clay scroggins – Protestia

Andy Stanley Protégé Clay Scroggins Promotes ChatGPT Sermon Production

Former North Point Community Church Pastor Clay Scroggins, a protégé of the ever-deconstructing Andy Stanley, stepped down from North Point in 2021 to found his own leadership marketing company. During his long tenure at various North Point Ministry positions, Scroggins turned a blind eye to Stanley’s constant Bible-twisting practices and even did some of his own.

In his various roles, Scroggins took the liberty of parading sexual deviants in front of the church to tell their ‘stories,’ baptizing them as believers while refusing to acknowledge that these unregenerate individuals desperately needed a call to repentance. Since Scroggins left the church, North Point has come out of the closet as an affirming congregation that even wants to subject its children to gender confusion and sexual deviancy.

While continually deconstructing the fundamentals of the faith, Andy and his cobelligerents at North Point have also been busy pedaling false teaching and heresy in the form of “Sermon Kits” that are marketed to lazy pastors who believe that they are too busy to take time study the Bible and write their own sermons.

Both Andy Stanley and Clay Scroggins offer their sermon kits on the North Point website, where for a nominal fee of up to $295 the non-discerning pastor can acquire a seeker-sensitive non-offending sermon, the theological equivalent of goat feed that is all too common in churches within the orbit of North Point’s spiritual influence.

In a sign that theological drift continues in the American church and talking heads like Scroggins learned nothing from the ethical issues presented by the Docent Sermon plagiarism scandal of 2021, Clay and fellow faith and spirituality marketing guru Evan Chasteen are now hawking a two-hour online course on “how AI can revolutionize your sermon preparation and explore the hermeneutical ethics of leveraging AI for your sermon preparation.”

While the course description doesn’t indicate that participants should use AI to write their sermons word for word, it does suggest that ChatGPT will be an integral part of leveraging AI to write a sermon, as taught in their workshop.

Scroggin’s push to convince pastors to use ChatGPT comes when the AI assistant is hemorrhaging users. As the mania surrounding ChatGPT’s initial release recently cooled, users have begun to realize that the capabilities of AI are less than expected, and errors within the system are more common than one would expect from a computer. A pastor might reasonably use study software like Logos or Biblehub to consult a wide variety of resources that would be useful, using them to help personally exegete a passage of scripture before penning an outline and writing a sermon.

Scroggin’s course, however, seems to send pastors to the indiscriminate source material of ChatGPT, effectively creating a shortcut around the crucial steps of exegesis, Biblical discernment, and sermon outline formation. SermonPrep.AI boasts that the method can be used by sermon writers of any Christian Denomination, indicating that the resulting sermons likely lack theological precision.

The problem with this approach is that it leaves the pastor and his congregation at the mercy of a nonsensical Biblical Hermeneutic that cannot discern between the heresy of 20th-century German Critical Scholars, Word of Faith Prosperity Gospel, Secular philosophy, and the faithful work of men like R.C. Sproul. Scroggins boasts that each participant in the two-hour workshop will leave with four nearly complete sermon outlines.

For pastors who fear that AI will replace them, Scroggins offers the reassurance that while AI will compile all of the knowledge and concepts that are necessary to complete a sermon, pastors are still crucial in the process because they provide the “unique insights or voice” that make the sermon personalized for their congregation. ChatGPT will compile the scripture references and resources and write the outline so that each pastor or goat farmer can focus on putting that special sauce on the sermon that his goats crave.

While disappointing, the Sermonprep.AI workshop sheds light on where goat herders like Clay Scroggins and Andy Stanley get the fodder for their scripture-twisting homilies. The only greater fools than those who think AI programs like ChatGPT can replace careful study and exegesis are those lazy, unfaithful stewards of pulpits who squander their time during the week.

Instead of putting in the necessary hours of labor, they believe they can purchase a canned sermon from Scroggins, who himself may have used AI to write the sermon outlines.

The blind pastors from North Point Community Church are still leading the blind.

B.T. Harman (Brett Trapp) is an Atlanta-based content creator. He is perhaps best known for his memoir series Blue Babies Pink: A Southern Coming Out Story, which over a series of 44 podcasts, details his journey from growing up in a Christian home to coming out as a celibate ‘gay Christian,’ to finally a non-celibate gay Christian who would eventually ‘marry’ another man.

Along with Blue Babies Pink, he would also found Harbor, an online support program for Christian Parents of LGBTQ Kids. He explains this program is helpful for all Christians regardless of their convictions regarding sodomy. “I fall on the “affirming” side of the theological spectrum. This is where I am, but I’m still committed to engaging all parents in a loving, respectful, non-shaming way. Harbor is about learning to create peace with your child, regardless of how everyone’s theology shakes out. It is more practical and less theological.“

Despite suggesting the counseling is theologically agnostic, many of the resources he offers are pro-homosexuality and his message is that gay kids can’t change, and so parents need to accept them and celebrate them for who they are. In an unlisted video for his live workshops, he features Susan Cotrell, who runs the gay-afirming ministry Freed Hearts, Greg and Lynn McDonald, founders of the gay-affirming ministry Embracing the Journey, and Amy Blakeslee, the lesbian gay-affirming Director of North Point Community Church’s Parent Connect.

In 2017, North Point Community Church Lead Pastor Clay Scroggins invited Harman to give a message to his church. Calling him a “vulnerability expert,” Scroggins would heap effusive praise on him and his podcast, clearly enraptured by the telling.

One key takeaway from the talk was the importance of being seen as 100% safe and trustworthy for gay people come out to, not 99% safe. Harman recounts that while he spent 20 years in the closet, he remembered and noted every stray anti-gay comment made by his friends. When it came time for him to out himself, he purposefully did not tell anyone who he recalls making critical “unsafe” comments about homosexuality. He instead only spoke to friends that were 100% safe, and Scroggins highlights this as something to emulate and strive to be.

At the end of the event, Scroggins invites Harman to close out in prayer, but not before delivering his supplications, where he openly prays that Harman’s ministry and influence flourish, notably in making allies for the LGBTQ community.

“Father, we just thank you for tonight. I thank you for Brett… I just thank you for his courage and for his authenticity and his genuineness…I just pray that you would continue to use him in powerful ways. I pray that you’d continue to give him creativity in the way he shares his message. You’ve clearly gifted him massively God, just the way he uses words, the way you’ve given him so much help.

...I just pray that you would continue to use him, not just with the LGBT community, but God that you would use him to create more allies for that community. That you would use him in the lives of parents who have kids who have come out. But God for everyone of us that has a secret that we’d never told anybody or something that about ourself that we feel like you can’t accept, I just pray that you’ll continue to use him in powerful ways to free prisoners. Because that’s your ministry and that’s ultimately what we’re all here to do. So I just thank you for him, and I thank you for his willingness to be a part of this tonight.”

This event took place in 2017, but it would not be his only involvement with North Point Community Church. As mentioned, he would cut a promo with North Point leader Amy Blakeslee years later and would give his endorsement to Embracing the Journey Ministries, a gay-affirming counseling resource that North Point church uses.

In 2022 his ministry was given as a recommended resource by Debbie Causey, a gay-affirming pastor at North Point, who was leading a breakout session at the Queer Christian Conference.