just don't go to it, we're going to lose a very large portion of our congregations. We have to understand it as best as we can and figure out how we're going to address it. There is a formation gap going on here. Nearly half of practicing Christians are forming theological habits through their interactions with AI, and only one in eight pastors feels equipped to address it. And here's what that gap produces: it produces a congregation that's already arrived at conclusions before the sermon begins. Sometimes incomplete conclusions and sometimes wrong conclusions altogether. And it's not that people can't study on their own. We want people to study on their own. I want people in my congregation to spend time in the Word of God and study and read and dig into the Word of God. But often conclusions are being drawn from an AI bot, reached without the pastor's input, with reach without communal and community discernment, without the Spirit's influence, and this gap can negatively affect the spiritual growth of the individual. We might not feel equipped as pastors to address it, but we've got to figure out how we can address this. How do we address when objections are already formed because of what they've curated through their searches and conversations with AI? It used to be you'd present a sermon in a service and listeners would listen and process the information real time and listen to the arguments and feel the tug of the Spirit and either accept or resist. But now, preloaded congregations, the resistance may already be sitting there in the pew. I already know what I believe about this. And they look at it with this quiet familiarity of like someone who's already heard this. In this day and age, authority is established differently. In a pre-AI world, the preacher carried this default informational authority. When I had a question about something spiritual, I went to my pastor, I asked my pastor. I had a question about a theological concern. I went to an elder. I went to somebody, a real human being that had experience to draw from. Yes, of course, these elders and pastors, we do. We have our personal preferences, we have our personal experiences that can maybe skew how we see certain things. It doesn't necessarily make it wrong, but when we communicate with somebody that has personal experience and has real life expertise or understanding of certain things, there's something that can be gleaned and even learned as that you ask that individual, and that individual humbly responds and directed and influenced by the Spirit's direction. But that there's the the information, the authority is a little different now. Now, what I think really challenges people is instead of going to these crude search engines where here's some websites you can go visit and learn about it. You go learn about it. Now what's the response you're getting sounds like a human being. Sounds very convincing. They've got the sites to prove it, they've got all the resources to say this is how it is. And it's so much easier and deceptive to get pulled into a response and just accept it without searching it out, without studying it. Just accept it because it sounds like a human. It sounds legitimate. But we've got to understand it, we've got to train our people and teach our people that there's a difference between communicating with an AI system and an AI model and with the difference between that and with a preacher, your pastor. There's some things the preacher, the pastor carries that AI can't. The pastor carries a pastoral relationship. They're involved in your life. The pastor carries an embodied presence. The pastor carries spiritual accountability to God, spiritual discernment. And I wouldn't say just the pastor, but the community of believers. There is an anointing of the spirit that is there. There is a voice of someone who knows the specific people in those specific seats. It's a more essential authority. But this authority is going to have to be claimed consciously because it no longer comes automatically. Now, I don't want us to look at this as a threat to us as preachers, as pastors. Oh, it can be, just as any other technology or any other influence can be a threat. But really what it does for is it clarifies, it helps us clarify and really dig and help us come to an understanding. We don't have to outsmart AI. You don't have to out, you'll never out information AI. In fact, if Elon Musk is really telling the truth that the grok AI model is right now has more information than somebody with several PhDs, and that's just continued to go. You can't out inform AI. But you can embody the presence of the Spirit. You can embody the love of Jesus Christ. You can discern from the all-knowing one, the one who is omnipresent and omniscient. We have a connection to that. Something Groff doesn't have, something that ChatGPT doesn't have, something that anthropic and claw doesn't have, perplexity doesn't have. As a pastor, you carry tools AI cannot carry. A relationship, history with those people, your presence, accountability, love, anointing, and direction of the Spirit. AI can do a lot of things. AI can summarize a scripture passage, and it can do it pretty well. AI can generate application points. AI can produce a theological overview. AI can synthesize commentaries from all across the internet, and it's their positions and summarize them and try to make them fit one another. AI can even offer devotional reflections, but AI cannot do what a sermon can do. A sermon is embodied proclamation. A sermon is somebody is delivered by somebody who is standing as the mouthpiece of God for that moment, embodying the word and will of God. A sermon is pastorally aimed at specific people. It is spirit-led in a specific moment. It is delivered by someone who has prayed over the room. It is a sermon is irreplaceable. The preacher who has prayed over the congregation is something that the preacher brings. AI cannot do that. The preacher is someone who has sat with the grieving, a grieving family all week. AI cannot do that. A preacher is somebody who knows that young couple in row four who is barely hanging on. AI doesn't know that. A preacher who has been formed by the text before forming the sermon. A preacher is one who delivers a single, clear, aimed word from God to the people in front of them. AI does not know your people. AI does not carry your relationship with them. It is not led by the Spirit. AI can never be led by the Spirit. So clarity matters more now, not less. Because a scattered sermon delivered to a preloaded congregation, one that says seven things loosely, one that doesn't know what it's really about is more vulnerable in a preloaded congregation because it has less to offer than AI already provided. But a clear, anointed, direct, concise, structured, single idea sermon that is pastorally aimed, spirit-led, and delivered by somebody who knows the people in the room, that is irreplaceable. That's what the congregation came for, whether they can name it or not. One clear idea, a structure that holds, language that's clear, delivery that serves comprehension. That's what we're trying to do in the clear preaching framework with the clear preaching framework on our Clear Preaching Academy. It's something AI cannot replicate. So this is an invitation open to all of us as pastors, as preachers. If one in three practicing Christians wants their pastor to help them navigate AI, we've got to figure out. We've got to figure this out. You don't have to come and have every answer about technology to walk through the door and have that conversation. You just have to be willing to address it pastorally and honestly. And even though our congregation might be preloaded, preach anyway. Preach more clearly than ever, preach more deliberately than ever, preach more pastorally than ever, because what you bring to that room on Sunday morning is not a better information service. It's a voice your congregation trusts. It's a word that they need and a presence that no algorithm can replicate. So the congregation doesn't need a preacher who out informs AI. They need a spirit-filled, spirit led preacher who discerns the heart and discloses the truth. Challenge is before us, but I believe God will equip us if we will seek his face and help us navigate the times we are living in. He's going to help us in the name of Jesus. God bless you.