Bible Students

Using ChatGPT for Ministry

Have you ever been totally overwhelmed by ministry work? Tirelessly reading books on how to improve sermons, making engaging youth games, or slaving away on service handouts? Let me introduce you to my personal assistant, ChatGPT. 

The Personal Assistant

In this video, we’re going to look at how to use ChatGPT for ministry. Specifically, I work as a junior high assistant and use ChatGPT on the daily as my search engine, material maker, and most importantly for me, my study partner. ChatGPT acts as a daily aid, saving me time that I can instead spend discipling students. While study time is absolutely valuable for both personal and public ministry, spending countless hours finding engaging youth service games, for example, is seemingly much less valuable. Therefore, let’s look at some of the ways ChatGPT can help us on the daily. 

In this video, we’ll be covering how to ask ChatGPT questions, what it looks like to study, how to find fun youth games, debating, and at the end, we’ll look at a more complicated use for ChatGPT,a programming assistant. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it! 

Asking Questions

First, we have to learn to ask ChatGPT questions. This is known in the business as prompt engineering. ChatGPT is based on a large language model made by OpenAI, which basically means it responds to questions by summarizing what other people have written on it. This comes with a major advantage and a disadvantage to watch out for. The advantage to this is that it can summarize, weigh, evaluate, and give amazing overviews of topics. 

For example, I recently asked it about an analogy on fleas. It gave the original story, some overlooked parts, and explained how the full story still worked as an analogy.

Let’s hop over to ChatGPT and take a look. Is it true that fleas won’t jump high if there’s a lid on their jar? Chad GBT says, “Yes, it is actually true, at least in a behavioral sense.” Amazing. Would this work as a sermon illustration? Absolutely. And it even offers to type up a devotional for us. Awesome.

Asking questions in ChatGPT means clearly explaining what you want, what context it is in, and sometimes even an example. The more specific the ask, the better the response will be for what you want. 

When researching for a paper, I was looking up what the best website platform was. Here, I asked the question, what’s the best website, which is unclear, meaning it gave an unclear answer. So then I had to specify what the best site for blogging was and it gave some options and then I specified even more and said that I wanted easy themes and cheap and it recommended some more specific answers.

The number one best thing about ChatGPT is that you can continue a conversation and ask questions. For example, I often have ChatGPT give me the greek behind some New Testament verses. When I am confused, I can ask it to expand on particular sections, and ask how those sections overlap with other topics.

Let’s hop on back over to ChatGPT. As we can see here, I look up what language John was originally written in. It says right here that it was written in coin Greek. I then ask for the Greek behind John 1:3, and it gives a clear breakdown of the Greek and the transliteration. I ask what the letters mean and it gives a breakdown of some of the sounds and some of the words

The downside to look out for, though, is that ChatGPT can be wrong. It is based on what people have written, and people can certainly be wrong. Therefore, it is important to check provided sources when looking at important information. 

Study Partner

With this said, ChatGPT functions as a wonderful study partner! Studying is one of the most time-consuming parts of ministry, professional or lay. Teaching takes a lot of time to study for, especially when someone is new to it. ChatGPT can give amazing and insightful custom looks at chapters of the Bible. But here’s the best part: ChatGPT does not remove the need for you to study the Bible. You shouldn’t just ask it to give you a finished sermon. But, it removes all of the empty “looking.” When I am looking for a source on a story I heard long ago, it may take many Google searches before I find something talking about it.

So, check this out. Is it true that the Pharisees used to pray, “Thank you, God, I’m not a woman, Gentile, or dog.” JBT basically says, “Yes, in the Babylonian Talmud in Menot 43b, but it also explains they probably didn’t say dog. It’s not in scripture, and that not necessarily all Pharisees said that.”

If I heard one commentary view a long time ago on a passage, I want to have those overviews now, not spend hours throughout the study searching for the right source! Especially when there is a question on something very specific, ChatGPT works great. 

Game Maker

Another time-consuming aspect of ministry, especially in my work, is games. I work in junior high ministry. Games have a fun place in many ministries, though often they are especially seen in youth and children’s ministries. Regardless, games are a fun way to include people in the services. Now, there are two ways ChatGPT helps me with games. First, it comes up with games for me to choose from. But my favorite is adding to games we already love. Let’s take a look. 

As we can see here, you can ask ChatGPT to give you 10 games for junior high. They should take 5 to 10 minutes. should include some visuals with a low budget. And right here gives 10 great answers. Cookie face, balloon pop, smoothy challenge, cup stacking, human knot, guess that sound. All awesome answers. So, let’s expand on the smoothie challenge. They give setup time, players’ prep, and some examples. Spinach, yogurt, and pickle juice. Wow, it’s so good.

But my favorite is asking it to add to games we love. I love playing Family Feud with the students. It’s a game where there are responses based on their popularity, as if there was a poll of people. Guess higher on the list, win more points. Without real polling, this is really hard to do. However, that’s where ChatGPT comes in. 

So, we’ll type in right here, give me a list of 30 questions for my family feud game where the top six answers are sorted according to popularity. Some of the questions should be on the Bible and some on junior high life. And we see right here, name one of the ten commandments, something that God created, a biblical weapon, a famous woman from the Bible. Now here we’ll ask give me 50 sword drawing verses half from the new half from the old testament. And right here we see that we were not specific enough. It gave all verses about swords. Needs more context on what sword drawing is. Okay, excellent. It understood this time. Now let’s get the full verses written out too. And we’re done. Ready to print and play.

Not only that, but it can make super specific questions. For example, I want to introduce the jr highers to the rapidly changing world around us in southern california through a biblical worldview. 

So, I asked it to give me 30 progressive topics in America. So, we see here I asked ChatBT to give me 30 progressive topics in America. And then I asked it to give me a biblical theme attached to each one. The responses were super creative. And now I want Family Feud questions on those topics. As we can see here, I was not specific enough in what I wanted. It used only the topics themselves, not the biblical themes. So, let’s try it again. There we go. This list looks great so far, but let’s also attach a Bible verse for each one of the responses. Awesome. Let’s check out this question right here. What should we do for the poor? Give them food. Give them clothing, money, shelter, prayer, and teaching. Looks great. Ready to print out and play.

Debater

A third thing that takes a long time is worrying that a message or conversation point won’t be convincing to those you’re talking to or teaching. One of the best things ChatGPT can do is debate you! 

Let’s hop on back to ChatGPT and check this out. I’m going to give ChatGPT my written sermon on why we should believe in God. But what would Chat say if it pretended to be a critical junior higher? In the message, I talked about the Kalam cosmological argument which says that if the universe had a beginning, it must have a beginning outside of itself. And for us, that means God. Chat then asks, “How I go from needing a beginning outside of the universe to an all powerful God?” That’s an awesome question. I’m glad I brought that up.

By submitting your sermon or asking it to debate you, ChatGPT will respond as the group you want to reach, raising concerns and asking questions. Through this, you can have a much better angle without the tireless nights, wondering if your words will make a difference. 

Programmer

So far, these uses of ChatGPT only begin to scratch the surface. So I want to transition here to a much more engaging use of ChatGPT. You can use ChatGPT to harness the power of coding, to be used for whatever you want. Let’s look at three examples. The first is a family feud variant that uses OpenAI API. The second is a sword drawing game that uses the OpenAI API. The final is a marble race that uses OpenAI API. Using ChatGPT as a programming assistant is much more complicated, but in my experience much more rewarding, as it opens doors to make amazing tools. 

Now, all three of these programs use OpenAI’s API which is an application program interface. Essentially, it allows these locally ran websites to communicate with ChatGPT on the back end. So, here we have a paste names here box. So, I can take the names of students who have signed in from planning center and plug them in directly to this box. When I click submit, it sends those names back to ChatGPT to organize them in first name, last name order. In planning center, the names are last name, first name, and then R, showing that they’re irregular. But in my opinion, that looks ugly in the marble race. So this sends it back to ChatGPT, which then sends it back. The site makes them into marbles. The marbles fall down and interact with this custom background, which is the weekly memory verse, until eventually one of the marbles hits the bottom and their name is displayed as the winner. All of the code for this site was generated by Chad GPT. All I had to do was tell it what I wanted and tell it any problems that I encountered along the way and it walked me through solutions.

This second site right here is a family feud game that uses ChatGPT on the back end. Here’s how it works. You can click manual topic and type in a topic that you want the question to be about. For example, John 3. Then we get the question name something significant that Jesus talks about in John 3:16. We say the sun, eternal life, God’s love. And then we say creation and uh we get it wrong. And then we see the fourth one is not perishing. But we can add more answers to this. So we do a random topic and now it’s activities junior highers might do when they’re bored, reading a book, not eating, playing video games, drawing or painting. However, we have to be careful because ChatGPT can also make mistakes. Here we’ll have 20 answers for the fruit of the spirit which obviously there are not 20 fruits of the spirit. Courage is not on there. That’s good. But diligence, benevolence, integrity, purity, meekness, humility, gratitude, and charity are not fruits of the spirit. 

This next application still uses ChatGPT on the back end. We give it a topic and it gives back a verse. The topic here is John and it gives the verse Matthew 3:1. But we can also give it random topics and it will attempt to find a Hebrew or Greek word that sounds similar. Now, this is part of the specific instructions that are sent to ChatGPT when generating the verse. In this example, we use the pop culture reference to Sigma Rizzler, and it returns the verse Hebrew Zakar to remember in Genesis 8:1.

Programming is as simple as asking “what does this mean,” over and over again. Here’s how I got started out. With a little bit of coding knowledge, I asked ChatGPT to code something for me. A memorizing tool for biblical languages. It was simple, and it totally transformed my ability to learn when I could fully customize the app I was learning in! All you do is this:

What do I do now? Copy/Paste, what do I do now? How do I do that? Etc, etc, etc, etc. Summarize the whole chat into easy steps. Help on this step! Boom. Ultimately, the only real limitation is your imagination. As long as you can continue to ask, how do I do this, the possibilities are absolutely limitless.

Closing

Now your time is far more freed up from the admin stuff to spend time with actual people! Wondering where you can do that? Take a look at this video right here to see the best discipleship spots. Until next time, peace out.