Peter Haas on AI, Content Creation, and the Future of Church Governance

Peter Haas, lead pastor of Substance Church and author of Happy Church Governance, Broken Escalators, and Pharisectomy, joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on how artificial intelligence is reshaping sermon writing, content creation, and church leadership. Peter has been in ministry for nearly 30 years and pulls back the curtain on how he uses tools like ChatGPT, Notebook LM, Gemini, and Claude to vectorize his sermon archive, build custom writing style guides, and speed up (without replacing) the creative process behind two sermons a week.

The conversation digs into the real ethical questions pastors are wrestling with around AI in ministry — from plagiarism and sourcing to why AI-generated sermons tend to stay "vanilla" and avoid the line of conviction. Peter also shares why he thinks the next wave of church staffing will split between people who train AI and people who babysit it, and how his doctoral research is using data to predict volunteer burnout, discipleship habits, and the felt-needs vs. real-needs gap in spiritual formation.

From there, the discussion shifts to church governance and organizational health. Peter unpacks the premise behind Happy Church Governance — that a church's bylaws can predict its life expectancy — and explains why most churches don't die from a lead pastor's moral failure, but from a board that becomes too risk-averse to deploy its own assets. He also breaks down the six-to-ten-year tradeoff between earning authority (as a planter) versus earning assets (as a successor), and why every model of church governance protects one group at the expense of another.

Whether you're a lead pastor, executive pastor, or nonprofit leader trying to figure out how AI fits into your ministry — and how to build governance structures that actually serve your church's calling — this episode is packed with frameworks you can put to use immediately.

In this episode:

• How Peter uses AI to write sermon metadata, YouTube descriptions, and small group discussion questions in seconds instead of hours
• Why AI-generated sermons will never fully replace a pastor's voice — and where the technology actually helps
• The "Why Factor of Three" technique for mining deeper sermon insights
• What actually causes most churches to stop growing after their founding pastor
• Why Peter believes every church should be experimenting with AI, thoughtfully and ethically
• A preview of Peter's doctoral research on predicting spiritual growth and volunteer burnout using data

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