A new AI platform aimed at helping pastors preach their sermons more effectively is set to launch later this month. Pulpit AI, created by Jake Sweetman and Michael Whittle, will be released on July 22 and will include both paid and free versions, according to both men. Whittle is based in Nashville, while Sweetman is senior pastor of Cathedral Church in Los Angeles, which he and Whittle started. According to Whittle, the two have been friends for over 10 years.

Whittle said, “Pulpit AI is a generative AI app that allows churches and pastors, church leaders, to upload any version of their sermons,” Whittle said. That includes audio, video, a manuscript or an outline. Then our app automatically turns [the sermon] into all kinds of associated content that a pastor or a church could need, based on that sermon.” This includes but is not limited to “devotionals, discussion questions and guides for small groups, newsletters, social media content – really anything that a church would need to communicate with its congregation,” Whittle said. The idea for Pulpit AI came from a desire to communicate a sermon to the congregation more effectively while at the same time creating less work for the church’s staff.

Whittle recounted, “I kind of ran into [Sweetman] one day, and I said, ‘Hey, what if we could build a tool that lets you just upload your sermon to an app and what if it could turn it into just a devotional that our congregation could read every day of the week based on the sermon?’” The two then asked a team member at Cathedral Church what she thought of the idea. Whittle said, “She was like, ‘Yeah, this would save hours of my week if we could do this.’ So that was kind of the genesis.” “The reality is that pastors put lots of hours into the preparation of a sermon,” Sweetman told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview. Sweetman said he spends “anywhere from 10 to 15 hours a week writing a sermon.”

Despite all this work, “for most preachers, their sermon doesn’t live on beyond the Sunday,” Sweetman said, “except for maybe getting uploaded to a podcast.” Using tools in Pulpit AI, he said, “is very helpful from a discipleship standpoint” and is able to turn a sermon into additional content without “a huge time investment and a big cost investment.” Sweetman added, “Pulpit AI just opens a huge door for content to be distributed to our churches. I mean, we’re going to spend 15 hours a week writing a sermon. Obviously, we think it’s valuable, and it’s valuable enough to live on in [the congregation’s] minds just beyond the 90-minute Sunday service.”

Unlike other AI programs, which have been accused of inaccuracies and bias, Pulpit AI will not say, suddenly start spouting heresy without warning, Whittle said. “The way our app is built, what you put into it is what it creates from,” Whittle said. So, “you’re uploading something that you have created.” Pulpit AI, he said, does not generate the sermon itself.  Instead, it creates content “based directly from the sermon and not pulling from a bunch of different sources around the internet.”