And don't encourage others to do so either. Really. Do not.
We live in a time where artificial intelligence makes taking incredible shortcuts effortless. I spun up this website faster than I ever could have imagined on my own, with minimal direct coding knowledge. When my daughter asks for help with her math homework, I could spend twenty minutes trying to re-learn how to calculate factors and inequalities—but more often than not, I snap a photo of the problem and ask Gemini to walk us through the steps, making sure it coaches us rather than just handing over the answer.
As AI becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous every single one of us is going to need to decide what "shortcuts" are acceptable to us, and which ones are not.
Nowhere is that line more critical than in matters of faith and formation.
Emily Belz
In an article for Christianity Today titled "How Great Is Our Claude," Emily Belz reported on worship leaders building AI tools to evaluate setlists. These tools parse lyrics and score songs on qualities like scriptural grounding, doctrinal clarity, and theological precision—classifying tunes into categories like "theologically strong" or "avoid."
It is a well-intentioned effort. It was built by considerate people looking to help busy worship leaders sort through many songs and avoid singing heresy on Sunday morning. 👍
Which sounds...reasonable! But, to me, beneath that efficiency lies a fundamental misunderstanding of what worship leading actually is.
I can think of a multitude of reasons why we should NOT encourage young people, or really any people to use these kinds of tools, but they mostly come back to one thread for me:
The Important Work of Worship Leading Isn't Choosing a Song
Most young worship leaders—the twenty-year-younger version of myself firmly included—tend to pour all their energy into rehearsal. It is practical. It is tangible. It feels productive to run through transitions, balance instruments, and make sure the band sounds tight. Having had my fair share of embarrassing musical trainwrecks on stage, I completely understand the impulse.
Yet seasoned worship leaders eventually discover that playing the music on Sunday is merely the final step of a long, hidden pastoral process.
Yes, playing skillfully matters. But underneath the musicianship is something far heavier: quiet hours spent in reflection, prayer, and pastoral contemplation. The worship team is not a glorified pep band meant to pump up the room's emotional energy before the sermon.
The real work of a worship leader is pastoral in nature:
- What is the Scripture passage calling our congregation to this Sunday?
- How is the church body processing the current sermon series?
- Where are our people hurting, doubting, or celebrating?
- How will Joe—who just came out of the hospital—hear this specific lyric about God's goodness?
An algorithm can check whether a lyric aligns with the Westminster Catechism. It cannot know that Joe is weeping in the third row, or that the single mother in the back needs to lament before she can sing triumphantly.
There is No "agile" Reflection
This kind of pastoral discernment is supposed to be slow.
There is no fast meditation. There is no agile reflection.
Giving worship leaders a tool to help them speed through this process might save them a few hours. But, respectfully, this is not the place to seek to make our young worship leaders more "efficient", if efficiency is even a virtue that we want people to pursue at all when it comes to caring for the soul.
What gets lost when young worship leaders delegate song evaluation to a score? They lose out on the wrestling. The wondering. The discipline of opening a Bible side-by-side with a set of lyrics, furrowing your brow, and asking: Is this true? Is this helpful? Does this speak to where our people are right now?
Furthermore, automated scoring creates a dangerous illusion of certainty. How many songs of honest, raw biblical lament would get flagged and discarded because a model scored them low on conventional doctrinal keywords? A song that appears "theologically weak" in a clinical, algorithmic vacuum might be the exact medicine a hurting church body needs to hear on a particular Sunday.
Software developer, Kyle DenHartog observed:
Social media ... instills values such as lack of reflection in our communication, attention grabbing ideas, and a bit of group think. With each new medium comes a different collection of properties that encourages emergent behavioral changes in us that show up in our collective shared values. So the final question I want to leave the reader with to reflect upon… Are the values you want within your communities being encouraged by the tools you use or is there a different tool that is needed to better reflect how you want to communicate with others?
The tools we build inevitably turn around and build us. When we rely on an automated filter to tell us what is orthodox, what does that mean for us?
Formation Requires us Being Formed
Consider the pulpit for a moment. Would we want our pastors to run their sermon drafts through a doctrinal AI checker to sanitize every sentence before preaching? What would be gained? A pure orthodoxy? And at what cost?
We would lose the preacher's personal encounter with the living God in the study.
If we want the next generation of worship leaders and pastors to mature, we must urge them, and ourselves, to resist these kinds of shortcuts. We have to grant them the space to wrestle with songs, to grapple with theological tension, and even to make mistakes. And when those mistakes happen, we must teach them how to cling to Christ through the process.
For if they do not, then they shall find themselves perhaps clinging not to Christ, but to some machine that has approximated His voice.