Pastor’s New Book Recounts How AI Sermon Help Quietly Reshaped His Ministry

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Roy Butler has written a book about the moment he noticed his own pastoral voice slipping away, replaced by one shaped through a chatbot. The new release, "Pastoral Formation in the Age of AI: A Pastor’s Confession, Awakening, and Search for Faithful Clarity," is out now through Christian Faith Publishing.

Butler’s account starts in familiar territory for many bivocational clergy: too much to do, and a tool that promised to lighten the load. According to the announcement, he turned to a basic chatbot as a practical workaround to manage an overwhelming workload and sermon-writing demands. gradually, the arrangement transformed his pastoral practice in unanticipated ways, creating distance from the core calling that originally drew him to ministry.

Butler has more than twenty-five years in vocational pastoral ministry. He served as a United States Army chaplain, a role the announcement credits with shaping his approach to leadership under real-world pressure rather than abstraction. He holds degrees from Wayland Baptist University and Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, and he founded ShoutChurch in Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he continues as pastor.

The book, per the publisher’s description, is not an argument against AI in ministry or an endorsement of adopting it without question. It’s framed instead as an examination of the gap that can open between a pastor and a congregation when efficiency starts to substitute for presence, and of the silence that often surrounds that kind of drift before anyone names it. The publisher describes it as offering pastors and congregational leaders a set of questions to sit with, rather than a verdict.

"I realized that somewhere between pursuing efficiency and developing dependence on AI, I had drifted from the very essence of what called me to pastoral ministry in the first place," Butler said in the announcement. "This book is my invitation to other church leaders to pause, reflect, and choose intentional faithfulness over uncritical adoption."

"Pastoral Formation in the Age of AI" is available through major booksellers and online retailers including Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.

Studio CarryOnHarry sees this less as a book about artificial intelligence than as a case study in how any labor-saving habit, adopted with good intentions, can go unexamined for too long in a role built on presence. That’s a question worth more attention across professions that run on burnout, not just the pulpit.

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