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.
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What a giant mess churchianity has become.
Amen to that.
Couple that with Harari – inspired ‘Bible’ and we’re good to go 👍