Leslie Taylor preaches in English and Japanese each Sunday at the bilingual Matsudo Church of Christ in the Tokyo area.
He prepares his sermons each week in English. Then he goes through his manuscript — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph — to translate it into Japanese.
ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot made by the company OpenAI, has helped improve the missionary’s process.
He said, “I do as much as I can by myself, but sometimes it helps with particularly complicated sentence structures, or I may ask it to explain a nuance.”
Roughly 6,500 miles away, Dion Frasier, senior minister for the Reynoldsburg Church of Christ in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, relies on ChatGPT to translate his sermon into Creole.
The area around Frasier’s church has a growing Haitian population and many are starting to attend his church. He uses the AI translation to produce a handout in creole each week.
Many Christians have mixed feelings about AI, with 30 percent believing it is exciting but 34 percent seeing it as scary, according to a recent survey by the Barna Group.
But many are beginning to see its usefulness. Back in Japan, Taylor stresses that his sermon represents more than words on a piece of paper.
When he stands before his multicultural congregation, he’s not just conveying information. He’s sharing the Gospel.